Rep. Michele Bachmann spent part of Earth Day arguing against a carbon “cap and tax” because carbon dioxide is a “natural byproduct of nature.” It’s “portrayed as harmful, but there isn’t even one study that can be produced that shows that carbon dioxide is a harmful gas… It is a harmless gas… And yet we’re being told that we have to reduce this natural substance and reduce the American standard of  living to create an arbitrary reduction in something that is naturally occurring in the earth.”

Bachmann — who erroneously claimed that C02 makes up three percent of earth’s atmosphere (it comprises 0.04%) — was countered later by Oregon Democrat, Rep. Earl Blumenauer, who accused her of “making things up on the floor of the House“:

My good friend, the gentlelady from Minnesota, doesn’t think there are any problems with the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It’s interesting to listen to her say that something that was naturally occurring simply couldn’t be harmful, ignoring the fact that we have the highest concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for 2/3 of a million years.

The consensus of the scientific community — not people making things up on the floor of the House — is that this has been profoundly influenced by human activity, starting with the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, where we started consuming huge quantities of coal, burning fossil fuels, accelerating that over time. The consensus of the scientific community is that this is in fact a serious problem.