Our focus should be on pollution, not carbon dioxide

There is a website that I’ve been paying attention to as we enter our third month of global economic shutdown. It’s a site that monitors the level of carbon dioxide in the air measured in parts per million.

There have been many stories about how air quality has improved dramatically in the most pollution-choked cities in the world. Whether it is sulphur dioxide and nitrous oxides or harmful particulate matter — which aggravate asthma and other deadly respiratory conditions — the shutdown has allowed hundreds of millions of people in the world to breathe fresher, cleaner air.

Particulate matter that is less than 2.5 micrometres in diameter, known as PM25, is particularly problematic. The World Health Organization estimates seven million people each year are killed by air pollution and PM25 is one of the major culprits.

So researchers at IQAIR set out to quantify just how much the air had cleared over several weeks of shutdown. In New Delhi, the number of hours at an unhealthy level of PM25 dropped to 17 per cent from 68 per cent. In Seoul, it dropped by 54 per cent; Wuhan dropped by 44 per cent; Los Angeles, London and Madrid were all down significantly and measurably, too.

So, I thought, surely carbon dioxide levels would be down. But they are not. They are up.

Co2.earth tracks daily, weekly and yearly changes in CO2 levels. They say on their website that daily CO2 is the number to watch as “the leading indicator for the alignment of human activities with planetary life support systems.”

On May 12, 2019, the level of CO2 hit 415.27 parts per million. You’ll recall several news stories last year saying that carbon dioxide had hit an alarming new all-time high.

Yet this year, as our level of use of fossil fuels from coal, oil and natural gas collapsed, CO2 levels have gone even higher. On May 12, they hit 416.71 parts per million, up 1.44 ppm or 0.35 per cent. That doesn’t seem to make sense now, does it?

I’ve read explanations from environmentalists on why we aren’t seeing a year-over-year decrease as we are for harmful pollutants. Apparently, it’s because carbon dioxide emissions have only been turned down, not off, so we should expect them to keep rising, much as one would water rising in a bathtub. One might argue the same should be true with all those other dangerous pollutants, that they were only turned down, not off, so they should have also gone up, but I won’t quibble.

Here’s my conclusion. If shutting off our world economy for several months has no impact on carbon dioxide, but a massive impact on dangerous air pollution, then we are focusing on the wrong thing.

If we have shut down the world economy because 300,000 people have died of COVID-19, how can we continue to tolerate seven million people per year dying from particulate air pollution caused principally by burning coal without scrubbers, and burning wood and dung for fuel?

It’s been disheartening to see people like Elizabeth May double down on demanding the world get to 100 per cent renewable energy, and declaring oil dead. I was especially bewildered to see her say that we should focus on tourism, instead. Um, how are people going to get to Canada if we can no longer use fossil-fuel-based aviation fuel in planes or marine fuel in cruise ships or gasoline in cars? Besides, if we eliminate all fossil fuels, what are tourists supposed to do when they get here? Roads are made of asphalt, which comes from bitumen. Every major attraction on the planet uses fossil fuels for their heating and electricity. Petrochemicals are used in every type of sporting equipment you can think of.

With the single-minded obsession with carbon dioxide, extreme environmentalists have lost the plot.

We need a new vision for environmentalism that focuses on people and the planet. We should start with wanting everyone on the planet to have access to the same quality of breathable air that we do and a growing standard of living that comes from having an industrialized economy. Building reliable power grids on nuclear, hydroelectricity and natural gas — and supplementing with solar and wind where (and if ) it makes sense — is the obvious way to reduce both harmful pollutants and carbon dioxide emissions. And save lives.