Pollution Is Not Just a Money Cost. It Threatens Our Health and Our Lives. And the Rest of Nature. And There are Other Major Poisons To Campaign Against. (Oil#4)
The costs of carbon pollution cannot be measured in money. The costs are qualitative and categorical. They are literally matters of disease and life or death.
And carbon is not the only pollution, the only poison, that poses a very immediate threat to people and nature.
Articles like Tim Kiladze's August 7 2026 article in the Toronto Globe and Mail, that demonstrates the futility of the Alberta Pathways Alliance carbon capture project, are useful. They show that there is no business case for carbon capture, or indeed for reducing oil extraction and use (fossil fuel based economies are profitable, they can hypercharge capitalist economic growth). There were ultimately no customers for the Norway Northern Lights carbon capture project. Canada, meaning the taxpayers of the Canadia public, will be the only people paying for the Pathways Alliance tar sands carbon capture business operation.
The First Three Articles Provide Context for This One.
The first article in this series showed that the Alberta tar sands Pathways Alliance carbon capture project is guaranteed to fail, except as a fig leaf that provides cover for increasing the level of Big Oil extraction and emissions.
The second article exposed the logic and actual consequences of the Paris Accords Net Zero approach. A Net Zero system lets governments manipulate targets for allowable emissions levels, and who has to pay what level of tax penalties, and who gets to avoid them and keep on polluting. Only A Winding Down to Zero, Together global treaty approach has any chance of actually working.
Competing countries and companies, whose relative economic and political-military power is significantly based on their relative ownership and control of Big Oil, will not unilaterally 'disarm'. Only a planned and coordinated and carefully managed winding down dictated by a central authority established by global treaties can work.
The third article continued the argument against Net Zero, pointing out that the Green New Deal that many activists hail as the solution is in fact part of the problem. Yes, we need alternate energy sources to fossil fuels. But there is no such thing as a 'green and clean' energy source that is all good, and stands in contrast to an all bad 'polluting and dirty' energy source. The Left and environmentalists should not be helping to brand the alternative energy industries as all good in this way.
A Green New Deal is entirely enmeshed in the Net Zero pollution credits trading system approach. The idea was initially brought forward by liberal Democrats in the US in the wake of the Paris Accords. It is consciously designed to be in alignment with the Net Zero goals and pollution credit trading mechanisms.
Liberal centrists like the Joe Biden administration have taken up the Green New Deal idea, recognizing its effectiveness as a counter to the alternative approach of Polluters Pay in Proportion to How Much They Pollute. Which would mean the United States and China and the Global North first and foremost, in a Winding Down to Zero, Together global treaty approach.
A Green New Deal spreads the idea that 'Everyone is a polluter, and hence we should all pay equally for the pollution that is caused, not the polluters'. It also promotes the fiction that adding so-called green energy will result in the subtracting of fossil fuel energy production and use by companies and individuals.
This article will restrict itself to stating two further points, without much detail.
(1) Let's Challenge the Framing that 'The Market' Can and Will Reduce Carbon Emissions by 'Putting a Market Price on Carbon'. Even More, We Should Insist that the Damages Are Not Measurable in Money.
The first point is about the capitalist markets logic that goes more or less unchallenged in all discussions about global warming, and 'decarbonizing the economy' to make it more green and less carbonized. It is taken as given that any decarbonizing policy must calculate the costs of fossil fuel energy, and the benefits of so-called green alternative energy, in money terms.
Governments and companies should therefore do whatever minimizes their money costs and maximizes their money benefits. They are rational choice actors, following capitalist market logic, and so they will do what is required guided by The Invisible Hand. They will do so without any need for an external legal-political authority that can impose penalties or provide incentive rewards, 'from the outside' and 'from the top down' and 'in a centralized instead of decentralized [market] way'.
The 'we can assign money prices to both damages and benefits' approach claims that an actual money price cost can be placed on carbon [dioxide emissions]. An equivalently precise money benefit can be assigned to the supposedly completely 'green and clean' industries that are to replace the carbon industry. These prices are inputs into the targets that are set for carbon polluters, and for the precise levels of the tax and other subsidies that are given to the green and clean alternative energy producers and users.
The market prices approach makes it seem that everything is based upon science and neutral and objective calculations. Issues of relative geopolitical wealth and power based on ownership and control of fossil fuels are hidden from view. Those precise market price calculations are proclaimed to be what is economically rational. They are what is at one and the same time, and according to the same capitalist market calculations, 'good for the environment'.
The narrative is established that 'market forces', and government energy policies that align closely with the cost-benefit monetizing of harms decided by market actors, will gradually replace bad with good, dirty carbon with clean green.
The Harms Caused by Fossil Fuels Are Ones That Cannot Be Assigned a Money Price. There is No Free Market, Net Zero and Pollution Credits Trading Solution.
My simple point is that the Left should insist that all arguments about the money costs and prices and benefits of carbon pollution are irrelevant (except when figuring out how to wind down to zero, and to pay for the enormous costs of the cleanup that will be required).
The costs of carbon pollution, like the costs of all other types of pollution (or what I think should more often be referred to as poisoning), are almost entirely qualitative and categorical in nature.
The costs are measured in how many people and beings and plants die (or go extinct), and how much younger than they otherwise would. The costs are in what diseases humans and animals and plants will get more often, and in how severe the version of those diseases will be, and how much diseases due to poisoning will reduce the quality of life measured qualitatively.
We should constantly expose and challenge the cost-benefit capitalist market logic that is at the heart of the idea of seeking a Net Zero goal by using market mechanisms of attaching a price to carbon, and letting polluters trade licenses to pollute.
When we let the 'it's only money' framing go unchallenged, then we are making the threats to life and health and quality of life seem to be merely matters of more or less money costs. A penny for your disease, a dollar for your life.
(2) Yes We Must Fight Campaigns to Stop Further Global Warming. But We Should Also Widen the Frame to Flag Other Major Poisons That Threaten Us.
Progressive environmentalists and the broad left assert that the most pressing environmental issue is global warming and climate change. The positive aspect of making this The Environmental Issue is that climate events and lots of media attention over the last three decades have broken through, in a way that is comparable to the breakthrough on tobacco smoking and cancer (that took over fifty years to accomplish). When we double down on global warming as The Issue, as the Clear and Present Threat to people and nature, we are getting the public to adopt a framing that can then be applied to other issues of pollution and poisoning.
But there is a negative side to doing this too exclusively. Precisely because the battle to establish that global warming is a threat, and that the main cause of global warming is fossil fuels, has been won, there is an opportunity to widen the frame that the Left ought to take. Fossil fuels are the biggest instance of poisons that have been fostered by capitalist and imperialist forces in the pursuit of unbridled 'economic growth' and 'development'. But there are many others that are causing disease and shorter lives and sometimes extinction.
Floods and Droughts. More Mosquitos and Ticks. Flesh-Eating Bacteria. More Potent Plague-Threatening Viruses. Let's Get Concrete About the Consequences of Unbridled Capitalist Economic Growth.
There is little point in keeping the increase in temperature under three or four or whatever centrigrade degrees, if in the meantime most of the human race is killed off by the Ebola virus, or some other plague. Or by the ingestion of plastics into most human foetuses. There is a very long list of killing and maiming diseases due to poisoning in pursuit of unbridled capitalistic economic growth.
We should be spending a bit more time scaring people with vivid descriptions of the qualitative consequences of Global Poisoning of All Kinds, Including Carbon Pollution. And we should come up with ideas for positive substitutes for each poison.
Tim Kiladze provides some facts that support employing the wider frame, and being ready to scare people with the facts. Stick closely to the science, sure. Don't just scare, but follow right up with ideas for ways to avert the worst. In every case, End Global Poisoning, Including Carbon Pollution will be the first step of the solution.
"The signs of a changing climate are everywhere. This summer, wildfire smoke from northwestern Ontario blew south and blanketed the Great Lakes region, turning the sky orange in some cities. Much of Western Europe also baked under another heat wave. There are even some oddities in places like Oslo. Ms. Lam [of the Northern Lights project in Norway] says she used to brag to her Canadian friends that there were no mosquitoes there, because it didn’t stay hot enough for long enough. “I’ve gotten so many bites this year because it’s so much warmer for longer,” she says.
Some environmental changes are harder to see, but could have devastating consequences. Rising temperatures allow more microbes, such as flesh-eating bacteria, to flourish in new places. More viruses are also adapting to warmer weather, finding ways to survive in the heat. That means one day more of them could learn to survive inside hot human bodies.
CO2 Emissions Continue to Increase. The Earth Is In Uncharted Territory. And Now They Are Adding AI Data Centers to the Mix.
All the while, CO2 emissions keep rising. Until the 20th century, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had never breached 300 parts per million, according to the NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory. It punched through that metric around 1910, and is now close to 425 ppm. This is uncharted territory.
And now the world is adding data centres to the mix.
In July, Meta Platforms Inc said it will spend more than $13-billion to build a massive artificial intelligence data centre outside Edmonton. The project is a one-gigawatt facility, which refers to to the amount of electricity it will consume, provided by a new natural gas plant. The entire city of Edmonton draws about 1.4 gigawatts.
In the U.S., Meta is constructing a five-gigawatt facility in Louisiana, and in Kentucky, Canada’s Brookfield [Asset Management, that until recently had Mark Carney as its CEO] is teaming up with Next Era the largest U.S. utility, to build another. The Kentucky project’s new natural gas plant is big enough to power 1.5 million homes. "
We are going to win this battle. The health and longevity (and very existence) of the majority of the people of the world, and most of Nature, are at stake.