This would be funny if it wasn’t real. The video below is an advertisement produced by oil industry executive H. Leighton Steward and Corbin J. Robertson Jr., chief executive of and leading shareholder in Natural Resource Partners, a Houston-based owner of coal resources. These guys have invested $1m to get the word out that CO2 is good for the planet.

Now on the one hand, they are not wrong. The planet is fine with levels of CO2 that are many times higher than what we have today. While today’s levels hover around 380 ppm, back in the good old Jurassic period they were well over 2000 ppm. Of course mammals took a back seat to dinosaurs back then, and West Virginia was swampy coast land, but Mother Earth was just fine with all that. Who’s not fine with all that are us humans. The ecosystem of a high CO2 Earth is significantly different than the one we now enjoy. The notion that more CO2 will just result in a greener planet with happier animals is simply naive.

Of course I suspect these guys don’t really believe this message. Rather, they are simply trying to protect the financial interests of their CO2 spewing businesses. But they are accomplishing that by preying on the scientifically illiterate. Those who payed just enough attention in middle school Earth Science to know that plants “eat” CO2, might be wiling to buy the argument that capping carbon emissions is just some government conspiracy to starve the flowers.

It would be much more comforting to think that an ad like this would be widely considered satire rather than science. But there are many who will consider this a valid alternate viewpoint to global warming, and will see this as an ideology debate rather than as sophistry opposing evidence and reason. This is a perfect example of why science should be studied by everyone, not just students who plan to become scientists and engineers. Public policy debates increasingly have a science angle on them, and educated and informed voters are needed to sort the ducks from the quacks.