CO₂ Isn’t the Villain, It’s the Unsung Hero of Life on Earth, By James Reed
In a world increasingly governed by environmental dogma and emotion-driven policy, a powerful counterpoint has emerged, rooted not in ideology, but in physics. Two of the world's most credentialed scientists, MIT's Richard Lindzen and Princeton's William Happer, have issued a scathing scientific indictment of the climate change narrative that underpins global Net Zero policies. Their argument is simple but devastating: the demonisation of carbon dioxide is not only scientifically indefensible, but catastrophically destructive to global well-being.
Lindzen and Happer's latest paper, delivered under oath in testimony to the U.S. Congress, makes an explosive claim: CO₂ is not a pollutant. In fact, it is one of the most essential molecules for life on Earth. Plants depend on it. The food chain depends on it. Civilisation, quite literally, flourishes because of it. The researchers argue that increasing CO₂ levels from today's 420 parts per million to something like 840 ppm would vastly increase plant growth, agricultural yields, and resilience to drought. According to their analysis, this could boost global food production by up to 40%, a figure that would drastically reshape our fight against hunger, especially in poorer nations.
Yet instead of recognising CO₂ as a life-sustaining molecule, governments and global institutions have declared it a pollutant, setting in motion trillions of dollars in green regulations, subsidies, and restrictions, all in the name of "saving the planet." But saving it from what, exactly?
The heart of the climate narrative rests on the idea that CO₂ emissions are heating the planet to dangerous levels. Lindzen and Happer challenge this claim on its scientific core. As physicists, they point to the basic laws of radiative transfer, the way greenhouse gases absorb and emit infrared radiation. Their argument is not abstract or novel: it is textbook thermodynamics. The heating effect of CO₂ declines logarithmically. That is, the more CO₂ you add, the less warming it causes. This happens because CO₂ absorbs infrared radiation at specific wavelengths. As CO₂ concentrations increase, the strongest absorption bands become increasingly saturated, most of the radiation at those wavelengths is already being absorbed. Additional CO₂ molecules can only absorb radiation at the weaker edges of these bands, producing diminishing returns. At current levels, the gas is already near saturation. Doubling it might add a trivial fraction of a degree Celsius to global temperatures, hardly the "existential threat" invoked by UN bureaucrats and climate activists.
Moreover, the models that predict catastrophic warming are, in Lindzen and Happer's view, deeply flawed. Climate models are not experiments. They are guesses, complex ones, yes, but guesses nonetheless, built on assumptions about feedbacks and human emissions that are highly uncertain. Worse, those models fail to match real-world data. Lindzen notes that if climate modelings were used in engineering, say, for bridges or jet engines, it would be thrown out as junk science. Instead, it is used to justify an unprecedented reordering of global economies.
The scientists also take aim at the corruption of science itself. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), they argue, is not an impartial scientific body but a politically captured agency. Its reports are vetted by governments, rewritten by bureaucrats, and designed to support pre-determined policy outcomes. This is not science in the tradition of Galileo and Feynman, it is something closer to dogma, cloaked in statistical fog.
Then there is the moral dimension. Net Zero, far from being a benign adjustment to the global energy mix, is, in their view, an unmitigated disaster in the making. Banning fossil fuels means strangling the fertiliser industry (which depends on natural gas), sabotaging cheap electricity in developing nations, and condemning billions to energy poverty. As Happer puts it, the pursuit of Net Zero will not meaningfully change the planet's temperature, but it will absolutely destroy economies and lives.
Perhaps the most damning element of their case is legal. In the United States, the Supreme Court has ruled that regulatory agencies must consider all aspects of a problem and cannot act arbitrarily. Yet, say Lindzen and Happer, climate policy has become untethered from these principles. The EPA and other regulators treat CO₂ as a villain while ignoring its central role in sustaining life. This, they argue, is regulatory malpractice, and a violation of basic scientific and constitutional standards.
What emerges from their analysis is not just a critique of bad science, it is a call to moral and intellectual sanity. We are not facing a climate crisis. We are facing a crisis of reason. The war on CO₂ is not just anti-industrial; it is anti-human. It punishes the poor, sabotages food security, and distorts the scientific process into a theatre of fear. If these two eminent scientists are right, and the evidence is overwhelming that they are, then the entire Net Zero project is the most expensive and destructive mistake of our time.
And the time to course-correct is now.
"Richard Lindzen Professor of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Emeritus Massachusetts Institute of Technology William Happer Professor of Physics, Emeritus, Princeton University PHYSICS DEMONSTRATES THAT INCREASING GREENHOUSE GASES CANNOT CAUSE DANGEROUS WARMING, EXTREME WEATHER OR ANY HARM More Carbon Dioxide Will Create More Food. Driving Greenhouse Gas Emissions to Net Zero and Eliminating Fossil Fuels Will Be Disastrous for People Worldwide. June 7, 2025
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