That was painful to watch. First of all they are debating was absolutely terrible. Rather than presenting their own arguments, both sides just tried to corner each other all the way through. This is a problem stemming from the host, who did not have any sort of control over the discussion.
I have to say, though. Some of the wording of the show made it very difficult to believe that they were taking an objective stance. For instance, calling the facts and statistics "scare tactics" immediately makes the audience think the evidence was tampered with to skew the results on the government's favor. Whether that is true or not is irrelevant since no one in the debate even attempted to falsify or justify the aforementioned statement.
The other main issue (which, to me, was the biggest problem) is that god awful poll. 25 million cars are nothing in the US, and certainly nothing in the world. Furthermore, when discussing automobiles, or fossil fuel - dependent transportation, they needed to account for all the trains, boats, and planes that also emit a large number of CO2. This quantity was brushed aside to show that cows produce more CO2 than a fraction of the cars used today. I'm very glad Bill Nye picked up on this but, as expected, the conversation immediately took a different direction once the flaw was shown.
Yeah I'm not happy at all about this debate. It could have, and should have, gone much better than that.
