Greenpeace co-founder and former president of Greenpeace Canada Patrick Moore explained how the burning of fossil fuels saved life on Earth “from an early demise” by returning carbon dioxide to the atmosphere previously trapped in sediments.

In a Wednesday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight, Moore explained to Breitbart News Senior Editors-at-Large Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak Moore how the Earth’s atmosphere had experienced a long-term depletion of carbon dioxide:

Over the millennia, they just ignore deep history, these people, they talk about the last 100 years as if that’s when the world started, but the deep history going back millions of years and even hundreds of millions of years shows us that carbon dioxide has gradually diminished in the atmosphere and in the oceans because it’s been lost to the sediments on land and in the seas. During the last glaciation, which was only 20,000 years ago, CO2 sank to a level which was close to a level of causing death to plants, so low. Inadvertently, by starting to use fossil fuels, we have actually saved life from an early demise, because CO2 is the food for all of life.

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Moore analysed how characterizations of carbon dioxide as a pollutant — including legal designation as such by the Obama administration — is “the biggest abomination that’s been made against science in a long time”:

It’s not pollution. That’s why the finding on CO2 by the EPA under Obama is such an important thing to reverse because when they found that CO2, when they ruled that CO2 was pollution, they made the biggest abomination that’s been made against science in a long time, because CO2 is, in fact, the food for life. It is what life is based on. Life is carbon-based. The carbon in all life came from CO2 in the atmosphere and the oceans. Nowhere else did it come from. That’s a fact. Nobody disputes that, yet they claim that because we’re putting more CO2 into the atmosphere — where it actually came from in the first place — the carbon in fossil fuels was made from life, made from plants and plankton in the land and sea, that carbon in the fossil fuels used to be in the air and in the ocean, and it got sucked up and lost to the sediments and was therefore no longer in the air. We’re just putting it back where it was in the first place, when life flourished during the greenhouse eras that went back for hundreds of millions of years when the Earth was far warmer than it is today.

Moore also noted the distinction between carbon — an element — and carbon dioxide — a gas. He lamented the conflation of the two by misinformed persons.

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