CEI takes on Al Gore: “We call it life.” Is Ford involved?

The cave dwellers at the Competitive Enterprise Institute are planning an attack campaign to remuddy the waters on global warming, timed to coincide with the release of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

CEI is a “think tank” bankrolled by a variety of bad actors sympathetic to the organization’s view that climate change might not be such a big deal after all. Chief among the group’s backers is Exxon Mobil.

I have to give CEI some credit. Rather than just denying that global warming is taking place or denying that manmade emissions play a role, CEI is going for broke: global warming is happening, and it’s going to be great!

Here’s CEI’s founder, Fred Smith, on Crossfire (via Think Progress):

Warmer winters, warmer nights, no effects during the day because of clouding, sounds to me like we’re moving to a more benign planet, more rain, richer, easier productivity to agriculture…We’re basically to a world now that’s a lot closer to heaven than hell.

It’s worth checking out the ads that CEI is planning to run in ten major markets. They’re actually fairly comical in their hamhanded attempts to rebrand carbon dioxide using 70’s style stock footage, reverse motion photography, and titles that may have been created on a Commodore 64. Carbon dioxide’s nothing to worry about, they tell us, as a mom loads her little ones into a minivan and a groovy chick blows soap bubbles in a field. For their next campaign, perhaps they’ll resurrect Poochie the rockin’ dog to explain to the kids that carbon dioxide is what makes soda fun to drink.

I was actually feeling fairly smug this morning as I read about Exxon Mobil’s involvement with this shady outfit. Our partner, Ford Motor Company, catches a lot of deserved flak for the fuel efficiency of its fleet. It also seems to miss out on a lot of deserved credit for its acceptance of the reality of climate change, its acknowledgement of its own special role in the problem, and its successful efforts to measure, publicize, and reduce its own emissions. At least Ford isn’t involved in pushing this pseudoscientific silliness on the public, I thought.

Or were they? Turns out that Ford is on a list of known donors to CEI, along with Coca Cola, IBM, Texaco, GM, and a long list of others. We have no information on when these donations were made or in what amount. If it turns out the money changed hands back in the 90’s, I think we can consider this water under the bridge.

But if the donations were recent, well, then we have more questions. Will Ford publicly disavow the nonsense being pushed in these ads? Will they put an equivalent amount of money into carbon abatement programs? More as the story develops.