COP15: Not All Pollutants Are Created Equal

Comments with a question mark are common here in Copenhagen, where people will frequently make long, often charged statements, ending with something along the lines of, “don’t you agree?” to legitimize their inclusion in question sessions.

A particularly loaded question I heard yesterday accused the United States of being a major polluter with very limited environmental oversight. True? Well, that depends on your definitions. In terms of greenhouse gas pollution, yes, the major polluter point is valid. In terms of other types of pollution? That’s a harder case. And in terms of environmental oversight? Forget it. American environmental standards are among the world’s most rigorous and longest-standing.

Now I acknowledge that there are glaring exceptions to this, including my pet disaster of mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia, which has had major land, water, air and community impacts.

But I think it’s important to remember that, significant as it is, greenhouse gas pollution is not the same as pollution. We still have major problems with traditional pollutants—and emerging pollutants—throughout the world. Some are air pollutants: sulfur oxides, mercury and the like. Some are water pollutants and land pollutants.

Which brings me to my next point: just as greenhouse gas pollution is not equivalent to “pollution,” the atmosphere’s greenhouse gas content is not equivalent to “the environment.” Not even the whole atmosphere can be referred to as the environment.

Air, land and water are generally acknowledged as the three major environmental systems, and though the current focus is on the atmosphere—this is, after all, an international climate change conference—we lose opportunities for productivity and credibility when we forget that we are working on a subset of pollution and a subsphere of the environment.

So while I agree that the United States needs to do something--and fast, and with the cooperative efforts of the rest of the world—I cringe when my country is attacked for having no environmental oversight and a complete disregard for pollution. These are untruths, and they’re important untruths.

On a more minor note—it’s also an untruth that the United States has the world’s highest per capita emissions. This is a less important untruth, but resorting to exaggeration for rhetorical effect only provides people with excuses to ignore storylines that are honestly alarming.