The Climate Alarmists’ Gross Perversion of the Word Clean

Climate alarmists have gone to endless efforts to gain public acceptance of their doomsday premise that the world must greatly reduce its use of fossil fuels to avoid catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. They have fudged the surface temperature data, used meaningless climate models, argued that human emissions of carbon dioxide will warm the planet despite the strong evidence to the contrary, and so on, but their greatest perversion is of the English language.

They have branded CO2 as a pollutant and claimed that reducing it is necessary to make the world “clean.” All the alarmists from Gore to McKibben to Obama are guilty of this; in fact, the use of this terminology is so uniform that one suspects that they all have been coached to say it at every opportunity. Unfortunately, their efforts have even been supported by the Supreme Court, which decreed that CO2 is subject to regulation by the USEPA under the Clean Air Act despite no real support for this in the legislative history.

The Alarmists’ Biggest Propaganda Weapon

Since no one is opposed to something being clean, this is by far the alarmists’ biggest propaganda weapon. They have eagerly seized it and are running with it as hard as they can, despite its inapplicability in this case. They often combine it with the additional adjective “renewable” and refer to wind and solar-generated energy as “clean renewable” energy. CO2 emissions from using fossil fuels to generate energy, on the other hand, are characterized as “dirty” even though they are invisible, so cannot be perceived as clean or dirty by anyone.

But how can they get by with such a gross perversion of reality and the language? Plants must have adequate levels of CO2 in order to live, and have been shown to grow better with higher atmospheric levels; if they all die, Earth will become a truly dirty, lifeless landscape with endless piles of blowing sand and dirt and starving humans. Plants came close to mass starvation during the last ice age because of the low levels of CO2. CO2 is essential for plants and indirectly for animals.

Why Wind and Solar Are Actually Very Dirty

So the alarmists are actually arguing that life on Earth should be dirty and plants must be allowed to die in order to keep life-giving atmospheric CO2 levels down. The alarmists’ favored means for reducing CO2 emissions actually have many important dirty aspects such as bird and bat kills, rare earth mining, hideous wind and solar plants spread over huge areas, and difficult and slow removal of abandoned windmills and solar facilities after the subsidies are cut. This does not make CO2 reduction “clean”; it makes it anti-environmental, anti-poor people, and ultimately “dirty.”

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