The speech delivered on Monday, April 10 at the Colegio San Agustín, in Salamanca, by Juan García-Gallardo, vice president of the Junta de Castilla y León and leader of Vox in this community, has provoked numerous comments and criticism. One of the many controversial sections is the one that refers to CO₂ (carbon dioxide).
García-Gallardo himself has included his speech in a note on his Twitter account. Textually, the leader of Vox does not make any statement and limits himself to inviting young people to be respectful of older people but without ceasing to be critical and skeptical, in the sense of asking questions and questioning some of the commonly accepted beliefs , a proposal that -taken literally- seems logical and beneficial for both young people and adults. In fact, the initial sentence of his post on his Twitter does not seem in line with the ideology of a far-right party: "Pursue the truth. Be free."
García-Gallardo refers specifically to this gas with these words: "Some of the things that at my age, in my time, we do not ask ourselves is whether the Second Republic in Spain was a fully democratic regime or not. We do not ask ourselves, and it's a very fashionable topic right now, whether or not CO₂ is a polluting gas, these [questions] come to mind as an example".
Viewers and readers can take this sentence (and the rest of the speech) literally or interpret possible second intentions, that is, putting the words spoken by García-Gallardo on Monday in the context of previous statements and in the line that Vox is marking for months in relation to climate change.
One possible interpretation is that, on this occasion, the controversial vice-president of the Junta de Castilla y León has used a twisted version of what is generally called the inductive question, which in this case would be a question that is posed in a more or less subtle way. inducing a specific response. A tendentious question, with ulterior motives. It should be understood that when referring to carbon dioxide, García-Gallardo is not proposing that young people ask if it is technically a polluting gas [something that can be easily found out by consulting an IPCC report or Wikipedia], but that he is inducing young people to deny the existence of climate change, one of the causes of which is the emission -due to human activities- and concentration in the atmosphere of large amounts of CO₂.
Indeed, from a technical point of view, CO₂ is not a polluting gas in the atmosphere. Yes, they are "pollutants", for example, molecules or compounds such as nitrogen oxides, carbon dioxide or sulfur dioxide.
But, it seems evident that García-Gallardo's approach has the objective of sowing doubt and providing arguments to the sectors that are generally called climate change deniers.
It goes without saying that García-Gallardo's reference to democracy in the times of the Second Republic is another inductive question, which in this case could want to justify the 1936 coup d'état, the subsequent war and the long dictatorship of General Franco.
