What Carbon Pollution Is.
Crumbs on the bed, ants in your pants, tape hiss, mustardayonnaise in your mayostard…
I’ve seen it argued that carbon is per-se good, so those who wish to see climate change abated should not belittle the carbon itself. It’s not the carbon’s fault. Carbon doesn’t change climate, people change climate!
Before we get to what carbon-pollution is, let’s make sure we all know what pollution is. Pollution is an unacceptable amount of anything where you don’t want it. This is a broad definition, and it deserves to be. It is unpolluted.
The definition has two components:
- A medium you want one way
- A substance in a quantity that conflicts with that want
It could be food. Betty Botter bought some butter—bitter butter, and it bittered her batter. It polluted her batter. So she had to go out and buy some better butter. Or it could be television. Advertising pollutes the program, at least if the ads are obnoxious enough and there are enough of them. Or it could be nature. Too much pollen, so that you cannot enjoy your garden. Or dirt you tracked in on the floor—nature pollution. A weed is any plant growing where you don’t want it to grow. Weeds are plant-pollution of a landscape.
Amateur astronomers drive to far-away places to get a clear view of the night sky. Around cities, and even near suburbs, there are too many lights on at night, which pollutes the darkness and makes it hard to see stars and other celestial objects. These people are not anti-light. They are anti-light pollution. It’s an easy thing to understand.
And when those astronomers are driving out of town, they might be stuck in a traffic jam. Traffic is a form of pollution. It is too many cars trying to go in the same general direction but with either too high a volume for the route (possibly due to a temporary reduction in capacity) or too little coordination of movement to do so efficiently.
Carbon Pollution.
It is pollution formed of molecules that particularly include carbon. Mostly CO₂ and methane (CH₄). Neither of those greenhouse gasses are bad by themselves. We humans cannot breathe them in, but we can use them for things at the right places and times. But the keyword is pollution. We need some carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Plants respire it, and therefore they require it. And we require plants. So it’s a problem of too much. The quantity matters.
Humanity has been shoving a lot of carbon into the air for some centuries now, and we’ve gotten faster about it. And most of this isn’t carbon that’s been part of the carbon cycle in recent times. This is old carbon that was stacked away in the form of gas, oil, and coal. It was buried, so we drill-baby-drilled it up, or dug it up in the case of coal. It was only 50 years ago that we realized we really shouldn’t put too much carbon in the air. But we’re really getting a handle on thinking about stopping at some point!
But it is pollution. That’s the key part. If you like fizzy soda or you like plants, carbon dioxide isn’t a problem in your garden or in your soda. But if you like having a regular climate, carbon is the problem in the atmosphere. It’s a problem in the oceans, as they become more acidic which messes with the lime cycle (calcium being the primary ingredient in the shells of mollusks and in coral growths).
In the atmosphere, these bits of carbon create a kind of traffic jam for heat that would otherwise go off into space. The heat runs into these traffic jams and gets turned back to earth. That results in extra heat being kept in, and it makes earth warmer than it would be. As the amount in the air grows, the amount of heat grows, which throws off all sorts of ecological and natural systems that rely on stable temperatures. Melting ice, rising seas, shifting ecological zones, the works.
Feel free to defend the honor of carbon all you like. But carbon pollution is a form of pollution. It’s not the carbon by itself. It’s the carbon being where it shouldn’t be in and in quantities it shouldn’t be. It’s the same with every other type of pollution.
There are three basic strategies for dealing with pollution of whatever sort:
- Live with it.
- Remove the thing you don’t want polluted elsewhere.
- Reduce or remove the source of pollution.
Any of these options may or may not be viable, depending on the type of pollution and what’s being polluted. For example, if you have a bagel with onion embedded in the crust and crumb, good luck if you consider that onion to be polluting. You really have one choice: embrace the onion-bagel.
Now, if you have only fresh pollution, you might move the source of the pollution. But if you have a bunch of people living near toxic chemical pollutions, both fresh and remnant, your best bet is to move the people away. Not let them linger for generations like some mad scientist who likes to see what diseases do. I’m talking about Cancer Alley. I mean, come on! Move the people away! Ban on people living there, pay them for their trouble. This is the amputation option. Like with gangrene. You cut off the affected area.
Finally, if neither of those are live options, you’re left with the last one: stop the pollution. This can be difficult, if the pollution source is embedded in the economy and you have regulatory capture and you have a political party hellbent on denying the thing is a pollutant (and they also hate humans generally). But it will happen. One way or the other. Because too much carbon in the air will either scatter us to the wind or we’ll get it in check like the pollutant it actually is.