BROOKE GLADSTONE:
This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD:
And I'm Bob Garfield. Last week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, released the second installment of its 2007 report, a report which states, with 90 percent certainty, that human activities are driving climate change. That has cut the ground out from under the feet of such groups as the Competitive Enterprise Institute, or CEI, which was in the business of denying that humans played a major part in global warming.

But CEI could tell which way the scientific wind was blowing, and last year toned down its denial of humanity's role in climate change, and spearheaded an ad campaign to play up the idea that carbon dioxide is good for you.
[FILM CLIP] [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
WOMAN:
The fields that produce CO2 have freed us from a world of backbreaking labor, lighting up our lives, allowing us to create and move the things we need, the people we love.

Now some politicians want to label carbon dioxide a pollutant. Imagine if they succeed. What would our lives be like then? Carbon dioxide. They call it pollution. We call it life.
BOB GARFIELD:
Since that ad was produced, CEI's legislative allies have been voted out of power in Congress, so the group has had to find more and better arguments to fend off restrictions on energy use. It's argued that rich countries have no right to clamp down on poor ones, that carbon caps would unfairly target the developing world. And it has never ceased pointing out that warming has a good side. We heard that again this week when we called up the Competitive Enterprise Institute's president, Fred Smith.
FRED SMITH:
If I was a Siberian, the idea of having sunny days might [LAUGHS] be very appealing to me. Also, growth seasons will last longer. C02 is a plant nutrient. But, of course, as you should know, in the report there's also arguments that there might be some negative effect.

When anything changes, there are some plusses and some minuses. The report tends to focus on the negatives, but it focuses on some positives, too.
BOB GARFIELD:
It's just that the idea reminds me of the movie Superman. Lex Luthor wants to send California into the Pacific Ocean so his land in Nevada will be beachfront. [SMITH LAUGHS] At some point, doesn't it become absurd to look at the silver lining in a cloud that could, you know, devastate the planet?
FRED SMITH:
Well, will this devastate the planet? Most of the studies show relatively small losses for the planet, and those losses are severe because poverty is still too great a part of the world.

The storms that hit Florida are not different than the storms that hit Bangladesh, but the consequences are very different because the resiliency of wealthy, technology-adroit societies is better. We have warnings. We can move out of harm's way. We have our SUVs, our vans or even our Priuses, depending on what you think is most appropriate. And we have insurance and other things that allow us to go back.

And if Bangladesh were more like Florida, there would be a lot less worry about the risk of climate change. Part of the answer – and the IPCC report does not disagree with this – part of the answer is making the world more adaptable, more resilient. And the point we make is that that requires that we use more, not less, energy, and today that means more carbon-based energy, and that means more CO2, not less CO2.
BOB GARFIELD:
I want to just go back in time about a year and talk about your organization's ad campaign about carbon dioxide. The thrust of the campaign was to remind Americans that carbon dioxide is an important building block of life. What were you trying to get at there?
FRED SMITH:
Well, maybe something a bit too complicated. You certainly can't articulate a lot of intellectual points in an ad, but the attempt there was to explain that CO2 is an evitable part of a better life for most of the people in the world, and attempts to suppress CO2 will mean suppressing a better life for people in the world we live in today.

It's possible that in the future there may be energy sources that are affordable, that we'll rely on other ways of creating energy that will be more available, more affordable than carbon-based fuels, but those aren't available today.

I mean, I've met Al Gore. I respect his position. But I think it's somewhat obscene for wealthy people in America and Europe to tell the poor people of the world that we want them to stop using energy.
BOB GARFIELD:
It's my view, and I think it's fair to say it's the institutional view of this program, that CEI has actually been the beneficiary of a certain kind of journalism that attempts to lend balance to any story by going to someone from the political opposition, irrespective of whether the opposing voice has equal weight. Now, do you perceive a change in the way that journalists are covering your organization?
FRED SMITH:
They're giving us a lot more attention, not altogether favorable. [LAUGHS] Vanity Fair has an article about one of my staffers this time, and it's kind of like "Demon of the World Award" or something like that. There's always an attempt, in a sense, to simplify, to demonize groups you disagree with and you think are wrong. But in a sense, these are issues that will have tremendous consequences for the people of the world.

There will be great sufferings involved, as energy becomes more expensive. It seems to me that someone should say that before you decide to make energy less affordable, we should stop and listen, and you have to decide whether what we say has any rationale or not. I mean, we think we're serious, but obviously we would, wouldn't we?
BOB GARFIELD:
[LAUGHS] Obviously you would. Fred, I very much appreciate you joining us.
FRED SMITH:
Glad to be on.
BOB GARFIELD:
Fred Smith is the founder and president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.