Richard,
On December 5th, 1997, in an interview segment called "Global Warming_A
Corporate Perspective" on PBS, the following exchange took place between
host Margaret Warner and Fredrick Palmer, CEO of Western Fuels
Association.
Margaret Warner: Let me see if I can find if there's some agreement. Now,
the advocates of this theory say it's indisputable that carbon dioxide
levels in the atmosphere are up 30 percent since the pre-industrial age.
Fredrick Palmer: Correct.
Margaret Warner: And that the temperature of at least the Earth is one
degree higher in the last hundred years.
Fredrick Palmer: I'll accept that.
Margaret Warner: You do?
Fredrick Palmer: Yes.
Margaret Warner: But then what you don't accept is what, the computer
projections showing that this is going to continue and accelerate?
Fredrick Palmer: In the last hundred years we've come out of a little ice
age. And the middle of the 19th century was the end of the little ice age.
We don't want to return to the little ice age. It's being caused by the
fact that we're coming out of a little ice age.
Margaret Warner: The overall theory of global warming is that because you
have this buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere, you're trapping heat.
Fredrick Palmer: Correct.
Margaret Warner: Are you saying then you don't think that has any impact
on the temperature of the Earth?
Fredrick Palmer: I think over time there will be a modest impact on the
temperature of the Earth. I think there will be some modest warming. What
is ignored by the scientific community...who talks about CO2 as a
pollutant, is that it's not a pollutant. CO2 is benign limiting nutrient
that for plants, agriculture, and forests, a buildup of greenhouse gases
of CO2 in the atmosphere is something that should be welcomed and not
feared. The impact will be benign in that we will have more productivity
in agriculture; we may have some modest warming, but warm is good; ice
ages are bad.
Margaret Warner: So that's one reason, obviously, that your industry is
opposed to the emissions caps that the administration -
Fredrick Palmer: Right. This is a bad treaty; it's a bad theory; and it's
a bad idea. The genius of the American economy is to take...fossil fuels
and to convert them into electricity, for example, to power our factories,
to give us the quality of life that we enjoy, to let you and I sit here
tonight in this magnificent room with these lights on, to have this
conversation. This is a positive good. Fossil fuels are good and not bad.
We want to use more of them. We want to use them cleanly and efficiently,
but more of them. They are trying to prevent a speculative bad fifty or a
hundred years from now by eliminating something that is a positive good
today, and we say that is profoundly wrong.
Margaret Warner: Now, and they say on the speculative bad, they
acknowledge that we don't really know how bad, in their view, it would be
but that because carbon dioxide, once it's up in the atmosphere, really
doesn't disappear for a hundred years or more, that by the time the
buildup gets enough - high enough to prove it - it's almost too late to do
anything, or it will be incredibly expensive. [...] I guess what I'm
asking, why should the American people think you all are right about the
future versus them?
Fredrick Palmer: Well, we have to live our lives based on what's in front
of us. We live our lives based on what we know, what we can see. We have
to go by scientific observations. What they - they talk a lot about the
precautionary principle in terms of changing our lifestyle today to
prevent something their flawed computers say might happen fifty or a
hundred years from now. The true scientific precautionary principle is
this: All of the scientists that I have talked to agree that we are
in-between ice ages. I debated a man on climate change in Florida last
week. He said, unless we do something, we'll have another ice age. The
only thing you can do to prevent another ice age is to put more CO2 in the
air. The true precautionary principle is to let industrial evolution of
humans continue on the path that it is in, to let our lifestyles develop
so we have longer lives, more wealth, our health is better by utilizing
fossil fuels. So we reject the theory. It's a flawed, bad theory.
[Note: transcript was edited - though not altered - for relevance.]
Andy