It’s official: CO2 is now a pollutant

CGES | MAY 2009 | SOURCE: Global Oil Insight

If plants could talk they would protest vehemently, for one of their principal nutrients is CO2 and the US' Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has just decreed that CO2 — along with methane, CFCs and three other greenhouse gases — is henceforth to be known officially as a pollutant and its (presumably anthropogenic) emissions must be regulated, because they may 'endanger human health and wellbeing'.

Thus, by a swift sweep of the bureaucratic pen one can turn an essential nutrient in the food chain from plants to humans into a pollutant like sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, which are released by the burning of fossil fuels and combine with moisture in the atmosphere to create acid rain.

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As every schoolchild knows, the trace gas CO2 is essential to life on Earth, because plants combine it with water and mineral salts in the soil to produce glucose, using energy from sunlight that is trapped by chlorophyll in the leaves. Plants store glucose as starch, which is then reconverted into glucose and thence into fats and proteins when energy is needed for growth, the production of more chlorophyll and reproduction itself.

To define as a pollutant (i.e., a chemical or waste product that contaminates the air, soil or water) a trace gas that happens to be a vital plant nutrient shows how far science is being twisted these days to suit the purposes of politicians and lobbyists with particular axes to grind.

Under President Bush, who was famously sceptical about the anthropogenic origin of global warming, the EPA could not proceed to regulate emissions of CO2 because the gas was obviously not a pollutant and the EPA's remit was to deal with clear threats to the environment posed by harmful human activities.

With Bush out of the White House and a new US administration now clutching firmly the levers of power and espousing an antithetical view on CO2's role in global warming, we did not have to wait long for the EPA to pronounce on the subject. It said it had reviewed the 'scientific evidence' and, in what it called an 'endangerment finding', decided that since CO2 was a danger to human wellbeing it was a pollutant and some cuts in CO2 emissions could therefore be mandated without waiting for Congress to pass carbon-cutting legislation.

We have come to a sorry pass indeed when a government agency, which for ideological reasons is itching to have a go at curbing carbon emissions, feels it necessary to distort the meaning of a word in order to pre-empt the due process of enacting appropriate laws.

Although the EPA's decision will go to public consultation to 'consider stakeholder input', the Agency's next step is likely to be the granting of a waiver from federal law to those States that wish to introduce unilateral curbs on tailpipe emissions.

It is always better to call a spade a digging implement rather than a potentially lethal weapon. The trace levels of CO2 in the atmosphere (measured in parts per million by volume) are the net result of huge fluxes in a complex carbon cycle of emission and re-absorption.

On a scale of 100, the physiochemical diffusion of CO2 in the oceans is thought to stand at 104, its re-emission by the oceans at 100, plant and soil respiration account for 50 each, photosynthesis is put at 100, deforestation at 2 and emissions of CO2 by humans burning fossil fuels at around 6.

However, these are estimates and the truth is that we do not know enough about the vast carbon fluxes associated with the world's oceans, and with photosynthesis and respiration, to be sure about man's role in the scheme of things. A slight difference between two large numbers can swamp mankind's relatively small contribution to the carbon cycle.

Then there is the question of what comes first, a rise in temperature or CO2 levels, because the long-term historical record contains periods when a rise in the former led the latter. Finally, we have the satellite evidence of global cooling since 1998 and the recent low point of sunspot activity, which some think is behind the last two cold winters experienced in the Northern Hemisphere.

A lot more truly scientific work needs to be done before we can be sure that fossil fuel use must be curbed, because a drastic reduction in anthropogenic emissions of CO2 would be very, very costly indeed.

Calling carbon dioxide a pollutant may be a sign of the times, but it also moves us closer to George Orwell's 1984, in which a supporter of the totalitarian Party says about the shrinking vocabulary of Newspeak … ' it's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words'.

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