TV Ads To Counter Gore On Global Warming

Better living through chemistry! If you are as old as I am, you'll remember it vaguely. That was a late 50s or early 60s ad campaign that ran to promote plastics and other products made with chemicals, and to counter early concerns about what production, and disposal, of plastics might do to the environment.

Turn on your TV in the next couple of days and you might see what amounts to "better living through carbon dioxide."

The conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute will run an ad campaign aimed at countering any effects Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, may have on how we view global warming. Reuters has a story on the ads today.

We showed you the trailer to Gore's film, so in the interest of equal time, and just because we are stunned by this ad, click here to see what's being offered up in defense of fossil fuel usage.

(WARNING: you have to sit through a more conventional ad first.
(DOUBLE WARNING: depending on your personality type, you may need an agita medicine, or you may choke yourself laughing, after viewing).

VIDEO PROVIDED BY MSNBC.com

If you can't fire it, up here's one quote from the ad:

"Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution; we call it life."

You can't make it up!

Yesterday former oil man turned president, George W. Bush, was asked if he would see Gore's film. He answered with a quick, and very Texan tough-guy, "doubt it."

Today, MSN is polling Americans on the issue. Asking them if they think their president should see the documentary. It's a flash poll and is not statistically meaningful. But here were the results when I logged on this evening:

Should President Bush watch the Al Gore documentary on global warming?

* 73510 responses

No 31%
Yes 65%
I'm not sure3.4%

Are you going to watch the documentary?

* 73448 responses

No 36%
Yes 55%
I'm not sure 9.1%

Not a scientific survey. Results may not total 100% due to rounding.

Global warming, at the world's peril, continues to be a political football in the U.S. Last year's storm-filled summer got some people to begin to think there might be something to this concept (this blogger included). Maybe Gore's movie - and this nut-job ad - might push a few more people toward reality.

While there seems little doubt to me about Gore's sincerity on the issue, I'm also beginning to feel strongly that he hopes to ride the issue of the environment to the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. Newsweek's Eleanor Clift examines that possibility.