House Minority Leader John Boehner appeared on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos and entirely rewrote the scientific community’s understanding of carbon dioxide. Boehner said, “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 more carbon dioxide. And so I think it’s clear.
Watch:
Of course, environmentalists’ chief concern with carbon dioxide is not its cancer causing effects, but rather its greenhouse properties. In that sense, its potential to harm to the environment is very real. Meanwhile, someone should tell Boehner that humans and other animals exhale carbon dioxide, because of its toxicity, but that respiring animals do not increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That happens, for the most part, when humans burn fossil fuels.
(As an aside, when Boehner mentions cows, he’s engaging in a common Republican attempt to trivialize the climate change issue by noting that animal flatus contains greenhouse gases. And though this is true, the real concern with that–such as there is any–is the presence of methane in cow farts. Not carbon dioxide.)
Boehner went on to describe a cap-and-trade plan as a multi-trillion dollar tax, which neglects the fact that a cap-and-trade plan would include a substantial rebate to consumers. But at the very least he managed not to suggest misleadingly that such a program would cost the average household $3,128.
