A report says Earth is turning greener thanks to carbon dioxide emissions. But America isn’t doing its part. While other countries are pumping out more CO2, the U.S. has cut its output.
Carbon dioxide is the environmentalists’ bogey man. In their narrative, it is an evil gas that, when produced by man, heats the globe to intolerable levels. But CO2 is just part of nature — even when generated by human activities — and it is making the world greener.
According to the study “Greening of the Earth and its Drivers” that appeared in the journal Nature Climate Change, there is “a persistent and widespread increase of growing season integrated LAI (greening) over 25% to 50% of the global vegetated area.”
At the same time, less than 4% of the globe is browning.
The authors, 32 of them from 24 institutions, say that “factorial simulations with multiple global ecosystem models suggest that CO2 fertilization effects (man’s emissions) explain 70% of the observed greening trend.”
Isn’t this what environmental activists want — a greener Earth? Don’t they want us all to “go green”? Well, we are. Except for America. U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide here are decreasing. In 2000, America pumped out 5,868 million metric tons of CO2, then 6,001 million metric tons in 2007, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The figure fell to 5,406 in 2014.
Meanwhile, total world CO2 emissions have increased from 24,780 million metric tons in 2000, to 31,261 million metric tons in 2007, to 35,890 million metric tons in 2014, says the Global Carbon Atlas.
Clearly America hasn’t held up its end of the greening of Earth as it should have.
Despite the report about carbon dioxide emissions’ beneficial effects on our world, the study’s authors felt the need to adopt the environmentalists’ narrative. Yes, Earth is greener thanks to CO2, they say in their news release. But they don’t want the global warming contrarians to use the greening to “argue against cuts in carbon emissions to mitigate climate change, similar to those agreed at the 21st Conference of Parties (COP) meeting in Paris last year under the U.N. Framework on Climate Change.”
