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carbon dioxide
bit too close to parody. Your first instinct is to laugh. Are you
reading Reuters or The Onion? Watching NBC’s Nightly News
or Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update? Then you realize
others are taking it quite seriously - and suddenly it stops
being all that funny after all.
Such was my reaction to the recent launch of what can only be
described as a pro-greenhouse gas ad campaign by the
Competitive Enterprise Institute. As the legendary humorist
Dave Barry might interject at such a moment, no, I am not
making this up. The libertarian-leaning think tank recently
released a TV-spot that opens with a montage of sunny
pictures; happy people enjoying a day at the park, joggers
running on the beach, a girl blowing dandelion fuzz to the wind.
“There’s something in these pictures you can’t see,” intones a
non-threatening female voice. “It’s essential to life. We
breathe it out. Plants breathe it in. It comes from animal life,
the oceans, the Earth and the fuels we find in it. It’s called
carbon dioxide.” After a copious listing of the many and varied
benefits of the marvelous processes that produce this
wondrous compound, we are told that “politicians” are
endangering this innocent product of nature. The spot ends
with a cheery, “Carbon dioxide - they call it pollution. We call
it life.”
Catchy isn’t it? Certainly beats “Give a hoot, don’t pollute!”
I’m not a Pollyanna here. It’s not that I’m unaware that
industry has been using the environment as its own personal
toxic playpen for decades. It’s just that until now they’ve
always had the decent manners not to be proud of it.
Compared to this, the good old corporate coverup seems
quaintly reassuring. Didn’t harmful atmospheric emissions
used to be something to be embarrassed about?
Not since some ad agency landed their account, they’re not.
Certainly, CO2 is not the only environmental catastrophe
whose troubled image could use a burnishing from the Madison
Avenue glitz machine. No doubt in another ten years or so we
can look forward to some playful, smiling Joe Camelesque
mascot with a name like Sooty, the Smog Cloud, standing in
front of singing children and animated dancing oil tankers,
chanting peppy slogans like “Benzene - Good for Me, Good for
You” and “The Greenhouse Effect - Warmin’ Up To It.”
Indeed, with the “They call it pollution, we call it life”
campaign such a world seems less a fantastic creation of Al
Gore’s dull nightmares than a foreseeable possibility. The CEI’
s clever spiel makes pollution seem more like a civic duty than
an impending problem. You half expect the spot to end with
Smoky the Bear pointing an accusing finger and saying, “Did
you emit enough carbon dioxide today?”
And that, of course, is the idea. If fossil fuel use can be
painted as some sort of natural component of ecology as
organic as lakes or birds or petro-chemical industry lobbyists,
then what do any of us owe the hollow remains of Mother
Nature’s defiled purity? Tailpipes and aerosol cans are
nothing less than an integral part of the ecosystem’s Great
Circle of Life. One can almost envision a pristine pre-human
Earth playing host to natural forests of old-growth oil
refinery smokestacks and virgin plains blackened with
majestic herds of wild SUVs slurping from plentiful, free-
flowing rivers of regular unleaded - right up until the Sierra
Club came along to throw off nature’s delicate balance.
But will people believe this sort of malarkey? I don’t know,
but in today’s marketplace of ideas few investors seem to be
going broke buying malarkey futures on margin. Like so many
other messages oozing from the festering open wound of
American social discourse, this is a tough virus to inoculate
against. Like wars that have no consequences, like tax cuts
which magically balance budgets, like arrogance and
inflexibility that are signs of strength, it is yet another easy
reality thriving in an era resistant to the harsh medicine of
unpleasant truths. Drive your gas guzzler all you like. Along
with deficits, deaths, and incompetence, we can add
worldwide environmental collapse to the ever-growing list of
trivialities that no longer need concern our troubled
collective mind. Anyone who says differently is an “alarmist.”
There will come a point, I guess, when we will all be alarmists.
But, then again, who will care? For by the time the alarms are
sounding that loudly, I fear the realities which await us will
surely put satire out of business completely.
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