I’ll just come out and say it – I think Carbon Dioxide (CO2) and the fear of global warming is the biggest distraction to ever derail environmentalism.

CO2 is an extremely common chemical – its a natural component of our atmosphere, its essential for plants, and its a constantly produced byproduct of non-plant life.  Yes – it has greenhouse properties, but its just one of thousands of warming and cooling agents we daily add to the air. If we really wanted to deal with CO2 we would get cracking on the development of nuclear power sources or we’d plant more trees.  This nonsense with cap and trade is looking more and more like a power-grab by the established interests that won’t even do much to address the supposed problem.

Meanwhile, pay no attention to the actually toxic things inside the air or even your tap water.  Millions of Americans drink water contaminated with arsenic or uranium, but we’re holding a global political conference to discuss the gas you exhale.  Its not just toxic elements either, we’ve also got this growing issue of drugs and pharmacuetical waste ending up in the water supply.  It doesn’t just affect humans drinking tap water and coffee, it also effects the river and ocean life that props our whole ecosystem up. To get a new drug approved, you pretty much just have to prove that its less lethal than the disease its supposed to treat – but this says nothing about the toxicity these chemical delivers to otherwise healthy fish, plants, and human individuals.

So we strip mine the rainforests – we let the toxic debris run off into our once pristine rivers and seas.  We continue to overfish the oceans and watch as our sonars drive dolphins & whales insane.  We have literal piles of radioactive coal ash lying around near our towns and cities, and we have hundreds of locations in this country deemed unfit for habitation or agriculture.

But holy crap, we have to do something about that CO2 in the atmosphere! We have slightly more of it than we used to – even though we really don’t have that much if you’re considering a real geological time-scale.

So the fish are deformed, the trees are diseased, and every one of us is drugged from you to me to my pet dog over there.  I hear it will all be ok, if we just get a lid on that evil carbon dioxide…