I Don't Think He's Running For President, But He Might Be Running For Arch-Druid

Move over EnviroTruth, ExxonMobil's got a new blatant anti-environmental campaign.  (Thanks, Dmitri)

"CO2: they call it pollution; we call it life," says a pair of ads by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (recipient of over $400,000 worth of funding from ExxonMobil in 2002).  They're being put out in 14 major US cities in order to counter the launch of the new Al Gore environmental film An Inconvenient Truth.

You can watch both of them at the CEI's website (and note that both of them contain at least one brief glimpse of what I believe to be an oil refinery in their montages).  I especially recommend the first one — the announcer's enunciation is just off-putting.  Close your eyes and listen, and try not to imagine the commercial playing continuously on a giant screen, in a grimy, rainy, dystopian, Blade Runner-esque city.  Of course, the fact that this is the fourth straight day that it's been raining here probably doesn't help.

You can find the quote in the title over at the Reuters article on the ads.

Edit: RealClimate weighs in on the claims in the second ad.