Pro-carbon dioxide TV/radio ads - (For real!)

The television advertisements, screened for the media yesterday and set to air in 14 US cities from today, are part of a feel-good campaign by the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute to counter a negative media spotlight on worldwide climate change.

The spots are timed to precede next week's release of An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary film on global warming that features Al Gore, the former vice-president and Democratic presidential candidate.

Against backdrops of a park, a beach and a forest, one ad celebrates the benefits of greenhouse gas-producing fuels.

"The fuels that produce CO2 (carbon dioxide) have freed us from a world of back-breaking labour, lighting up our lives, allowing us to create and move the things we need, the people we love," the advertisement runs.

"Now some politicians want to label carbon dioxide a pollutant.

"Imagine if they succeed -- what would our lives be like then?"

The other advertisement questions media reports of the threat of climate change, especially a Time magazine issue devoted to the topic, and shows film of a glacier melting and then runs in reverse to show the glacier reconstituting itself.

"We had started work on this several months back, but we sort of changed course once the flood of glacier-melting stories began," said Sam Kazman, an institute lawyer who worked on the advertisements.

"So we did want to get out there before the Al Gore film got into national opening."

Fred L. Smith Jr, head of the institute, a lobbying group that stresses limited government regulation and a free-market approach to environmental issues, found the Gore film "very alarmist," although well-produced. – REUTERS