Panic Part 4 - C02 Is Good For You

By Wayne Brown


Gregory Wrightstone is the executive director of the C02 Coalition, whose goal is stated on their web page:

The CO2 Coalition was established in 2015 as a non-partisan educational foundation ... for the purpose of educating thought leaders, policymakers, and the public about the important contribution made by carbon dioxide to our lives and the economy. The Coalition seeks to engage in an informed and dispassionate discussion of climate change, humans’ role in the climate system, the limitations of climate models, and the consequences of mandated reductions in CO2 emissions.

Major donors to this "coalition" include the "usual suspects" such as the Koch Brothers and the Mercers who have funded such "non-partisan" projects as Fox News.  It is no coincidence that Wrightstone is a frequent "talking head" on Fox. The common thread of these projects is to present "alternative facts" in a format that superficially resembles the way that actual facts are presented.

The "inconvenient fact" about who pays Wrightsone's rent is omitted from the book. I have never seen it mentioned in Wrightstone's "qualifications" when he appears online. This book is part of the "educational" goal of the C02 Coalition. To claim it is "non-partisan" and "dispassionate" is simply laughable.

The book is wonderfully produced, full of nice color graphs and Wrightsone's well-honed rhetoric, which you can sample in numerous videos (mostly on Fox News) without buying the book. He weaves fascinating information about the Earth's past (what is true ain't new) along with "facts" coming only from hard-core Climate Skeptics such as Craig Idso who served as Peabody's climate denier in chief (Peabody is "big coal").  "What is new ain't true".

This book collects all the "talking points" of climate skeptics between two covers. For those who are routinely confronted by climate skeptics, it's useful to know their playbook. The key well-known "fact" it presents is that climate has been changing for the whole history of the. Earth and THEREFORE we are OK. Nothing to see here. It's like saying volcanos have always been happening so don't worry about living on a volcano.

The problem we face is that the particular climate change we are facing (never actually described in the book) is a particularly fast, and nasty, and totally unprecedented change in climate, entirely created by Wrightestones's financial supporters. He is paid to make us shut up and love it.

Lomborg presents many of Wrightsone's facts, replacing the smell of oil with the smell of money. It seems to me that Lomborg is simply wrong while Wrightsone attempts to "gaslight" with a huge pile of irrelevant facts. Wrightstone argues that the old and gas industry are your friends. Lomborg argues that Climate Change will make (some) people rich.

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