House Republican Leader John Boehner, Ohio, talking with ABC"s George Stephanopoulos on April 19, was absolutely spot-on when he said, "Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide." Who can quarrel with that?
But Boehner strayed into the realm of make-believe when he said, "The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical."
The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen is comical. Boehner made it up - and shame on him if he utters it again - to ridicule the notion that we need to control carbon dioxide emissions. The idea that increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are harmful to the environment is not comical.
Boehner also was way off on the chemistry when he tried to underscore how comical the whole notion is, and said, delicately, "Every cow in the world, you know, when they do what they do, you've got more carbon dioxide." Actually, what cows do is produce methane in their digestive tracts through a process called enteric fermentation.
Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, but it is dwarfed in the atmosphere by CO2 and has a much shorter effective lifetime than CO2, which can persist for thousands of years. Carbon dioxide emissions in the US were 6,103 million metric tons in 2007, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency, with about 75% attributable to the transportation, industrial and commercial sectors. Methane emissions from all sources were 585.3 million metric tons, with about 23% attributed to enteric fermentation.
Reducing methane emissions from a variety of agricultural activities - including what cows do - and other sources will have to be part of any comprehensive program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally. It's serious business, and congressmen like Boehner and Representative Dana Rohrabacher, Republican-California, hardly elevate the discussion with mocking references to flatulence.
A couple of years ago, Rohrabacher famously suggested that the dramatic climate change that occurred 55 million years ago could have been caused by dinosaur flatulence. Rohrabacher later insisted he was joking. (The dinosaurs disappeared about 65 million years ago, so it was bad science and a bum rap, as well as a sophomoric joke). However, he returned to the theme last year when he said that cows are a "greenhouse gas causing machine."
If the "anti-meat, manmade global warming crowd" has its way, Rohrabacher warned on the House floor, then
"[n]ot only are they going to cut our personal transportation, but we can't even stay home and have a [barbeque]. Heck, they're not even going to let us have a hamburger."
Representative John Shimkus, Republican-Illinois, took a different tack recently when he looked back to the age of dinosaurs as a time when "we had the most flora and fauna" and CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere "were probably at 4,000 parts/million," compared to 388 ppm today.
Carbon dioxide is plant food, "so if we decrease the use [sic] of carbon dioxide are we not taking away plant food from the atmosphere?" Shimkus asked at a House subcommittee hearing. "There is a theological debate that this is a carbon-starved planet," he said. Who knew?
But exactly how much carbon in the atmosphere is desirable? 800 ppm? 1,200 ppm? And who will make that determination? The clergy? Shimkus? And even if 4,000 ppm were acceptable for prehistoric plants, science is finding that anything much above current levels could jeopardize the species that inhabit Earth today.
By taking away plant food from the atmosphere, "we could be doing just the opposite of what the people who want to save the world are saying," Shimkus argues. In any event, Shimkus believes that the fate of the Earth is in God's hands, implying that it is fruitless to try to "save the world" by reducing carbon emissions.
"Earth will end only when God declares it's time to be over," he said. This might serve as a governing principle in a theocracy, but it shouldn't be the basis for political decisions in the US Congress.
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