On the hypocrisy of climate change threat advocates

By Denis G. Rancourt

Those who argue that climate change driven by fossil fuel burning is a dominant threat to the environment and to humankind should act according to their beliefs. With knowledge comes responsibility.

If it is true that scientific consensus leads one to the undeniable conclusion that unchecked global warming or climate change will likely lead to humankind’s greatest threat in its short history on Earth then two things follow:

(1) Powerful interests which oppose climate change mitigation or which do not sufficiently endeavour to mitigate climate change and which obviously have access to science experts and their published reports must knowingly desire the destruction of the biosphere as we know it, and

(2) Citizens who become aware of the scientific consensus have a moral responsibility to do everything they can in self-defence to avert the eminent destruction of the planet.

Each individual citizen who becomes informed that increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration from the burning of fossil fuel will lead to world catastrophe on the scale of the planet has a duty to do everything he/she can to stop as much fossil fuel burning as possible.

The time for discussion, organizing and lobbying is over. The planet is on the edge.

Simply reducing one’s carbon footprint rather than actively participating to reduce fossil fuel burning by multiplicative actions is a cowardly escape from responsibility. By this false logic why not kill yourself and reduce your footprint to zero?

The slashing of automobile tires can no longer be seen as a crime but must be understood as a service to humanity.

Likewise water in gasoline tanks, derailing coal-bearing trains, bombing pipelines, forcibly shutting down extraction operations, and destroying home furnaces must all be understood as noble emergency service to humanity rather than seen as property and economic damage.

Poisonous CO2 must be brought under control without further delay. Those who cannot fight should stop breathing and kill themselves for the greater good.

Surely climate change threat advocates do not realistically expect the same technocratic government-NGO-corporate-finance enterprise that created the problem and that refuses to expediently fix it before it is too late to act as needed to avert the impending catastrophe?

That would be like asking investors to prevent stock value bubbles and market crashes because of the harm to ordinary people and the devastating impacts on communities.

No, responsible citizens must take immediate individual direct and effective action to stop as much fossil fuel burning as possible.

A single teenager slashing five or so tires per minute on a parking lot (church or Wal-Mart say), counting internal combustion engine down time, is equivalent to shutting down one coal-fired power plant every two years.

Live according to your beliefs.

Anything else is pure hypocrisy and selfish escapism.

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CO2 emission from fossil fuel burning is not more than from breathing

by Denis G. Rancourt
This essay was first posted on the Activist Teacher blog.


The present (2010) rate of CO2 emission from fossil fuel burning, expressed as kilograms of carbon per year, is 0.8 x 10^13 kg-C/y (where, in scientific notation, 10^13 = 10,000,000,000,000 with thirteen zeros). This includes all fossil fuel CO2 emissions; from petroleum, coal, natural gas, and cement production.

My calculation (below) shows that this rate of CO2 emission is roughly equal to the CO2 emissions from the simple breathing of air of humans and domestic animals (humans, cattle, swine, sheep, goats, chickens, pets, etc.), so-called anthropogenic (from humankind) animal breathing.

Energy for life comes from the burning of food fuel. Organic matter is burned using the oxygen that we breathe and this controlled combustion produces CO2 gas and H2O water. Organic matter can be represented by the generic formula C-H2-O and the breathing (or burning) reaction is simply the reverse of the photosynthesis reaction as:

C-H2-O + O2 = H2O + CO2 + energy.

In this reaction, each C in organic matter produces one CO2 molecule on burning.

The metabolic rate of an animal (or living being) is the rate of energy expenditure needed to sustain life functions (such as the pumping of blood, etc.) and to power any work done by the animal (such as walking, running, lifting, etc.)

The metabolic rate for humans primarily depends on age, sex, and body weight. Representative values (somewhat similar for all large warm blooded animals) are: 1 Watt per kilogram of body weight (W/kg) for sleep, 4 W/kg for walking, and 18 W/kg for running. Below we use a representative average value for all humans and domestic animals to be 5 W/kg.

Our task therefore is to evaluate the metabolic rate of energy use requirements of all humans (6.7 billion individuals) and their domestic animals (1.3 billion cows, etc.), in order to use the above chemical reaction to obtain the needed global rate of O2 consumption which, in turn is equal (on a per molecule basis) to the rate of global CO2 production from anthropogenic animal breathing.

In evaluating the energy required for burning organic matter (food), a most convenient approximation is to note that the energy produced is proportional to the amount of oxygen consumed. The proportionality is fairly constant for all food types and is approximately twenty kilojoules of energy per litre of oxygen gas at standard atmospheric conditions: 20 kJ/L. (One litre of gas at normal pressure and temperature conditions contains 0.04 moles of the gas molecules. One mole is 6.02 x 10^23 molecules.)

Now rather than use living body weight in the metabolic rate formula, we use the same convention as for biomass and express all human and domestic animal body weights in kilograms of carbon, kg-C. Dry weight (water removed) is approximately 30% of living body weight and approximately half of the weight of dry natural organic matter is carbon.

This leads to the convenient final formula:

R-CO2 = Rmet x Mbio x [5.5 kg/Wy]

where R-CO2 is the calculated rate of CO2 emission (expressed in kilograms of carbon per year, kg-C/y) corresponding to an amount Mbio (expressed in kg-C) of breathing biomass (whatever humans or domestic animals one wishes to count) and where the factor of 5.5 kg/Wy is in units of kilograms per Watt-year.

Using Rmet = 5 W/kg and Mbio for all humans and domestic animals on the planet equal to 4 x 10^11 kg-C, we obtain R-CO2 = 1 x 10^13 kg-C/y which is comparable in value to the present rate of CO2 emission from fossil fuel burning of 0.8 x 10^13 kg-C/y.

The global CO2 emission rate from fossil fuel burning is comparable to the rate of CO2 emission from global anthropogenic animal breathing. Our fossil fuel burning contributes the same amount to atmospheric CO2 as our breathing and the breathing of our domestic animals.

Furthermore, if we consider that all living things breathe (admittedly some microbes don’t breathe oxygen) and that Earth’s (living) biomass is approximately 10^15 kg-C, then total global breathing may well exceed the CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning by a factor of between ten and one thousand times greater.

I hope that the present comparison to the natural act of breathing will serve to encourage a re-examination of the misguided notion that the trace gas and essential nutrient known as CO2 could be of any danger to humans or to Earth’s ecological systems.

The day CO2 became a pollutant was a sad day for both establishment science and First-World middleclass canned policy consumers.

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Denis G. Rancourt was a tenured and full professor of physics and environmental science researcher at the University of Ottawa in Canada. He practiced several areas of science which were funded by a national agency and ran an internationally recognized laboratory. He published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals. He developed popular activism courses and was an outspoken critic of the university administration and a defender of student and Palestinian rights. He was fired for his dissidence in 2009 by a president who is a staunch supporter of Israeli policy. [See rancourt.academicfreedom.ca]