The question from my September 2015 post “Carbon Pollution” – tongue slip or deep ecology influence? seems to have an answer. Obama and his administration have cited “carbon pollution” on many occasions, so it is not a slip of the tongue. Obama’s science czar John Holdren is more a charlatan than a scientist, but is known for having promoted the idea that the US and the world have an excess of humans and need “depopulation,” an equivalent of deep ecology. Now we should ask how much Obama and his administration are influenced by this anti-humanism, and how this ideology interacts with other Obama agendas. Besides anti-humanism, the use of the disgusting phrase “carbon pollution” may be caused by other factors:
- An intent to confound carbon dioxide – invisible, odorless, harmless to humans, and beneficial for plants gas – with soot. Soot is indeed harmful, and soot contamination is a major environmental problem in many countries. But US power stations and diesel engines are already equipped with filters, capturing practically all soot, so there is no relation between carbon dioxide and soot emissions.
- Genuine scientific illiteracy and contempt for science among Obama’s internal circle of advisers.
- An attempt to target audiences with severe cognitive limitations.
- An attempt to intimidate or at least taunt those citizens who do understand the role of carbon as the basis of all life on the Earth, and who are concerned about this increasingly hateful and authoritarian Pre$ident, who had Jeremiah Wright as his spiritual teacher.
I leave it to the reader to decide how these factors weigh on this and other matters.