Stop calling it 'carbon' or 'soot' when you mean the colorless gas carbon dioxide, note to recent WSJ headline

Carbon dioxide is not "soot." It is a colorless gas.

3/15/11, "ATI Says 'Stop Calling It Carbon'," ATI press release

"After an editorial in today's Wall Street Journal titled "Carbon and Democracy" that confuses casual observers about exactly what is alleged greenhouse gas pollution and what isn't, American Tradition Institute executive director Paul Chesser today is calling attention to

• misleading terms in the global warming debate.

"It's carbon dioxide, not carbon, and there's a big difference," Chesser said. "Humans and animals exhale the former, and plants love it, but environmental extremists demonize it. They love to confuse the issue by calling it carbon

• to create an image of black particulates emitting from smokestacks, when in fact

the alleged global warming 'pollutant' we talk about is a

• colorless, odorless and harmless gas."

Unfortunately even the conservative, free-market media (like the Journal, despite their sound positions on energy and climate issues) has fallen into this trap. This confusion was driven home in testimony by EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson last week before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Asked how she would describe carbon, Ms. Jackson replied,

• "As black carbon soot."

Fortunately Rep. Joe Barton corrected her, saying, “That table in front of you is carbon.

• Carbon itself is not a pollutant.”

The use of "carbon" rather than "carbon dioxide" by environmentalists is meant to deceive, and its use by climate realists only neuters their argument. As columnist Terry McCrann of The Herald Sun in Melbourne, Australia recently wrote:

"There is neither the need to abbreviate carbon dioxide to carbon; and the exercise of abbreviation renders it inaccurate. A bald-faced, quite deliberate lie.

For if carbon dioxide can be called 'carbon pollution,' in this or any other universe, in this or any other reality, well then rain has to be called "hydrogen pollution."

The reason the term is used by (Australian Prime Minister Julia) Gillard is an exercise of quite deliberate despicable dishonesty. It is the modern political form of those subliminal advertisements that are banned. To suggest that it is about stopping dirty bits of grit -- the very real carbon pollution of yesterday's coal-burning home fires which gave London its sooty smog and killed thousands every year.

"The real carbon pollution which no longer exists in modern developed economies, mostly precisely because of clean coal-fired power stations. And which does exist --

• and kills -- in developing and third-world countries,

• denied centralised power generation."

Whether it's in polls or in the news media, identifying "carbon" as a contributor to global warming simply because it conjures a polluting image is deceptive and wrong. "I call upon everyone in the media -- including my friends in the conservative/libertarian movement -- to get your terms straight," said Chesser, who admits he has been guilty of the same transgression in the past. "The government wants limits on carbon dioxide, which they want you to believe causes global warming.

• So tell the story right and leave the

• imagery of 'black carbon soot' out of it.""

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3/16/11, "So now it's a 'pollution tax'?" Australian Climate Madness


via Tom Nelson