Friday, May 26, 2006
"Only in America"
“Only in America” - a phrase commonly deployed to declare an activity or event has an extreme level of ridiculousness. Mostly, because those sorts of things do happen only in America.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) - a pro-market think tank (is there any other kind?) - has produced and aired two television commercials promoting CO2 emissions.

Yes, that’s right; promoting emissions of the worst culprit named in causing anthropogenic global warming. “Only in America!” you might say.

“Some call pollution. We call it Life” is the CEI’s tag line. Because plants ‘breathe-in’ CO2 it is good to emit more of it. It is not ‘pollution’ it is a harmless, colourless gas.

That CO2 levels are at their highest for 300,000 years and this rising concentration is contributes to the greenhouse effect and rising atmospheric temperatures is simply ignored.

The advertisement’s screening coincided with the theatrical release of a movie on global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth", which features Al Gore.

The CEI’s message is really quite extravagant. It is not simply suggesting that anthropogenic global warming is a myth perpetrated by greenie alarmists (the usual story), it is actually promoting greater emissions of CO2.

So go one, burn that energy, drive that SUV a few hundred yards to the school to collect your kids. Take half a dozen foreign holidays per year. It’s all good for us!

If these ads screened anywhere in the world (and this can only be a hypothetical discourse) I would be relatively sanguine; simply no one would buy it.

But Americans? Would they?

Maybe I am being disingenuous.

(The Competitive Enterprise Institute is predominantly funded by the American Petroleum Institute and Exxon-Mobil. This is not disclosed in the advert.)

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