Competitive Enterprise Institute Launches "CO2 is Life" Advertising Campaign

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) launched a national television advertising campaign on May 18, 2006, featuring two 60-second spots promoting carbon dioxide as beneficial and dismissing climate change concerns. The ads aired in 14 U.S. cities from May 18-28, 2006, strategically timed to counter Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” The campaign’s tagline—“They call it pollution. We call it life”—represented one of the most brazen examples of fossil fuel industry-funded climate disinformation reaching mass audiences.

False Scientific Claims and Misrepresentation

One advertisement focused on CO2, claiming “it’s essential to life. We breathe it out. Plants breathe it in” before concluding with “They call it pollution. We call it life.” A second ad claimed the world’s glaciers were “growing, not melting… getting thicker, not thinner.” The glacier ad misrepresented research by Curt Davis, director of the Center for Geospatial Intelligence at the University of Missouri, whose work CEI cited. Davis publicly stated that CEI was “misrepresenting his previous research to inflate their claims.” The editor of Science magazine condemned CEI for misrepresenting “the conclusions of the two cited Science papers… by selective referencing.”

ExxonMobil Funding and Corporate Coordination

The ad campaign was funded through CEI’s network of fossil fuel industry donors, including significant support from ExxonMobil, which had given CEI hundreds of thousands of dollars in preceding years. CEI’s climate director Myron Ebell—who would later lead Trump’s EPA transition team—coordinated the campaign to create the false impression that scientific debate existed about basic climate science. The ads represented a sophisticated propaganda technique: using elementary-school-level facts (plants need CO2) to obscure complex scientific realities about atmospheric carbon concentrations and climate destabilization.

Strategic Timing Against Climate Action

The campaign launched as international momentum for climate action was building post-Kyoto Protocol, and as “An Inconvenient Truth” was raising public awareness. By framing carbon emissions as “life” rather than pollution, CEI sought to make climate regulation seem absurd—as if environmentalists wanted to regulate “life itself.” This rhetorical strategy proved effective in right-wing media ecosystems, with the ads widely shared and the “CO2 is life” framing adopted by climate denial advocates for years afterward.

Significance

CEI’s 2006 ad campaign represents a milestone in corporate-funded disinformation reaching mass media audiences. Unlike think tank reports aimed at policymakers, these television spots targeted general public understanding of climate science using emotional appeals and misrepresented research. The campaign demonstrated how fossil fuel industry money could purchase not just policy influence but direct manipulation of public consciousness about existential environmental threats. The ads’ effectiveness in obscuring scientific consensus about climate change contributed to years of delayed climate action. Myron Ebell’s later role leading Trump’s EPA transition—resulting in Scott Pruitt’s appointment and systematic dismantling of environmental protections—revealed the long-term consequences of allowing fossil fuel propagandists to shape environmental policy discourse.