WSJ: Pollution used to Mean More Than Just CO2
I had the opportunity to comment on a recent Wall Street Journal article by Bjorn Lomborg about climate change, CO2, President Trump, China, and India.
A regrettable outcome of the media-hogging climate change debate is that the measure of pollution by nations has been reduced to carbon dioxide emissions, a rather benign compound apart from its relationship to climate change. In “The Charade of the Paris Treaty” (Review, June 17-18, 2017), Bjorn Lomborg succumbs to this myopic view when he states, “He (President Trump) failed to acknowledge that global warming is real and wrongly claimed that China and India are ‘the world’s leading polluters'”. Mr. Trump is actually on to something if we were to broaden the definition of pollution, as we once did, to include polluting chemicals that contaminate water, air, and the land, including habitats. Nations like China and India are among the most egregious polluters when this more liberal, and comprehensive, definition of pollution is applied.