Factcheck.org on House Republican Minority Leader John Boehner guest spot on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos”:
House Republican Minority Leader John Boehner was a guest on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” on Sunday, and he made a remark that could use some clarification and correction.
A conversation about climate change included the following exchange:
Stephanopoulos: What is the Republican plan to deal with carbon emissions, which every major scientific organization has said is contributing to climate change?
Boehner: George, the idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide. Every cow in the world, you know, when they do what they do, you’ve got carbon dioxide.
To start, we haven’t noticed environmental groups, or anyone else for that matter, labeling CO2 a “carcinogen.” According to the American Cancer Society, carcinogens are “substances and exposures that can lead to cancer.” Carcinogens are harmful to people, not necessarily the environment, so how they relate to a conversation on climate change is unclear. But, for the record, CO2 is not listed as a carcinogen by any of the national or international organizations the ACS monitors.
Furthermore, Boehner’s comment that CO2 isn’t “harmful to our environment” runs counter to the scientific consensus on climate change. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and there’s widespread scientific agreement, as Stephanopoulos noted, that carbon dioxide emissions from factories and exhaust pipes across the country are a cause of global warming. (There’s not concern about the CO2 humans exhale.) As we’ve pointed out before, the U.N’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that “the primary source of the increased atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide since the pre-industrial period results from fossil fuel use.” And last week, the Environmental Protection Agency said CO2 emissions could be regulated under the Clean Air Act.
Finally, while it’s true that when every cow (and other types of livestock) “do what they do, you’ve got carbon dioxide,” as Boehner described it, that’s not the relevant issue in the climate change debate. The bigger concern is the methane gas that is released with livestock excrement, flatulence and burping. Methane is ”23 times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere,” according to the EPA.
The New York Times had an article today on Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels that ignored their own scientists:
“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue.
But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.
“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.
The coalition was financed by fees from large corporations and trade groups representing the oil, coal and auto industries, among others. In 1997, the year an international climate agreement that came to be known as the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated, its budget totaled $1.68 million, according to tax records obtained by environmental groups.
Throughout the 1990s, when the coalition conducted a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign challenging the merits of an international agreement, policy makers and pundits were fiercely debating whether humans could dangerously warm the planet. Today, with general agreement on the basics of warming, the debate has largely moved on to the question of how extensively to respond to rising temperatures.
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