Conservatives are typically known for their message discipline. But something about global warming seems to get them where they live, as it were. They feel compelled to try to convince the public that carbon dioxide is harmless and the secret agenda of environmentalists is to regulate literally every aspect of your lives (see Krauthammer, Part 2: The real reason conservatives don’t believe in climate science).
As a result, individual members of Congress just make up the most bizarre and self-contradictory attacks imaginable. That is clearest with Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), the ranking Republican of the House Energy and Commerce Committee (see links below). Today’s befuddled argument for inaction from Barton was first published by Think Progress.
In a new interview with Newsmax, Barton continued his nonsensical approach to the issue, claiming that the Obama administration’s efforts to regulate carbon dioxide would potentially “close down the New York and Boston marathons“:
Barton says the average healthy adult exhales between four-tenths of a ton and seven-tenths of a ton of CO2 a year.
“So if you put 20,000 marathoners into a confined area, you could consider that a single source of pollution, and you could regulate it,” Barton says. “The key would be whether the EPA said that 20,000 people running the same route was one source or not.”
One indication that the EPA likely would consider 20,000 runners a single source of pollution is that the agency is trying to regulate waste-water runoff and emissions of drilling rigs in oil fields by attempting to define entire areas as a single source of pollution, Barton says.
common conservative attack against addressing greenhouse gas emissions is to say that there are natural sources of CO2, so if we regulate industry we would have to regulate those sources as well. But this is straw man argument. As the the EPA notes, it is industrial sources of CO2, not natural sources, that “have increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere“:
Natural sources of CO2 occur within the carbon cycle where billions of tons of atmospheric CO2 are removed from the atmosphere by oceans and growing plants, also known as ‘sinks,’ and are emitted back into the atmosphere annually through natural processes also known as ‘sources.’ When in balance, the total carbon dioxide emissions and removals from the entire carbon cycle are roughly equal.
Since the Industrial Revolution in the 1700′s, human activities, such as the burning of oil, coal and gas, and deforestation, have increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. In 2005, global atmospheric concentrations of CO2 were 35% higher than they were before the Industrial Revolution.
In the interview, Barton mocked the EPA’s recent declaration that carbon dioxide was a pollutant that endangers public health and welfare. “There’s never been anybody who’s been treated in an emergency room for CO2 poisoning. It doesn’t cause asthma; it doesn’t cause your eyes to water; it doesn’t cause cancer.”
Of course, the EPA declared CO2 a threat to public health because of the catastrophic consequences of climate change, not because it is a carcinogen.
Related Posts:
- Barton: humans should just ‘get shade’
- Barton says the only way to stop a global pandemic is if everyone does nothing“
- Rep. Shimkus: “Man will not destroy this Earth. This Earth will not be destroyed by a flood.” Rep. Barton: “I wish I had another dozen John Shimkuses on the committee.”
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
You’d think if we could call a collection of runners point sources we could call, um, maybe idling trucks at a distribution center in Oconomowoc as a point source. Courts said no to that one Mr. Barton. Better luck next time. Perhaps you’d like to change the law. I’d gladly give up marathons for the ability to regulate truck stops and dist centers as point sources.
Can our side use stupid non-scientific analogies too? For example, what happens to Joe Barton if he inhales pure carbon dioxide for just five minutes? He dies, therefore, carbon dioxide is dangerous!
What Joe Barton has chosen to ignore is that CO2 is a respiratory TOXIN. In 1986, Lake Noyos in Cameroon burped CO2 in an event that left over 1,700 people dead. There is a very real concern over CO2 respiratory hazards from land based disposal in CCS systems. Depending on how much were to leak and how fast, we may not be able to evacuate people out of the zone where death would be sure, silent and swift.
conservatives can’t tell the difference between respiration and burning something. this probably leads to hundreds of deaths every year as they set themselves on fire trying to take a deep breath. gets hushed up as “arson” so the morons can keep their seats in congress.…
While I deeply empathize with the urge to call conservatives “stupid” and “morons,” I think that it’s important to realize the effect of each epithet.
I would argue that each intelligence assault (especially earned intelligence assaults) to a conservative is more damaging than each incandescent lightbulb burning on the planet right now.
Solving climate change = getting every single person we can convince totally on board.
Insulting someone’s intelligence, especially when they are actually behaving unintelligently, is a bad way to convince anyone of anything. But it is a great way to make someone double-down on a losing strategy, even to the point of being totally and obviously irrational.
If environmentalists were serious about solving global warming, all of these tokeny pledges to micromanage one’s own carbon emissions would be thrown out the window, and be replaced with a full court press campaign to make conservatives and deniers feel okay about solving the problem of global warming.
The bottom line is that when they stop feeling frightened and offended and put out is when actual, large-scale progress starts.
deborah, i should have made it clearer i was making fun of joe barton and fellow disreputable politicians, not regular people.
about intelligence, though, you’re the one saying they’re not smart enough to figure it out for themselves, with this “if environmentalists were serious” junk. if a person is inclined to think that the greenhouse effect is a communist conspiracy, they’re on their own strange trip, and need to be separated from the group until sense returns. this is one of the rare times that i support ostracism.
US conservatives — pols and base — need to come to terms with how far out they’ve wandered into the wilds of their own beliefs and paranoia. they don’t seem interested. the solution for others isn’t just open ears and hands and hearts, it means getting rid of the radical bankster policies of the last 30 years, that have stripped money and dignity from people all over the country — making sure the losses fall where they won’t hurt much and the gains are shared fairly and helpfully. no one who thinks democrats are stalinists (or corrupt corporocrats) will believe in fairness until they see it happen to their own people.
Someone should sit Barton down to watch Apollo 13.
I think that politicians and Joe Barton are definitely people, and are defending themselves as much as anything.
I am advocating empathizing with them as a tactic. It’s certainly something that every single one of us has the capacity to do. Haven’t you ever been wrong in a public setting, and defended your wrong point way past the point of reason because you were embarrassed and didn’t want to admit that you were wrong? I sure have!
And haven’t you ever lost a lover or a job, or otherwise faced an adversity, and clung to a kind of weird, unhelpful, made-up viewpoint about the problem out of sheer fear? I sure have!
These people are not idiots. They are humans having human emotions that you’ve had too. Punishing and ostracizing them will make them stronger, and you (us) weaker.
Barack Obama actually offers lesson after lesson in how this works. He consistently gains strength by respecting and empathizing with his enemies, and at the same time he sucks away all the reasons that they have to oppose him–he makes them weak by empathizing with them. His graciousness is the primary reason that you can rightly say that conservatives have wandered far out into the weeds! Imagine how far we would get if regular people who care, like you and me, behaved with similar grace and equanimity. What would there be left to argue with?
Every single time anyone, including Joe Barton, is called a moron, we step a little bit further from the goal, because it becomes just that much harder to bring that person back, and we need them. We need everybody. We can’t solve this problem by carving the world up into The Green Zone and Emittistan.
Bullwinkle,
A more terrestrial example would be the one about the family who followed Homeland Security’s advice on protection from chemical attacks and covered their home windows with plastic and duct tape only to asphyxiate themselves.
What I see in the conservatives that I work with is fear, mostly fear of being so wrong for so long. Lots of anger, too, a lot of it tied up with fear and denial.
It expresses itself in snickering and ridicule, but underlying all of it is fear. Fear of being wrong. Fear of not being one of the most special, smartest people in the world anymore, should dittohead in chief Rush turn out to be wrong.
Perhaps to reach conservatives we have to come up with a moral argument:
Shame on you for fouling your nest! Oh, the shame of it! We have sinned, and are now being punished! To repent we must make amends to the planet!
We are dealing with heavily propagandized, authoritarian people, who view the world in stark moral terms, and who are being misled by cunning paid propagandists.
I don’t know how to get through to such people, other than by repeating the truth, appealing to their sense of shame, and pointing out that Rush Limbaugh’s last 8 year contract was 400 million dollars – 50 million dollars per year.
Being “a friend to corporate America” pays pretty well, these days, I guess.
Regarding CO2 from breathing, our industrialized agriculture has in effect injected fossil carbon into our food – as transportation energy, fertilizer, and so on. Eating locally, growing a garden, and eating lower on the food chain by eating less meat are great ways to lower our carbon footprints, IMO.
Personal lifestyle changes are trivial compared to political involvement, though.
We need to seize the coal fired power plants, and forcibly transform them into advanced, more efficient carbon negative power plants, which combine biocarbon fuel, oxyfuel combustion, and carbon capture and storage.
Hey Leland,
Everyone’s been wrong and acted stupid because of it before. And everyone’s behaved irrationally out of fear before. Maybe this scales and maybe it doesn’t. But I know that I am much more likely to drop my silliness when I am being stupid and/or irrational when I feel safe and respected.
Appealing to shame makes intuitive sense, but it also produces a lot of resistance. On the other hand, if environmentalists were telling the most compelling story about safety and were making every effort to respect the opponent, there would be nothing left to resist.
Joe Barton as a leading represntative of science by concensus party has an opinion that differs with fact. I can understand that Joe having been brought up to belive in big oil is scared that the cow will be moving on and his familar teat will be gone. So Joe will argue that CO2 is not a serious problem; waste product in the air we breath should be tolerated. I wonder it Joe believes that pissing in the punch bowl should be tolerated as well.
I measure co2 concertations for a range of purposes everyday at co2meter.com and see what is going on and I’m very concerned that we have a debate over the obvious this can be be measured by anyone including Joe.
Ray Hicks, President; CO2meter.com
deborah i see your point but i don’t think you can save me. i don’t know how not to smack anyone who says they can’t tell the difference between a pair of lungs and a blast furnace. this is not a partisan reaction. i take most rhetorical excesses in stride. but even monks and nuns have limits; if they didn’t they wouldn’t hide themselves for years to prepare for their next public appearance.
i will try. if you will promise not to lionize the current president. he’s also human. his bread is buttered differently and better than joe barton’s but still buttered.
Hapa,
I see what you’re saying about lionizing Obama and didn’t really intend to. I don’t think he’s superhuman, I just think he’s got this one tactic down cold.
Peace!
peace
john ramming — I have little concern regarding sequestering CO2 in deep saline formations. Up to some limit the CO2 has a chemical affinity for the surroundings and so is most unlikely to leak. Just have to be sure not to force too much CO2 into each such formation. Fortunately, the US has an ample supply of such formations.