No. 4: Plants Need C02

Meet the 12 loudest members of the chorus claiming that global warming is a joke and that CO2 emissions are actually good for you.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

H. Leighton Steward’s best-selling book, Sugar Busters! Cut Sugar to Trim Fat, advocates weaning Americans from candy bars and other sweets. But the autodidact and retired oil executive draws the line when it comes to putting the country on a carbon diet. His recent self-published book, Fire, Ice and Paradise, describes CO2 emissions as an important part of our environmental food pyramid. Carbon, it explains, is not “a significant driver of current temperature change.” In fact, “CO2 is shown to be a positive factor in Earth’s ecosystems, a benefit to the plant (food) kingdom, and thus the animal kingdom, which includes humanity.”

To raise awareness of why “CO2 is green,” Steward maintains PlantsNeedCO2.com, which greets visitors with a photo of sprouting seedlings framed by a blue sky. “Good news,” it announces, “Earth and it’s [sic] inhabitants need more, not less, CO2.” The site explains that “more CO2 means more plant growth” and that a warmer climate—should climate change actually exist—will have a salubrious effect because “more people die each year from cold weather than from hot weather.”

Until recently, PlantsNeedCO2.com was registered to Houston-based Quintana Minerals Corporation, part of a group of oil and gas companies overseen by the family of coal magnate Corbin J. Robertson. In addition to serving on the board of the American Petroleum Institute, Robertson is CEO of Natural Resources Partners, which owns coal mines in the Midwest and Appalachia.

Steward, who did not respond to an interview request, boasts an impressive-sounding CV. He chairs the board of the Institute for the Study of Earth and Man at Southern Methodist University, was chairman of the National Wetlands Coalition, and twice chaired the Audubon Nature Institute. Moreover, he has received the “regional EPA Administrator’s Award for environmental excellence.” But his green cred is questionable. Ten of the eleven corporate sponsors of the Institute for the Study of Earth and Man are energy companies. According to the Environmental Working Group, the National Wetlands Coalition has supported rolling back federal protections that kept Steward’s Louisiana Land and Gas Company—once the nation’s largest private owner of wetlands—from operating in sensitive areas. The Audubon Nature Institute has no relationship to the National Audubon Society; it does, however, operate a golf course in Louisiana. The EPA did not respond to an inquiry about Steward’s “environmental excellence” award.

Click here for the next member of the dirty dozen.

Click here for the previous member.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate