This is one of the most important posts ever on WUWT, it will be a top “sticky” post for a few days, and new posts will appear below this one during that time.
People send me stuff.
Imagine, shooting 40,000 elephants to prevent the land in Africa from going to desert because scientists thought the land couldn’t sustain them, only to find the effort was for naught and the idea as to why was totally wrong. That alone was a real eye opener.
Every once in awhile, an idea comes along that makes you ask, “gee why hasn’t anybody seen this before?”. This one of those times. This video below is something I almost didn’t watch, because my concerns were triggered by a few key words in the beginning. But, recommended by a Facebook friend, I stuck with it, and I’m glad I did, because I want every one of you, no matter what side of the climate debate you live in, to watch this and experience that light bulb moment as I did. The key here is to understand that desertification is one of the real climate changes we are witnessing as opposed to some the predicted ones we often fight over.
It is one of those seminal moments where I think a bridge has been created in the climate debate, and I hope you’ll seize the moment and embrace it. This video comes with my strongest possible recommendation, because it speaks to a real problem, with real solutions in plain language, while at the same time offering true hope.
This is a TED talk by Dr. Allan Savory in Los Angeles this past week, attended by our friend Dr. Matt Ridley, whose presentation we’ll look at another time. Sometimes, TED talks are little more that pie in the sky; this one is not. And, it not only offers a solution, it shows the solution in action and presents proof that it works. It makes more sense than anything I’ve seen in a long, long, time. Our friend Dr. Roger Pielke Sr., champion of studying land use change as it affects local and regional climate will understand this, so will our cowboy poet Willis Eschenbach, who grew up on a cattle ranch. I daresay some of our staunchest critics will get it too.
To encapsulate the idea presented, I’ll borrow from a widely used TV commercial and say:
Beef, it’s what’s for climate
You can call me crazy for saying that after you watch this presentation. A BIG hattip to Mark Steward Young for bringing this to my attention.
“Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert,” begins Allan Savory in this quietly powerful talk. And terrifyingly, it’s happening to about two-thirds of the world’s grasslands, accelerating climate change and causing traditional grazing societies to descend into social chaos. Savory has devoted his life to stopping it. He now believes — and his work so far shows — that a surprising factor can protect grasslands and even reclaim degraded land that was once desert.
Published on Mar 4, 2013
There’s a longer version with more detail below, about an hour long. Also worth watching if you want to understand the process in more detail:
Feasta Lecture 2009
Extracts available at vimeo.com/8291896
Allan Savory argued that while livestock may be part of the problem, they can also be an important part of the solution. He has demonstrated time and again in Africa, Australia and North and South America that, properly managed, they are essential to land restoration. With the right techniques, plant growth is lusher, the water table is higher, wildlife thrives, soil carbon increases and, surprisingly, perhaps four times as many cattle can be kept.
feasta.org/events/general/2009_lecture.htm
Recorded 7 November 2009, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
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markx
‘I believe it oversimplifies the issue to simply blame “climate change” and I’m not sure we have the data there to ascertain the significance or normality of recent changes, although I’d agree that ‘government reaction to fear of climate change’ has probably played a significant role.’
You quite rightly raise a whole raft of factors affecting farm profitability which would need to be considered in assessing why farmers are walking off their farms. However the factors you raise, assuming for the sake of argument that all the points you make are valid, affect all Australian grain farmers. But not all Australian grain farmers are walking off their farms: only the ones who are being belted by climate change. I notice that writers are using the term ‘drought’ in the context of the public discussion around the phenomenum. This does not make sense. In the south-west the old definitions of ‘drought’ no longer apply. Welcome to the new normal.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/farm-exodus-as-drought-sows-seeds-of-despair/story-e6frg8zx-1226590322090
dmh
‘Climate Ace;
OTOH, if you are concerned that around 1 billion people a year go to bed hungry each night, one strategic solution would be to move human consumption of nutrients and energy as far down the trophic chain as you can get
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Since the problem is entirely one of corrupt and ineffective governance rather than a shortage of food, this would solve precisely nothing.’
Entirely? No price signal affected by supply and demand considerations? No hunger affected by price signals? None at all?
When he says burning 1ha releases what 6000 cars release… he means what cars release during the time it takes to burn, not during entire car life.
At least that’s how I understand it.
Provoter, March 11 at 10:37
Bravo! With no intention of getting your goat: admiration for your crafty genuflection to site policy. You do good preaching to the choir.
@ur momisugly Climate Ace:
“But, but, but… great big furry striped cane toads in the Kimberleys? Now, where did that go wrong the last time?”
Um, yes.. we haven’t had a lot of luck with introduced amphibians have we, though the top predator is now manning our borders, armed with a beer and a cricket bat.
But those big furry beasts breed at a much slower rate, and are a lot bigger and easier to spot. There would be no problem controlling them. As John Tillman noted later, large predators have never been any match for us: the Ancient Britons got rid of most of them where I come from, then the Romans finished them off; the villagers around the small gold mine that I worked on in West Java used to warn me: “Don’t go down into the jungle after dark: the Meong will get you!”, but the poor old meong had actually been wiped out by their grandparents, at about the same time as the ‘Tasmanian tiger’ in fact, and its few remaining cousins that I worked amongst in Central Sumatra were up against it from illegal logging, road and dam projects, pineapple plantations and the bounty that a villager could get for its claws as Chinese medicine and and private parts as an invirilating restaurant delicacy.
Besides which, as a bush geologist, it is just an incredibly rare and special experience to be picking your way home along a jungle track at nightfall, in primal fear of whatever beast left raking claw marks seven feet up the tree that you just passed, with the acrid stench of a very large tomcat. It beats even being the lone early morning swimmer off some WA beach who has just seen a huge grey shape glide underneath him and is praying that it was a sea lion. You suddenly know exactly what you are. A meal armed with a small stick. Everybody should know that.
@ur momisuglyJohn Tillman:
“Larry, as you probably know, Australia used to have major reptile & marsupial predators, such as a giant, Komodo dragon-like goanna & this guy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsupial_lion ”
Yes, there were many large predators here once, and a lot of large herbivores, upon which they obviously preyed. I am never quite sure how instrumental we were in their demise though. Most of the Pleistocene megafauna seem to have gone extinct worldwide over the same period of time, although smaller predators like the thylacine appear to have hung on in WA and along the Nullabor until a couple of thousand years ago, and lasted even longer in the higher rainfall areas of Tasmania until European farmers finally hunted them out in the 1930s..
It is tempting to correlate the demise of all these species (wooly mammoths, sabre-toothed wombats, etc.) with the rise of human beings, but I am not sure that we were entirely to blame. There were large, quite rapid oscillations in climate and sea level during this period, accompanying the recent ice ages and interglacials, so it may be that accompanying rapid changes in rainfall and vegetation patterns extinguished the larger, less adaptable herbivores, along with most of the predators that hunted them, leaving only the most adaptable or best-suited species to survive, amongst them those wily, omniverous and infinitely adaptible scavengers: ourselves.
It could be that, both here and in the northern hemisphere, only the very most adaptable species made it through this epoch of climatic disturbance, and we just happened to be one of them.
Re: Australian megafauna extinctions.
Science can’t be sure when numbers of humans first arrived in Australia, but the currently accepted best date correlates strongly with likeliest period for extinction of the giant wombat, etc.
Of course correlation doesn’t clinch causation, but the case for human contribution, arguably critical, is strong. Humans may not have hunted the big animals to extinction, but in combination with other factors, including their own dogs, associated rats & habitat alterations, our species probably made the difference, as I wrote, directly or indirectly.
http://www.uow.edu.au/content/groups/public/@web/@sci/@eesc/documents/doc/uow014698.pdf
Abstract:
All Australian land mammals, reptiles, and birds weighing more than 100
kilograms, and six of the seven genera with a body mass of 45 to 100 kilograms,
perished in the late Quaternary. The timing and causes of these extinctions
remain uncertain. We report burial ages for megafauna from 28 sites and infer
extinction across the continent around 46,400 years ago (95% confidence
interval, 51,200 to 39,800 years ago). Our results rule out extreme aridity at
the Last Glacial Maximum as the cause of extinction, but not other climatic
impacts; a “blitzkrieg” model of human-induced extinction; or an extended
period of anthropogenic ecosystem disruption.
Ever since Paul Martin proposed his controversial “Late Pleistocene Overkill Hypothesis” in the 1960s, critics have attempted to falsify human causation for the apparently abrupt Quaternary Extinction Event in North America. It’s hard to do, since most of the big animals which disappeared from ~14,000 years ago had survived climate fluctuations at least as severe as those of the last deglaciation. For example, wooly mammoths had been through two glacial/interglacial transitions & varieties of the Columbian mammoth even more.
Forest-dwelling mastodons survived into the Holocene. Latter surviving species of bison were seemingly wiped out by American Indians of the Archaic Period driving them over cliffs, as the Solutreans in France did horses (which of course survived in Eurasia).
Unlike consensus climate “scientists”, Martin (recently deceased) welcomed criticism of his hypothesis & organized conferences on it with invited opponents. Not just climate but disease (in some cases associated with human arrival) & bolide impacts have been suggested as contributory factors, among others. The latest challenge comes from pushing back the date of first human arrival a few to several thousand years earlier than he assumed originally.
The idea is that megafauna like elephants & rhinos survived in Africa because they were used to human predation, not naive like American mammoths, antique bison species, camel, horses & ground sloths, etc, & the carnivores which relied upon them. There is physical evidence of mammoth hunting, which some have interpreted as scavenging.
Eurasia is an intermediate case, since megafaunal extinction there took place over a longer period (perhaps beginning with the wooly rhino), but is also associated with the arrival of anatomically modern humans & their development of advanced hunting techniques, combined with the pressure of changing climate & perhaps associated habitat zonal compression. Since it appears dwarf woolies survived on human-free Wrangel Island until 4000 years ago, they weren’t hunted to extinction. Aurochs eventually were, but only a few centuries ago (also hurt by forest clearance), & the European bison (wisent) just barely scraped by. Ibex (wild goats) remain in pretty good shape in their mountain fastnesses. The list of extinct (both locally & globally) big game & their predators is however long.
Islands & island-like environments on larger land masses offer the clearest examples of human-caused or -abetted extinctions, with New Zealand an important case in point. Frequently both hunting & habitat loss contribute, along with human-associated rats & domestic animals. Australia in this sense is an island writ large, a very big yet still unusual & isolated ecosystem, suddenly disrupted.
Humans don’t IMO have it in our power significantly to alter global climate (although obviously we create UHIs), but we are capable of wiping out species large & small in certain environments, & have apparently done so.
Very odd that 40 years ago an Indian came up with a very similar result from a completely different method.
See this post at Chefio’s forum.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2013/03/12/leucaena-leucocephala-collection-of-links/
Further to the exaggerations of Alan Savory: in his TED talk at 19:35 he states “we are already doing so on about 15 Mha on 5 continents”. That’s a sizeable area. And who are “we” and what are we doing?
I can not find any reference to the 15 Mha elsewhere. But according to his own information ( http://www.savoryinstitute.com/research-and-case-studies/ ) the socalled research and case study projects only covers approx 0.15 Mha on 3 continents (Zimbabwe, mid-western USA and eastern AUS). Where is the rest 14.85 Mha ? Did I miss something, or is Alan Savory exaggerating achievements by a factor 100 ? (OK, I know such numbers are difficult but one could expect that at least the order of size would be reliable).
What a lot of nonsense about greening the worlds deserts. To begin with Desertification is NOT a fancy word for land that is turning to desert (as Alan Savory wrongly states in the beginning of the talk; NOT inserted by me). Desertification is a term coined for land degradation in dry land areas due to anthropogenic and CLIMATE factors and has nothing to do with deserts. And as I have mentioned earlier, the so-called desertification in the west-african Sahel area has later been found to be caused mainly by decadal climate fluctuations. The vegetation has now largely recovered because the rainfall has returned to more “normal” levels.The earlier belief of an anthropogenic caused desertification is a longlived myth.
Pls do not misread me here. Land degradation is a very important issue, but while Alan Savory is advocating a holistic management approach focusing on livestock only, such approaches (and much more holistic for that matter, not only focusing on livestock) have for decades been applied in large-scale agriculture and natural resources management initiatives across the globe, trying to address the true complexity of balancing social, economic and environmental objectives, e.g. Sustainable Livelihood Approach, Community Forestry, Participatory and Integrated Watershed Development, Sustainable Land Management etc. Improved management of livestock is ofcourse a component here, and fine with me. But don’t let the tail wag the dog.
And Anthony – yes, you were (momentarily) crazy when you posted this as a very important post. Better luck next time – and thanks for your efforts.
best wishes … jens
davidmhoffer says:
March 11, 2013 at 6:55 pm
I’m betting they found something (ash maybe?) that barely occurs at all in gasoline and there’s 6,000 times as much…but still meaningless….in grass.
I think you will win the bet, because when I first read his statement I immediately thought of smog which is very current here in Athens Greece. We got a lot about the submicron sized particles in smog, and smoke from fireplaces in the living rooms, being deadly for people.
Due to the floundering economy they raised the tax on heating oil to such heights that people in towns ( including Athens) started using fireplaces which were just decorative in all the new apartments and as a result, when there is no wind the cities are covered in smog.
I’m a little confused about why people seem to be hailing this man. He makes some ludicrous statements early in the videos – why would we think that any of his later statements are sensible?
He states Climate Change has already wiped out 20 civilisations. Pardon?
He states that London was only viable because it was supported by Australia, the United States etc. Well, they’ve been independent for a while but last time I visited it, London was still there.
If his views are this wrong on things we do know about, how reliable are his views on things we don;t know about?
We have to be very cautious not to view something as true just because it sounds plausible. I worked in (organic) farming for a couple of years. I found the farming community littered with both vast and excellent practical experience, and completely detached nuttiness, often combined in the same, charismatic person.
You can find similar charismatic guys talking about homeopathy with the same eloquence. But there is no scientific substance to it, Nevertheless, people love homeopathy (even though it is not even plausible, not even that).
Whether to use rotational grazing or not, and, if yes, to what intensity was a continuous topic of discussion. In many climates you can do both, but humid conditions favor permanent grazing somewhat, at least in moderate climates. Often the way you graze just alters the species composition, so you just create a different ecosystem on your paddock which is nor better or worse than the alternative.
So unless Savory can really prove that he found Columbus’ egg, I stay skeptical.
The greater problem here, is that humans have demolished or greatly diminished entire species of natural herd grazers, such as buffalo, deer, giraffes, and elephants. Through habitat destruction, hunting, poaching, and culling, humans have created the problem! The solution would be to stop threatening these species and help their numbers increase by providing them safe habitat and enforcing strict no-kill rules.
Allan talks about his concern for the millions of humans who are suffering and dying. What about the 10 billion livestock animals that are brutally slaughtered each year in America alone?! Does their suffering mean nothing? His view is a very human-centric one and does not take into consideration the delicate balance of all living beings.
@John Tillman, 8.01am re: Australian Megafauna Extnctions
Thanks John, a very informative and interesting paper.
I wasn’t being facetious by the way; I really have no clear idea whether or not we were the major factor in the world-wide extinction of so many of the Pleistocene megafauna. It would be terrible to think that we were such a force for species destruction, even that long ago, but certainly we were the first species to go around spearing and butchering anything that we could eat or that threatened our existence, and that might well have made a difference.
I feel that what I should really do now to make up my mind’ is to research all the latestof the rapidly expanding knowledge of prehistoric human populations and migrations and then compare this to the most recent findings on megafaunal extinctions around the world, to see how well they actually do correlate. But it being 12.45am here in Western Australia and having to get to work in six hours time I should probably delay that project to another time!
With regards,
LK
Larry, I hope that when & if you do find time to study the Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions, you might also be able to write up your conclusions. Anthony or his highly-skilled professional moderators in the pay of Big Oil would I assume find the subject a topic worthy of this blog, as relevant to life, science, nature & climate, etc.
My opinion is that humans definitely hunted many bird species to extinction over the past several years, aided by habitat destruction & the depredations of our rats & dogs, especially on islands, like the moa & dodo, but also even widely distributed, vastly numerous North American species like the passenger pigeon, which suffered from hunting at the same time as its Eastern hardwood forest habitat was being cut down for wood & burnt to grow corn. So why wouldn’t people have done the same 10,000 years ago (except maybe for the size & danger of big game vs. small game)?
New technology as well as invading new territory can also put pressure on big game populations. The Great Plains bison herds were doomed by firearms, whether wielded by market hunters backed by a government intent on rapidly depriving Indians of their livelihoods (not to mention the desires of settlers & railroads), or, after the introduction of repeating arms, more slowly by the Plains peoples themselves, who like the whites also preferred to shoot cows. (Muzzle-loaders were too hard to reload on horseback, so the adoption of firearms instead of arrows & lances for hunting was delayed.)
Even 500 years after the demise of (nine?) moa species, Maori oral history preserved the memory of giant birds easy to catch, which the first settlers gladly slaughtered for want of other large animals until their pig population grew.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/287/5461/2250
Stephanie K says:
March 12, 2013 at 9:49 am
The greater problem here, is that humans have demolished or greatly diminished entire species of natural herd grazers, such as buffalo, deer, giraffes, and elephants. Through habitat destruction, hunting, poaching, and culling, humans have created the problem! The solution would be to stop threatening these species and help their numbers increase by providing them safe habitat and enforcing strict no-kill rules.
I disagree on the solution because together with the herd grazers humans eliminated predators, wolves tigers lions in the same habitats ,and threatening others still surviving, like bears. Predators were natures cullers . Deer will eat up a whole forest if not culled as there are no wolves to check their numbers. Man has also to replace the function of predators. In this proposal, if it is viable, the herds will be moved and culled by humans, mimicking predators.
Does anyone know what happened to the ivory from the 40,000 elephants?
That above post is why domesticated animals and high yield crops are so important to human life and so beneficial to the environment. Countries who use the agricultural advancements first developed by Norman Borlaug have become not only self-sufficient, but net exporters of grain. And the forests and local wildlife are incidentally preserved as well because there is enough to eat and to make a profit.
One of the indicators of a blessed and prosperous people/country are “wide pastures” and cultivated land. It requires peaceful conditions and a general safety from maurauders, theives, predators, environmentalists who are trying to get rid of the domesticated cow through methane legislation based on shoddy science, and from the activities of well-funded NGOs.Cattle belongs with people and people belong with cattle. It has been so for ages: Mithra, the arch angel of friendship, loyalty, and agreements made between people, is also the angel of “wide pastures.”
Re: Willis Eschenbach March 11, 2013 at 5:26 pm
—
Hi Willis, that graph is not going to provide answers your question about size and significance. I posted the link just for folks to see easily that agricultural burning is indeed taking place a lot in Africa – enough, at least for me, to justify a deeper look, but it’s not going to provide that just by itself. I’m trying to find more info about the size of these fires, but right now I’m quite busy with other matters (moving next weekend). If someone knows some dataset potentially shedding light to this, it would be nice to post it in here. There seems to be some burned area info in http://modis-fire.umd.edu/Burned_Area_Products.html but I don’t have time to look into it further right now.
I have to say that I’m kind of frustrated about the scarcity of citations and references in Savory’s presentations, even more so because they often are related to his chosen marketing sidelines like “carbon” and “climate change”; a strategy that may very well backfire big time, if vagueness and unfounded assertions undermine his “main” message – which I find pretty solid and very important.
One constructive way to address these issues could be to invite Allan Savory to answer a set of preselected questions in a WUWT article, many such questions have already been asked in this thread, this would also give him an opportunity to further elaborate his main points, and to provide citations and references.
Climate Ace;
Entirely? No price signal affected by supply and demand considerations? No hunger affected by price signals? None at all?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You proposed decreasing livestock and increasing food crops to grow enough food to feed a billion people who are starving. I pointed out that there is already enough food, so growing still more won’t solve the problem. So you whine about price fluctuations. There will always be price fluctuation in individual commodities, that doesn’t mean there isn’t enough food to go around nor does it mean that smoothing them out will do diddly squat for the people who are starving since they are already starving at both the top and the bottom of the price fluctuation. You’re not interested in what the problem actually is though, so you just try and change the subject instead.
BTW, your proposal to convert land from livestock feed to food production is a really good way to increase substantially the number of people starving in the world. The land used primarily for livestock feed is in general marginal for food crops. By converting it from something the land from something it is good at (livestock feed) to something it is not good at (food crops) you would be reducing the amount of food in the world. Do you think that will decrease starvation or increase it?
And if you are wringing your hands about the starving people’s of the world, where is your voice on the matter of raising food and turning it into gasoline and burning it? If you are truly concerned about the world’s starving masses, I suggest you start there and fix a real problem that contributes to world hunger instead of pontificating on subjects you clearly know nothing about and proposing solutions that would make the problem worse due to your ignorance.
There seem to be quite a few people posting negative comments. Putting aside the criticisms about how scientific his methods are can any of these detractors point me to an example where somebody has used Allan Savory’s farming techniques and failed?
I have no doubt that there are many places currently considered unproductive near desert that would be helped by correct land management and find Savory’s presentation exciting. However, there are plenty of places around the world that exceedingly low levels of rain fall. (There are many such areas out here in California.) My reservation about Savory’s presentation is that there seems little detail in the way of minimum rainfall and water resources necessary for implementation. Death Valley isn’t going to be forested by managed herds of cows. I’m not negative on Savory at all, but I would like to see more studies validating his techniques and explaining the limits of the practice.
davidmhoffer says:
March 12, 2013 at 12:11 pm
“BTW, your proposal to convert land from livestock feed to food production is a really good way to increase substantially the number of people starving in the world. The land used primarily for livestock feed is in general marginal for food crops.”
Spot on. And these “marginal lands” require some large grazer to maintain the balance between grasses, forbs etc. And the efficiency of crop land is far outpacing population growth- or at least it was until we started turning food into fuel.
“an example where somebody has used Allan Savory’s farming techniques and failed?”
Surely the employment of rotational grazing does not guarantee sustainability. It depends what else you do.
It might be premature to say this, but the dairy industry in Godzone, which really is the ultimate development of Voisin, is showing a few cracks. Pastures are lasting 3-4 years , and the replacement is no better; nitrogen inputs and NO3 losses to groundwater are both increasing; soil degradation from high-density stocking at critical periods (late winter) is causing both nitrate leaching and carbon losses; not to mention less drought resilience, and impaired structure leading to compacted soils etc. etc. I don’t need to go on because I guess you have witnessed this yourself.
Definitely , they are going backwards in terms of sustainability, but failing? Just a few .
Besides it’s going to rain next week.
When something sounds too good to be true it usually is just that. Allan Savory is a charismatic speaker and he promise no less than to save the planet and at almost no cost. He has been giving this message for two decades now, and equipped with this before and after photos, his message seems almost irresistible.
The problem is that he so far has failed to find any scientific support for his theories.
However, that does not mean that there may be something true in his message after all, but he is clearly overselling it.
I thought that ammonia from cow’s (as a byproduct) was a big factor in global warming?
It’s not ammonia but the gas methane passed by flatulent cattle that so concerns Warmunistas. The effect of bovine methane on climate is even less significant than man-made carbon dioxide.
Both greenhouse gases as CAGW threats are bovine excrement.
Kay Wilson says:
March 12, 2013 at 4:36 pm
I thought that ammonia from cow’s (as a byproduct) was a big factor in global warming?
FB says: perhaps you are confusing NH4+ (ammonium) with nitrous oxide (N2O).
Relax. James Hansen says nothing to worry about.
Or perhaps you are confusing NH4+ with CH4(methane).
Relax. James Hansen says not worth worrying about; besides, it has a short life in the atmosphere and rapidly breaks down.
But which global warming did you mean? The gradual warming since the Little Ice Age?
Don’t worry; it’s all good.
Perhaps the cyclical warming between 1975-2000? Relax. It happens and in the other half of the cycle there is cooling.
Look at the link below ; it explains the cyclical warming/cooling overlying a gradual warming for the last 150 years.
Relax; it is all under control (just not human control).
http://joannenova.com.au/2013/03/has-the-world-started-cooling-hints-from-4-of-5-global-temperature-sets-say-it-might-have/#more-27430
Whoops! The subconscious slip. Don’t laugh when composing. That should be nitrogen dioxide NO2 ; not nitrous oxide (N2O)- laughing gas.
Willis Eschenbach says:
March 11, 2013 at 9:49 am
If he really said that he’s clueless. 6,000 cars run for how long? One year? Ten years?
In addition, my numbers say no. Assuming 2,000 kg of net primary production per hectare per year for grassland, and a car going 20,000 miles and getting 20 miles per gallon, that works out to about 2,300 kg of fuel burned by the car.
Nope. Seems that the EPA kool-aide has been drunk concerning CO2 being a dangerous pollutant. Quote: “more damaging pollutants that 6000 cars”
Those would be particulates, aerosols and VOC.