Author: Andrew Livingstone

We put out the following as an excerpt from, “The War on Carbon is a War on Us” by Christopher Bedford, Common Sense Society, July 7, 2023:

We’ve come a long way from an environmental movement concerned with actual deadly chemicals. Long gone are the days of A Civil Action or Erin Brockovich, by and large, it’s because the West has largely reformed its actual polluters and cleaned up its air and waterways. The air might still stink in our biggest cities, but you can breathe healthily on a muggy day; and while the water’s far from tropical, you can now swim in the Chesapeake Bay or even Boston’s Charles River.

These newer attacks aren’t on your everyday pollutants, though: they’re on carbon and nitrogen, the gasses emitted by breath and animal waste, respectively. That is to say, they are attacks on the natural outputs of life itself.

The ideology of Net Zero is dangerous. Not only economically for our nation, but socially. The ideology of Net Zero teaches us that carbon is poisonous whereas the reality is that carbon is an essential building block of life of earth. The only possible final outcome with the war on carbon is a war against life itself.

Our leader’s [Biden?] blind commitment to the religion of Net Zero is damaging and will continue to damage our nation’s economic future. Without cheap and abundant power, it will simply be impossible for our nation to compete on the world stage.

We are shutting down our productive capacity and sending our businesses and our very future offshore to competing nations which do not subscribe to the sheer madness of Net Zero ideology.

The Australian Government must abandon its commitment to Net Zero and abolish any attempts to impose a tax on carbon emissions. Net Zero is an orchestrated wealth transfer from our nation to others.

We cannot help what we believe [?]. We can only defer to our own research and our consequent assessment of plausibility. I think that the concept of net zero is ridiculous. More, while I can see that the Earth’s climate changes, I find the notion that we are changing it by irresponsibly encouraging carbon dioxide (apparently 0.04% of our atmosphere) unconvincing. Yet the war on carbon is a source of a million fortunes, all, as it turns out, funded by free public money.

My opinion on the “climate emergency” appears to make me an outlier. The other side of the argument in fact recognises no argument. There is a barrage of propaganda from hundreds of media outlets paid for by organisations such as Covering Climate Now and the loftily named World Weather Attribution. Despite the fact that scepticism is supposed to be the foundation stone of science, scientists such as Dr Judith Curry who question the consensus are ruthlessly de-platformed. 

The war on carbon is a war on life itself. It is a war on plant health, animal health and human life. Not only is carbon dioxide necessary for photosynthesis, but it also makes plants more nutritious, multiplying their medicinal value. Numerous studies show that higher carbon dioxide levels increase the vitamin and mineral output of plants. Studies also show that higher carbon levels increase the plants’ output of flavonoids, phenolics, essential oils, tannins, antioxidants, amino acids and other phytochemicals

Humans and animals depend on the vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals provided by the plant kingdom. When plants are starved of basic elements like carbon, they

cannot provide the nourishment that humans need to thrive. As the world’s population surpasses eight billion people, there will be a greater global need for warmer temperatures, longer growing seasons and higher carbon dioxide levels to build up an ecosystem that supports highly medicinal crops, herbs and super foods.

Carbon is the element of life, the chemical basis of all known life-forms. It is the fourth most abundant element in the universe, and the second in the human body, after oxygen. It is the unique and, indeed, astonishing properties of carbon that make life possible. With four electrons available for covalent bonding, carbon forms an unimaginable diversity of complex organic compounds, with more than ten million described to date; and yet that figure is only a tiny fraction of the number theoretically possible. It has an unusual ability to form polymers — macromolecules with repeating sequences, such as DNA — at temperatures experienced on earth.

Its physical properties vary widely in allotropic forms as distinct as graphite and diamond: soft and hard; opaque and transparent; conductive and insulating. Carbon will not ionise under any except implausibly extreme conditions, and its allotropes are thermally conductive, thermodynamically stable and chemically resistant. Taken together, these properties make carbon the foundation of the entire, rich, complex and beautiful biosphere of this planet. 

Like all heavy elements, carbon is forged in the furnaces of stars. But when the British scientist Fred Hoyle came to this element in his ground-breaking work on stellar nucleosynthesis, he found himself faced with a conundrum: carbon should not exist. That is, it should be transformed instantaneously into oxygen on coming into existence. After exhaustive analysis he discovered there just might be a solution to the riddle of the persistence of carbon, but only if a very specific value was assigned to the parameters of the carbon-12 isotope: i.e., a resonance level at 7.65 MeV (million electric volts) above its ground state.

In 1945, Hoyle was on sabbatical from Cambridge University, having completed his secondment in Britain’s radar research program during the war years. On a visit to Caltech, he managed to persuade nuclear physicist William Fowler to put together at team at Pasadena University to design an experiment to test his prediction using particle colliders and an over-sized mass spectrometer at Caltech. The Americans were sceptical of Hoyle’s outrageous claim, but, incredibly, the exact value Hoyle had predicted was confirmed, and the result led him to a mind-blowing epiphany.

“I do not believe,” he wrote later, “that any scientist who examined the evidence would fail to draw the inference that the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequences they produce inside the stars.” “The Universe: Past and Present Reflections”, Engineering and Science, 1981

Carbon is the impossible element, and the miracle of life begins with physics. [1]

Hoyle had previously been a somewhat militant atheist, expressing sceptical and even satirical views towards Christianity, Creationism, and the ‘Big Bang’ theory (his phrase) advanced by the Roman Catholic priest Georges Lemaître. Now, however, the astrophysicist became one of a number of scientists who started to advance the teleological argument — that physical parameters governing the condition of the universe are fine-tuned to very specific values which enable not only the possibility of life, but of astronomical structures, diverse elements, chemical bonds, and even matter itself. For Hoyle, the very existence of carbon was proof of intelligent design in physics.

Would you not say to yourself, Hoyle argued, “Some super-calculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom, otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be utterly minuscule. A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has

monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”  Fred Hoyle, “The Universe: Past and Present Reflections.” Engineering and Science, November 1981. pp. 8–12

And that’s probably about as far as empirical science can take us. Hoyle, for one, did not default to belief in anything resembling an anthropomorphic God, and so continued to describe himself as an atheist. Instead, he adopted a position consonant with ancient philosophy in both its Eastern and Western branches — that the universe itself is intelligent. As the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus of Soli wrote, in his De Nature Deorum: “The universe itself is God”.

With any other element, Hoyle’s epiphany would perhaps not have had quite such an impact on the scientist. It was the fact that the miracle concerned carbon, whose unique properties make it the only possible platform for the phenomenon of life itself, that forced a decisive paradigm-shift in his thinking. His worldview expanded, as it must, to accommodate the previously impossible.

It must have been a very strange experience to witness the contemporaneous rise of the political climate movement with its weird demonisation of his immaculate molecule. He didn’t get heavily involved in the debate, but I think we can assume without too much presumption that he would have been content to trust the intelligence of an evolved planetary system within an intelligent universe. He made occasional interventions in the infant science of climatology — for instance, to dispute the way the so-called ‘greenhouse effect’ was calculated — but for the most part the astrophysicist was focused on higher things: on origins; of the universe, of life, of religion.

The war on carbon is not to save the environment. The war is against humanity, and to destroy humanity you must first destroy its sustenance. To do that you must attack the ecosystems that sustain it and embrace the risk of collapsing the biosphere itself. Your life-science and technology will enable you — you hope — to bring it all back, to your own design and specifications. So, enlist your enemy in its own destruction; have it worship your Satanic inversions.

The enemies of carbon portray planet Earth as fragile and sick, humanity as its disease. But this planet, like the carbon atom at the heart of the web of life, is a system imbued with intelligence, and it doesn’t need us entombing the gas of life in the ground or erecting screens of toxic particles in the sky. This is madness, or mockery — a Satanic joke.

What we need to do is to plant trees and protect primary forest;

clean the oceans and rivers;

abandon oil-based plastics and switch to hemp;

use fossil fuels to unleash Third World development and

boost atmospheric carbon dioxide as much as we can;

end poverty and hunger and watch the population stabilize.