Pollution

Issue Brief

“It isn’t pollution that’s harming the environment. It’s the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.”

Dan Quayle, former U.S. Vice President

Regular readers will have seen our post debunking misinformation spread by an organization calling itself KICLEI (Kicking International Council Out of Local Environmental Initiatives). One of the claims KICLEI, along with many other climate denialists, makes is that carbon dioxide (CO₂) is not a pollutant.

On its face, this seems like an absurd claim to make – as the primary driver of climate destabilization, CO₂ is a major threat to the stability of human civilization. But, as with many absurdities, there is a grain of truth to the claim, though it’s pushed to such an extreme – the grain of sand is inferred to the whole beach – that it does, indeed, become absurd.

So, how can something be both a pollutant and, also, not a pollutant? CO₂, it so happens, is a great place to start in understanding this paradoxical situation.

The Claim

In her communications to municipal councils, Maggie Hope Braun, founder and main actor of KICLEI, makes the following claim:

“CO₂ is not a pollutant—it is essential for plant life and constitutes just 0.04% of the atmosphere, with human activity contributing only 4% of that total. Canada is responsible for only 1.6% of human-generated CO₂ emissions, meaning our national footprint is negligible in the global context.”

A pollutant is defined as any substance or energy introduced to an environment that, in excessive quantities or in specific conditions, disrupts ecological balance, damages natural systems, or poses risks to human health, flora, or fauna.

There are very few substances that are inherently pollutants, in other words. Even most synthetic materials ultimately over time break back down into natural components.

Some, like microplastics, exotic forever chemicals like Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) and Chlorofluorocarbons (CFC), as well as radioactive isotopes released by nuclear weapons testing, do break down over time, but over such an extended period of time that they, essentially, are introduced into our environment as new substances that remain forever, irrevocably altering ‘nature’. The build-up of the concentrations of these substances occurs at a rate that cannot be easily counterbalanced through their degradation, such that there is no effective natural flow to their presence in the environment.

CO₂, however, is not in this category of substances, so cannot be considered a pollutant in and of itself. In that very narrow understanding, CO₂ is not a pollutant. (But neither are mercury, cadmium, or lead.)

What we must consider, then, is whether CO₂ occurs in a quantity that is excessive, or that disrupts ecological balance, damages natural systems, or poses risks to human health, flora, or fauna.

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The Facts About CO₂

Just about everyone is familiar with the famous hockey stick graph, which illustrates the sharp increase in global temperature over the past 150-ish years.

To illustrate the increase, the graph starts in the year 1000, showing temperatures remaining roughly steady through to the mid-1800s, at which point they start a dramatic upward surge.

(Some point to a warming period just prior to this even “stick” portion of the graph, known as the Medieval Warming Period, as evidence in favour of a natural cause of global warming.

The amount of warming currently is far beyond anything that occurred during this period, and even during that period, scientists confirm, while natural variation played a role, additional “external forcing”, like unusually active volcanic eruptions, would have had to play a role.)

The so-called “hockey-stick” graph illustrates the sharp increase in global temperatures since the start of the industrial revolution and the widespread burning of fossil fuels.

Warming, of course, is the symptom, so what, the question had to be asked, is the cause?

Matching significant events to the timeline, above, points pretty clearly to the advent of the industrial revolution, powered by the burning of fossil fuels, initially coal, then oil and gas. We have a clear correlation.

Science backs that correlation up, in a way that underscores the asymmetrical characteristic of pollution.

CO₂ Lasts Far Longer Than H₂O

The most prevalent greenhouse gas in Earth’s atmosphere isn’t, in fact, CO₂. H₂O, in the form of water vapour, can comprise as much as 3% of the gas in our atmosphere, whereas CO₂ currently makes up just over 0.04%.

A couple of key differences, however, mean that H₂O is less a contributor to global warming than it is a multiplier of it.

H₂O doesn’t persist in the atmosphere for long. The duration of key GHGs are shown on the chart below.

The significance of CO₂ as a pollutant is due to its persistence in the environment.

We already know that the effects of current CO₂ emissions will last far into the future. The chart below, from the IPCC’s Physical Science Basis, Summary for Policymakers (2021), shows how cumulative CO₂ emissions have an impact on future global warming.

This graph, from the IPCC’s Physical Science Basis for Policymakers (2021), shows how CO₂ emissions are likely to impact future global warming.

Even if we stopped all emissions now, warming would continue due to the period of time that CO₂ lasts in the atmosphere, creating a lag in response to mitigation efforts.

It’s important to emphasize that this builds the case for action, since the longer we kick the can down the road, the more cumulative emissions rise, further increasing the response lag.

The coloured ranges on the right show very likely warming projections due to CO₂ emissions that have already been released. The SSP1-1.9 scenario (SSP stands for “Shared Socioeconomic Pathways”), which models a low emission result, nevertheless continues the upward warming trajectory, albeit lower than other scenarios.

CO₂ Is More Potent

Persistence in the environment is one thing, but concentration, or impact, is another.

In addition to lasting far longer than H₂O, CO₂ absorbs far more infrared radiation, which is the energy or heat that the Sun emits and Earth absorbs, some of which is reflected back to the atmosphere and into space, than H₂O does. The chart below shows the absorptive capacity of different GHGs, with the shaded portion representing the radiation reflected or emitted by Earth.

This graph shows where CO₂ is on the infrared spectrum, which determines the amount of energy it absorbs in the atmosphere.

There are reasons, in addition to global warming, to be concerned about the amount of CO₂ we’re subjecting ourselves to.

Research is showing that CO₂ levels in the 1,000ppm (parts per million) range, which is not unusual for some indoor spaces, have serious and lasting health effects, including reduced cognitive abilities, bone demineralization, and kidney calcification. At the start of the industrial revolution, atmospheric CO₂ concentration was 280pp; currently we sit just under 427ppm. At the end of the century, it’s possible that we will near that marker of 1,000ppm under the SSP5-8.5 scenario.

High CO₂ levels can have serious negative impacts on our cognitive abilities, as well as increasing bone demineralization and kidney calcification.

The first slide, a series of three graphs, shows the impact of projected CO₂ on cognitive functions. The second slide is a closer focus on projected CO₂ concentrations.

Too much CO₂ is also causing problems for plant growth.

Recent studies show that while more CO₂ does boost the amount of biomass in plants, it reduces uptake of nutrients, such as nitrogen, which, not surprisingly, reduces their nutritional value within the food chain.

Possible explanations for this include the imbalance caused by too much CO2, which leads to the plant closing or narrowing its stoma, the mechanism by which plants absorb nutrients, once it has reached its absorptive capacity for CO2, preventing continued, normal, uptake of additional nutrients.

Conclusion

A key thing to take away from this understanding of pollution is that nature strives for balance. The world is inherently interconnected, and values ascribed to whether something is negative or positive are very much related to how they fit within flows from one thing to another, and whether they impede or enable the information or energy or nutrients that allow both that specific thing, but also, importantly, the environment or ecosystem within which that thing exists, inclusive of all its other ‘things’, to thrive.

In one of the most fascinating and instructive books to come out in the past several years, Suzanne Simard, in Finding the Mother Tree, outlines her research that shows one example of this interconnection.

It’s perhaps not unusual to say the forests are living things, but to frame that more explicitly as a living thing, in the unitary sense, probably is. But Simard’s research shows that this is very much the case. The many trees that comprise a forest are linked together by mycorrhizal fungal networks, which facilitate communication and cooperation between trees, such that they act in concert, across species, to enhance the conditions they need to thrive.

Mother trees act, well, much like mothers, though in a way that extends to their neighbourhood. They are finely attuned to children trees to which they are connected, and, through communicating to them via the mycorrhizal networks, understand where nutrients are needed and then distribute them so that the whole neighbourhood is able to flourish, together.

In her experiments, Simard used various methods to cut off the mycorrhizal means of communication, and the results were stark – isolated trees were far more prone to disease, and far less able to recover, such that many died quickly.

In the context of pollution, perhaps the lesson here is that balance is important, and that to understand balance, we need, first, to understand the relationship that constituent parts have with each other in their formation of a whole. Pollution occurs where there isn’t a good fit between a thing or substance and their environment it finds itself in (using “fit” in the evolutionary sense that Darwin meant). This is why pricing pollution, so that its cost is accurately recognized in the marketplace, is such an effective policy. This is also why having good information, as opposed to misinformation, is so crucial to understanding and responding effectively to the world we inhabit.

The approach that KICLEI takes, along with other climate denialists, is to put on blinders with respect to information they don’t like, ignoring the reality that to act effectively in a world that is fundamentally interconnected, consideration for how any single action might impact the whole must be taken into account. The truth of this fact scales in proportion to an action’s potential impact.

Misinformation, in summation, to the extent it ignores or misconstrues good, available information, and to the extent it causes an imbalance in our ability to function effectively within our interconnected world, is a form of pollution, and KICLEI, as purveyors of misinformation, are polluters.

(Apropos of our current political climate, in which wannabe strongmen, so-called alpha types impose their notion of how things should be on others, democracy, approximates this sensitivity and responsiveness to the interests of all who comprise the body politic. Of course, it isn’t perfect, but it can be made better, and it’s a law of nature that those who try to resist change eventually crumble. See Ozymandias below.*)

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*This Issue Brief, like all of our Issue Briefs, was first published in our monthly newsletter. This newsletter also contains great recipes, events and updates, as well as a poem, which, for the newsletter this Issue Brief was published in, was Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias. Sign up using the form above if you’d like to get these in your inbox!