The CO2 Coalition, a source of climate change misinformation in Pa., wants us to love carbon dioxide

Carbon dioxide is a “miracle molecule” that fuels all life on Earth. That’s the message a group downplaying the threat of climate change has been spreading to Pennsylvania conservatives.

“I love CO2,“ Gregory Wrightstone, executive director of the CO2 Coalition, told the conservative Pennsylvania Leadership Conference in Camp Hill last month, “and so should you.”

Wrightstone will make the same widely contested pitch Thursday when he addresses the Lehigh Valley Tea Party in Allentown.

Climate scientists warn Wrightstone’s CO2 Coalition is a fount of misinformation that promotes doubt about the effects of climate change, and serves as a mouthpiece for the oil and gas industry. A United Nations report calls climate change “the single biggest health threat facing humanity.”

A former geologist who worked in Pittsburgh for two decades in the fossil fuel industry, Wrightstone acknowledges that the burning of coal, natural gas, and oil has increased the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

But such activity merely warms the planet, he said in an interview, extending the crop-growing season and thus feeding the world. It has no chance of kicking off climate catastrophe as others predict, he contended.

Evidence shows, however, that the growing accumulation of greenhouse gases — primarily carbon dioxide — is already fueling extreme weather events, including deadly wildfires in Hawaii and calamitous floods in Vermont in 2023, the world’s hottest year on record, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

Created in 2015, the coalition is a nonprofit based in Arlington, Va., with a revenue of $1.06 million in 2022, the latest data available from public documents. The coalition doesn’t list many of its donors.

“It is a front-group tied to the fossil fuel industry and conservative funders. They’re shills, promoting untruthful or misleading claims,” said Michael Mann, a climatologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

Mann’s work was included in a report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore. “The coalition isn’t a legitimate source of science,” he said.

Coalition funders have included the conservative Mercer Family Foundation, a major Trump donor, according to Grantmakers.io, a public IRS data site; the Charles Koch Foundation, connected to Koch Industries, which has owned oil refineries and pipelines, and has conducted a “climate change disinformation campaign,” according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit that studies climate change; and the Thomas W. Smith Foundation Inc., which supports groups that fight critical race theory, according to SourceWatch, part of the progressive Center for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit watchdog organization.

Coalition spokespeople describe the organization as a “who’s who of eminent scientists” who amplify the importance of carbon dioxide, which helps the Earth trap heat from the sun.

The group was cofounded by William Happer, a professor emeritus of physics from Princeton University who has attempted to dispute climate science for years, according to Politico’s E&E News, which covers energy and environment policy. Happer, a senior director with the White House National Security Council in the Trump administration, has called carbon emissions a boon to the environment.

A former CEO of the coalition, William O’Keefe, was a COO of the American Petroleum Institute, the largest U.S. trade association for the oil and natural gas industry.

Wrightstone is the author of Inconvenient Facts: The Science That Al Gore Doesn’t Want You to Know. He often appears on conservative media outlets such as Fox News, NewsMax, Breitbart, the Daily Signal (part of the Heritage Foundation), as well as on Christian radio networks.

The CO2 Coalition’s position is exemplified by a slogan it featured on billboards along the Pennsylvania Turnpike in New Stanton and Bedford last year: “Sleep well. There’s no climate crisis.”

“We are speaking to people who love America,” said coalition marketing vice president Angela Wheeler in a brief interview. “They believe that truth matters.”

This approach to climate change has been labeled the “new denial” — forsaking the hard-to-defend argument that warming is a hoax (the ”old denial”) for one that downplays the perils of a heated-up planet.

The coalition’s use of hard-to-parse jargon makes it appear that its arguments hew to scientific principles. But, said University of California, Berkley, researcher Amber Kerr, the coalition will use technical details “to distract and confuse rather than to educate the public.”

In testimony before the Pennsylvania House Environmental Resources and Energy Committee in 2022, Wrightstone claimed that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency “falsely determined that carbon dioxide was a pollutant” 15 years ago.

Wrightstone’s allegation has been debunked by numerous climate scientists, who say that while carbon dioxide is a naturally occurring gas, human CO2 emissions are over-warming the planet.

“CO2 fits perfectly EPA’s definition of a chemical substance that presents ‘an unreasonable risk of injury to health or the environment,’” climate scientist James Hansen wrote in 2022. Hansen, credited with alerting Congress to global warming in the 1980s, is director of the Program on Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

The nonprofit’s message that predictions of impending climate crises are overblown dovetails with Republican thinking: Just 23% of Republicans believe climate change is a major threat to U.S. well-being, vs. nearly 80% of Democrats, according to a 2023 survey by the Pew Research Center.

In a widely reported incident last year, representatives of the group were kicked out of the National Science Teaching Association convention in Atlanta for distributing 700 comic books that played up the benefits of carbon dioxide without discussing its detriments.

The comic book depicts a character named Mr. Gordon who tells a child that carbon dioxide is paramount for sustaining all life on earth without noting the dangers of accumulated CO2 in the atmosphere, raising the ire of science teachers at the convention.

Teaching children that CO2 is life-sustaining without discussing the buildup of greenhouse gases “is like telling a drowning person they need water to survive,” Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, told the Washington Post. “It’s not helpful.”

Many of the CO2 Coalition’s findings have been contradicted by Scientific American, NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, among others.

David Robinson, the New Jersey State Climatologist and a professor in the department of geography at Rutgers University, said that the coalition’s message has no basis in fact even if its members are earnest in believing in it.

“What they put out is misinformation, placing a shine on a seriously negative situation, which is that the planet is warming at an unprecedented pace,” he said.

Wrightstone disputed that, saying the coalition’s work is accurate and science-based.

But Mann said the coalition’s work is built on a foundational “myth” that the world isn’t at risk from accelerating carbon dioxide.

“Every authoritative scientific society in the world concludes the opposite,” Mann said.

Staff writer Ryan Briggs contributed to this article.