Carbon dioxide isn't pollution, NewAtlas

Report says plug-in hybrids are almost as polluting as gas-powered cars

The article highlights a report from the European Federation for Transport and Environment (T&E) which purports to show that plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) pollute almost as much as internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles.

I submitted this comment:

A review of basic chemistry: carbon dioxide is not pollution. It's an essential trace gas, without which there would be no life on earth. No carbon dioxide, no plants. No plants, no animals. Hybrid engine cars emit a lot less actual pollution—carbon monoxide, ozone, sulfur dioxide, etc.—than internal combustion engine cars because they produce propulsion more efficiently. But leftists fudge the numbers to suit their agenda.

Guess which comment didn't get shown?

Leftists don't like it when you don't stick with their narrative and their contrived definitions. Carbon dioxide makes up 0.04% of Earth's atmosphere and is critical to all plant life. Calling carbon dioxide "pollution" is perverse, yet here we are. Leftists pervert words and meanings to promote their fantasies.

The Leftist Lexicon highlights some words leftists have usurped to mean something entirely different.

I chose the image above from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which coincidentally, isn't actually a bulletin published by nuclear physicists. It's a leftist political organization masquerading as a scientific publication. They purposely edit (distort) the image to make it look like coal power plants are emitting a thick pall of dark smoke. Here's another, published by the AP, in an article about West Virginia challenging the EPA's unconstitutional Good Neighbor Plan that requires states to reduce ozone that crosses state lines, which the Supreme Court has stayed pending court decisions. Once again, they distort the image to look like dark clouds of smoke polluting the air.

Here's what the smokestack emissions of a modern U.S. coal plant actually looks like.

Those thick clouds are white clouds of water vapor, not dark clouds of smoke like in Victorian England. U.S. coal power plants have expensive scrubbers that extract most of the pollution from the emissions. Modern technology has done a remarkable job of reducing air pollution.

But that wasn't good enough for leftists. They've decided that the harmless, beneficial carbon dioxide released from burning fossil fuels is a pollutant, contrary to science.

Leftist Lexicon - Big Lies and Doublespeak

The Big Lie

Adolf Hitler coined the term "big lie" (große Lüge) in Mein Kampf to explain how people could be convinced to believe a gross distortion or colossal lie because they wouldn't believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously." He claimed that Jews implemented the Big Lie to blame Germany's loss in World War I on German general and nationalist politician Erich Ludendorff who himself blamed Jews and others for a conspiracy that resulted in Germany's defeat and ignoble standing in Europe after World War I. The irony is that Hitler and Ludendorff were promoting big lies about Jews; lies that led to the extermination of 6 million of them by Hitler.

The notion that repeating a lie often enough will transform it in the public's mind into a truth has been attributed to Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, and other notorious tyrants, but the idea was probably around centuries before them. It appears in the 1869 novel The Crown of Life in a form that may be the basis for the current expression of it.

If a lie is only printed often enough, it becomes a quasi-truth, and if such a truth is repeated often enough, it becomes an article of belief, a dogma, and men will die for it.

Doublespeak – Doublethink and Newspeak 

In his dystopian novel, 1984, George Orwell invented the term "doublethink" to describe indoctrination by the totalitarian government to compel people to accept conflicting beliefs as truth, usually contradicting their own memory or sense of reality. He also invented "Newspeak," a fictional language invented by the government to limit critical thinking. Doublespeak, which doesn't appear in Orwell's book, is a modern contraction of those two terms. The doublespeak names for government offices were contradictions of their mission. The Ministry of Love interrogated, tortured, and brainwashed enemies of the government. The Ministry of Peace waged war. The Ministry of Truth distorted history, destroyed historical records that conflicted with their agenda, and generated lies and propaganda to promote their dogma.

Leftist Lexicon of Doublespeak

In a spectacular modern example of Doublespeak—almost as if they were the totalitarian government in 1984—leftists have perverted language to mean things disconnected from their original meaning. Some of the terms are a big lie, like "climate change" (see below), which have been so widely and uncritically adopted that they have become a perverse form of received wisdom, even though they are gross exaggerations that are demonstrably false.

Here's a partial lexicon of leftist terms that mean something completely different to them than the original meaning the rest of us understand:

racist noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

fascist noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

misogynist noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

bigot noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

homophobe noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

Islamophobe noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

xenophobe noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

Nazi noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

Hitler noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

democracy noun: any system designed to let leftists rule, often referred to as "our democracy" (which some of us write as Our Democracy™), means government by leftists. When Republicans win elections, it's fascism (see above) and a threat to Our Democracy™

climate change noun: catastrophic, imminent, human-caused global warming and imaginary disasters from increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is now 0.04%, up from 0.03% a couple centuries ago, formerly called global warming

climate denier noun: a pejorative term meant to demean people and conflate them with Holocaust deniers, it means someone winning an argument with a leftist about so-called climate change

A couple more just for fun:

literally adverb: figuratively

ironically adverb: coincidentally

See Steven Hayward's Lexicon of Current Political Terminology for more.