There’s an old saying that “you are the company you keep.”
That’s definitely true for Alberta Premier Danielle Smith. Her takes on COVID-19, vaccines and trans rights, to name a few, have echoed some of the most prominent right-wing darlings.
Judging by the policy resolutions put forward by various United Conservative Party riding associations for debate at the party’s annual general meeting last weekend, the attitudes of Smith’s buddies — and right-wing figures — are shared by others in her party.
One policy resolution gained much attention. It came from the Athabasca-Barrhead-Westlock and Red Deer-South constituency associations and called on the UCP to “recognize the importance of CO2 to life and Alberta’s prosperity.”
Specifically, it said the party should abandon Alberta’s 2050 net-zero target, remove carbon dioxide from being designated as a pollutant and begin “recognizing” CO2 as foundational to all life on Earth.
We should be making more of it, not less, the resolution said.
“CO2 is presently at around 420 ppm, near the lowest level in over 1,000 years. It is estimated that CO2 levels need to be above 150 ppm to ensure the survival of plant life,” the resolution said.
The numbers cited happen to be remarkably similar to those pointed to by Danielle Smith’s good pal Jordan Peterson, in an episode of his podcast sombrely [sic] titled “Climate Lies.” His guest on the episode was Patrick Moore, a widely criticized scientist heavily involved in the early days of Greenpeace. He’s now known for his nuclear lobbying and for his climate claims. He’s also the guy who said drinking a quart of the herbicide glyphosate was safe... but refused to gulp down a cup when asked.
During the podcast talk, Peterson pointed toward Moore’s data claiming we are in fact in the midst of a CO2 drought.
“We’re down to about 430 parts per million and plants start to die at 150 parts per million. The plants are metaphorically gasping for breath,” Peterson claimed.
Those numbers are almost identical to the policy resolution. Both are being used as calls to action that we should be helping the poor plants by pumping out more CO2. That implies CO2 levels are dropping and producing more will somehow prevent a catastrophic plunge below what plant life needs to successfully photosynthesize.
That’s not true, according to Climate.gov, a climate science and information communication tool from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration U.S. government agency.
“Based on air bubbles trapped in mile-thick ice cores and other paleoclimate evidence, we know that during the ice age cycles of the past million years or so, atmospheric carbon dioxide never exceeded 300 ppm. Before the Industrial Revolution started in the mid-1700s, atmospheric carbon dioxide was 280 ppm or less,” an article from the site reads.
“By the time continuous observations began at Mauna Loa Volcanic Observatory in 1958, global atmospheric carbon dioxide was already 315 ppm. Carbon dioxide levels today are higher than at any point in human history,” it continues.
All this to say the claim that our CO2 levels might be in danger of dropping below the levels needed to sustain us, at least for the next few million years, is bogus.
But millions of years is how far the pro-CO2-inflation crowd seems to be looking ahead. At least that’s how Moore views things.
“The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was reduced by about 90 per cent during [the last 150 million years].... If this trend continues CO2 will inevitably fall to levels that threaten the survival of plants, which require a minimum of 150 ppm to survive,” Moore said during a 2015 lecture entitled “Should We Celebrate CO2?” for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a charitable foundation notorious for climate denialism.
“Tonight I will demonstrate that human emissions of CO2 have already saved life on our planet from a very untimely end. That in the absence of our emitting some of the CO2 back into the atmosphere from whence it came in the first place, most or perhaps all life on Earth would begin to die somewhere around two million years from today,” Moore claimed.
To take a quick peep down a rabbit hole, the Global Warming Policy Foundation has been scrutinized for receiving over half a million dollars from a U.S.-based right-wing donor fund called the Donors Trust, which itself got millions from the oil tycoon Koch brothers.
During Moore’s chat with him, Peterson enthusiastically agreed that CO2 levels were doing wonders for the planet.
“Now carbon dioxide levels have gone up and not even that much, and the consequence of that is that the plants are thriving in comparison. And this has happened over only a 20-year period. And so, the amount of the Earth that’s green since the year 2000 is equivalent to the total land area of the United States,” Peterson stated. He also claimed that crop production had gone up by 13 to 15 per cent, in his mind because of the miracle chemical compound.
“If we weren’t ideologically addled,” Peterson said, “and we were looking just at the straight data, with the eyes of, let’s say, new investigators, we’d look at the release of the plant-based carbon dioxide sequestration from the fossil fuel reservoirs as the return of a necessary nutrient to the atmosphere and we would consider it a net positive.”
He emphasized that “it’s literally an anti-truth, the notion that carbon dioxide will cause desertification.”
That assertion is completely incorrect, according to American climatologist and geophysicist Michael E. Mann. Mann is the author of The New Climate War, a book focused on combating climate misinformation and denialism in online spaces.
As for the claims that CO2 has improved crop production, Mann says it’s not only inaccurate, but anti-truth.
“The assertion is wholly untruthful. The exact opposite is true. If Jordan were to do his due diligence in informing himself before pontificating about things that are far afield from any expertise or knowledge base he has, he would know that the definitive recent study published in the premier journal Nature Climate Change a few years ago comes to precisely the opposite conclusion,” Mann said.
That study found climate change caused a 21 per cent loss in potential global farming productivity since the ’60s.
“Is Jordan Peterson engaging in good faith on these matters?” Mann said. “I’ll leave that as a question.”
This muddying of CO2’s role in climate change is part of a larger trend in denialism, one Mann says science communicators and the public need to challenge.
“It’s important to call a lie a lie... and so many of the talking points of polluters and their enablers are just that,” Mann said. “This is not good-faith skepticism, and we have to make that clear. It’s politically, ideologically and financially motivated denial, and it extends now well beyond climate change.”
Mann highlights co-ordinated COVID and vaccine misinformation as another example.
Coincidentally, our premier has a few colourful takes of her own on that subject.
So, how can we as concerned citizens fight this disinformation in all its forms?
“Call them out as the bad actors they are,” Mann advised. “Make sure they’re not able to usurp the mantle of ‘skepticism.’ Skepticism is a good thing in science, but what they’re engaged in is motivated denial. They and the polluters who fund them benefit; the rest of us — and the planet — pay the price.”
My point here is to ask my fellow Albertans: Do we really want the people in charge of things like environmental policy in this province to be taking their direction from those who have such an asinine grasp of climate change? These are the same people who on one hand say climate scientists don’t understand the scientific reality of things like the carbon cycle, but on the other argue that we’ve strayed too far into science and away from religion to the detriment of society.
I certainly don’t.
UCP members voted resoundingly in favour of the resolution.
While Smith acknowledged it reflected the desires of her members to keep the oil pumping, it seems the province still supports carbon capture as a way of lowering emissions. Only time will tell how this will affect the province’s 2050 net-zero commitments.
The Athabasca-Barrhead-Westlock and Red Deer-South constituency associations did not respond to questions by deadline.
Tim Rauf is an Alberta-based science writer. His work focuses on the newest technological trends, and how these technologies can affect communities and society.
