Why things go wrong: emotional reasons

The theory

A commenter on the post about classifying asked: "How useful is it to classify carbon emissions separately from pollution?" That's a very good question, but I'm not going to give my own answer... yet. Instead, I'd like to say that it's a fine example of a question that can easily be answered wrong for all sorts of emotional reasons... one of those that shows why some problems are really difficult. Let's use it to go through a whole bunch of emotional reasons that lead to wrong answers:

• Clinging to the past: People cling to the past. We can't help it. If we first got involved in the environmental movement because we heard about pollution, the answer to that question is obvious. If we only got involved after we started worrying about climate change and we never cared much for pollution, the answer is also obvious. But different. One of my readers asked once: "How does one make a group forward-looking rather than backward-looking?" The truth is, people are naturally backward-looking. Which normally works quite well. Problem is, it's hard to tell that it's stopped working.
• Unpleasant associations: Pollution is dirty, who wants to talk about it? On the other hand, carbon dioxide is a transparent gas with no smell at all, and a normal part of the atmosphere anyway. Shouldn't this mean that they should be treated separately? On the other hand, if you want people to feel that this apparently clean and innocent gas is a very nasty thing, shouldn't this mean that they should be seen as the same?
• Crowd psychology: The crowd of old environmentalists and the crowd of new climate changers are not the same crowd. The answer to the question will depend a lot on which crowd you associate with.
• Wrong or irrelevant comparisons: Different chemical compounds are, well, different. How do you choose which ones to put in the "pollutant" bag? Is a division in just two categories (good stuff here, bad pollutants there) a good idea to start with? Whether you put carbon dioxide in or out the "pollutant" bag, wouldn't you be making some wrong or irrelevant comparisons?
• The wrong option is attractive: As you can see, I'm not being very clear about which option I think is best. I'd just like to point out that both options can seem immensely attractive. If carbon emissions are a different thing from pollution, it makes it easy to get a lot of attention if your activities are about carbon emissions only, and you don't have to worry about pollution in general or feel guilty about not looking at that. If they are a form of pollution, you can just use a lot of stuff that you already had for general pollution and make it fit.
• Habit and inertia: If you are used to deal with pollution in general, you want to classify carbon emissions as pollution because that's what you are used to do. If you are used to think of carbon emissions as something very different from anything that's been a problem before, you don't want to change your mental habits either.

Getting wrong answers to questions leads to wrong actions. As the commenter already noticed: "If we think about 'pollution' as a group of different types of substance emission, and consider the need to manage them in tandem, we would be developing a different set of solutions, than if we just try to address carbon emission on its own." Then, it may be that trying to make carbon emissions fit a model best suited for some types of traditional chemical pollution makes the problem worse.

Think about all these difficulties to give a good answer to the question, and then try to answer it. Is carbon dioxide a pollutant? To help you think, it's useful to list the five valid answers to every yes/no question:

1) Yes

2) No

3) I don't know

4) Yes and no (the answer depends on assumptions that haven't been specified - "is a chameleon green?")

5) Mu (the question has incorrect assumptions - the correct answer to "Are you still beating your wife?")

My own answer to the question, at the bottom of the post.

The practice

Experiment 1

It's easy to see other people's flawed reasoning, but much harder to recognize your own. To start getting a feel for your own limitations, it may be easier to watch pets. What are the limits of what you can expect of a dog? A cat? A hamster? For example, how many things can they remember for how long?

Once you have a fair idea of the limits for different animals, it's a lot easier to think about the limits for humans. You don't have unlimited memory or unlimited capacity to understand the consequences of everything. You can't analyze every issue in detail and come up with a good answer, you use shortcuts. What shortcuts do you personally use often?

Experiment 2

Can you think of other examples of questions that are easy to answer wrong? Go through the list above and try to describe the pitfalls. After that, try to give a good answer. My own answer below may give you inspiration... maybe as something rather flawed that you'd rather avoid.

MY ANSWER

Yes and no.

With the definition of an environmentalist, the answer is a resounding "yes". Pollution is anything that causes harm, instability or discomfort in an ecosystem. Carbon emissions cause climate change, and climate change causes plenty of harm to ecosystems all over the Earth.

The popular definition of pollution is more restrictive, though. An environmentalist may talk about light pollution or thermal pollution, a layman would never say that. Most people think that pollution means only chemical and radioactive pollution, toxic to animals or plants. Under that restrictive definition, carbon dioxide isn't pollution. It isn't toxic.

In situations like this, where the layman and the expert definition of a word are different, it can be much safer to abandon the word altogether. Instead of talking of pollution in general, one can use "harm to the ecosystem/the Earth". And when you mean chemical pollution specifically, it may be best to use the whole "chemical pollution" instead of saying just "pollution" for shorthand... or mention by name the specific chemicals.