Saturday, March 12, 2016

The Ridiculous Classification of Carbon Dioxide as a ‘Pollutant’

One of the most absurd policies ever enacted by any government is the U.S. government’s categorization of carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Kindergarten science tells you that co2 is an odorless, colorless, harmless gas that is vital to the cycle of life on Earth.

Yet, people fall for the “pollutant” idea. One such person penned a letter to the New Jersey Star-Ledger. In Defining carbon dioxide as a pollutant, the writer makes the case that everything has limits, lest it become harmful. But should every element on Earth be labeled a pollutant? If so, the term is meaningless. The writer seems to grasp this, so he attacks columnist Paul Mulshine’s criteria of an air pollutant as something that is a "direct threat to the lungs"—an objective criteria that excludes CO2 as a pollutant.

The letter writer's counter:

Currently 75 percent of the American public feel that losing our shorelines, flooding our cities, increasing fires and drought are threats to them. These people are saying carbon dioxide is a pollutant.

Really? How many of these people would give up the reliable, economical energy that their clean water, lighting, transportation, clean, controlled indoor climate, and the myriad machine-made products and services that their lives depend upon? Given a choice, what would they consider the biggest threat, energy deprivation or being exposed to the ever-present natural climate dangers that men have always had to deal with? The “public” can say what it wants, but saying “carbon dioxide is a pollutant” doesn’t make it so, any more than the once popularly accepted “fact” of a flat Earth made that so. Neither does the parade of perpetually wrong, increasingly hysterical predictions of a climate cataclysm.

I left these comments:

So the term “pollutant” is to be redefined away from objective, observation-based facts because public opinion polls say that ever-present natural environmental hazards like floods, fires and droughts are a threat to human beings? Why not define water as a pollutant? Almost anything in sufficient quantities is harmful. To define something as harmless as CO2 as a pollutant is to obliterate any rational definition of the concept “pollutant.”

But there is a hidden political agenda behind the CO2-as-pollutant movement. The effect of defining carbon dioxide as a pollutant is to give totalitarian powers to government officials. Human life and flourishing—from every breath we take, which contains 100 times as much carbon dioxide than what we inhale, to fire, which is so integral to human life—requires the production of carbon dioxide. If carbon dioxide is a pollutant, then every human is a polluter, simply for living. Maybe we need population controls, such as a one-child policy, with forced abortions and sterilizations; fines for having more than one kid; forcible removal of “excess” children for adoption by childless couples; the demonization of girls.

Hyperbole? It’s already been done in China. Or maybe CO2-as-pollutant is only a means to get total government control of industry. What better way to expand government controls than to get control of energy—the industry that powers all other industries? Given the indispensable value of CO2 to life, the logic of carbon controls must necessarily mean totalitarian controls on human life, one way or the other.

Climate change is window dressing. If limiting carbon dioxide were the real goal, environmentally conscious people would be beating the drum for a crash program to advance nuclear power and, wherever feasible, hydroelectric power—neither of which emits CO2. They want neither. The real motive of the carbon-limitation gang is an anti-development, anti-industrial agenda. The opposition to fossil fuels, nuclear, and hydroelectric is a means to this inhumane agenda, because industrial society requires reliable, economical, industrial-scale energy to thrive. Nuclear and hydro have effectively been stopped. Only fossil fuels stand in the way of the anti-industrialists. Hence, defining CO2 as a pollutant.

Related reading:

Population Growth, Longevity, Prosperity, and CO2—Joe Bastardi

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