Category — Positive externalities

In my last post, I suggested that the externalities from coal-fired electricity generation were probably not as negative as was being touted in a recent report by Paul Epstein and colleagues from the Center for Health and the Global Environment. As further support for my contention, I submit the contents of a new book by copious carbon dioxide researchers Drs. Sherwood and Craig Idso titled “The Many Benefits of Atmospheric CO2 Enrichment: How humanity and the rest of the biosphere will prosper from this amazing trace gas that so many have wrongfully characterized as a dangerous air pollutant!”

The father-son authors take the reader alphabetically through the many benefits from an atmosphere enriched with carbon dioxide that they have gleaned from the peer-reviewed scientific literature, as well as the results of their own experimentation (also documented in the literature). The Idsos’s 55 subject areas of CO2′s beneficial influence is backed by scientific references. The benefits by and large include only direct influences from higher CO2 levels, and don’t delve into indirect influences through, for example, climate change (with the exception of the inclusion of three or four categories dedicated to describing declines in human mortality and increases in human longevity).

I include below the list of those 55 ways that the Idsos have identified “in which the modern rise in atmospheric CO2 is benefiting earth’s biosphere.”

Hopefully, Paul Epstein and colleagues will pick up a copy of this book (available here), because I am certain that they did not include many of these considerations in their calculations.

In the list below, I give only the category name, but a synopsis of CO2’s impact in each of the categories is contained in a pamphlet that summarizes the book, and which is available from the Science and Public Policy Institute. [Read more →]