Obama to name CO2 as pollutant

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Sen. Barack Obama intends to classify carbon dioxide as a dangerous pollutant that should be regulated should he win the presidential election on Nov. 4, according to a report published by Bloomberg.

Obama's intent will be to instruct the Environmental Protection agency to make the designation under the 1990 Clean Air Act to set emissions limits on power plants and manufacturers, Obama energy adviser Jason Grumet said.

President Bush declined to curb carbon dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act, even after the Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that the government had the authority to do so.

Categorizing carbon dioxide as a dangerous pollutant will have wide-ranging political consequences, including imposing on power plants and manufactures fines and penalties that will amount to new taxes, unless they take government-mandated steps to curb their carbon dioxide output.

At the heart of this debate is a contention by global warming alarmists that carbon dioxide is a key "greenhouse gas" that functions as a dangerous pollutant because its presence in the atmosphere is a man-made cause of climate change.

The problem with the argument is that the science behind categorizing carbon dioxide as a noxious pollutant is not clear.

As my co-author and WND columnist Craig Smith and I argued in our book entitled "Black Gold Stranglehold: The Myth of Scarcity and the Politics of Oil," carbon dioxide is a very small percentage of the atmosphere, less than one-tenth of one percent.

Further, the incremental addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere attributable to human activity is remarkably small.

Carbon dioxide in the air is measured in terms of carbon "pentagrams." One pentagram equals one billion metric tons. The atmosphere contains some 730 pentagrams of carbon, or 730 billion metric tons. The net annual addition of carbon dioxide contributed to the atmosphere by human activity is estimated to be 3 pentagrams of carbon, an increase of only about four-tenths of 1 percent (0.4 percent).

Another problem is that plants need carbon dioxide to survive. Human beings breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. Plants are just the opposite. Plants absorb carbon dioxide and throw out oxygen.

One simple solution is to grow more plants, but that solution is evidently unacceptable to those whose real goal is to push an anti-business, anti-capitalist and possibly anti-people political agenda that is advanced by identifying carbon dioxide as a dangerous pollutant.

As Bloomberg pointed out, "Placing heat-trapping pollutants in the same category as ozone may lead to caps on power-plant emissions and force utilities to use the most expensive systems to curb pollution. The move may halt construction plans on as many as half of the 130 proposed new U.S. coal plants."

What may be next is an Obama program to create an international market in paying for and trading costly carbon credits.

For more on how Obama plans to join negotiators from 200 countries to limit carbon dioxide, read Jerome Corsi's Red Alert, the premium, online intelligence news source by the WND staff writer, columnist and author of the New York Times No. 1 best-seller, "The Obama Nation."

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