The Captain Planet Years: Did Captain Planet Reduce CO2 output?

"EARTH!"
"FIRE!"
"WIND!"
"WATER!"
"HEART!"
"Go Planet!"
...
We're the Planeteers
You can be one too
'Cause saving our planet is the thing to do!
Looting and polluting is not the way
Hear what Captain Planet has to say!

"The Power is Yours!”…

And apparently the power was ours. Between the years that Captain Planet was on the air (1990-1996), CO2 level growth was at a lower annual rate than both before and after the show was originally broadcast. A cause for correlative coincidence celebration!

If you were born somewhere in the eighties, chances are that you are familiar with this environmentally active cartoon which originally aired on TBS. If, for some reason, you aren’t well acquainted with Captain Planet, it essentially was the Voltron of environmental do-gooders. If the Voltron reference is dated, well…here


A colleague and I were discussing the important factors leading to memory and the distractions associated with earworms. Ear worms are those annoying songs that get stuck in your head, for whatever reason, and wreak havoc on your productivity. All this talk was thanks to my colleague, who will now be referred to as Craig, and his most recent copy of Discover Magazine.

For some reason, the captain planet song came into Craig’s head, and we playfully discussed the roles of each Planeteer, and how unfortunate it was that one of them had the power of Heart, as it had nothing to do with the other “elements” of the Earth. We sat nostalgic for a bit, and then I had an idea. I, jokingly, made the quick assumption that CO2 levels were probably lower during the run of Captain Planet. Our First step was to find out how long Captain Planet ran: 6 years. Check. Then it was off to find the CO2 levels for the Captain Planet years, as well as years prior and after . We consulted a website put out by NOAA, which had data on the annual mean growth rate of CO2 for the past 28 years. In our preliminary data collection, we found some interesting results:

--The average global growth rate of CO2 between the years of 1980 and 2008 was 1.65ppm.

--The average growth rate during the Captain Planet years,1990-1996, 1.23ppm. Boom, we had a beginning point and a reason to keep collecting data:

--During our analysis, we found that before Captain Planet was on the air, between the years of 1980 and 1990, there was a mean increase in CO2 levels of about 1.56 ppm. And the most startling evidence to support the Captain Planet hypothesis are the data that show up after Captain Planet was taken off the air: an increase to 1.97ppm CO2 per year on average in the world.

An interesting fact to note, during the lowest year of CO2 growth rate, 1992, an environmentally friendly animated film came to the masses: Ferngully. I’m just saying, can the power of a children’s animated film have a positive effect on the release of greenhouse gasses? I am just speculating, of course, as with the Captain Planet years.

More work needs to be done to find out just how close the correlation is to causation. How many households viewed Captain Planet during its run, how many countries the show was aired in, what themes were explored in the show?

-Anthony


If you have any comments or leads as to how we can make this study as accurate as possible, please feel free to let me know.