The Consequences of Being Captured by the Fallacy of CO₂ Pollution

[Written in collaboration with Microsoft Copilot AI]

Prologue: A Myth in Color

The image above is not a scientific diagram. It is an allegory—a modern cosmograph: Helios, mythic charioteer of the sun, casts radiant parcels downward—his outstretched arms of light delivering heat into a world built to harness it. Below, a plume of steam rises from the industrial stack—misconstrued as carbon fumes, though it is only water rendered gaseous. Between them arcs the dragon, carbon dioxide made visible through myth—a beast of fire, capturing remnants of Helios’s warmth and breathing it back to scorch the flattened Earth spread like thin parchment beneath their gaze.

Each element is deliberate. The radiant god, known for pulling the sun, now releases his rays unwillingly to the mechanisms of a misguided vision. The serpent—once ancient and feared—hovers in the air below, elevated anew to master and steward of the skies. The background shimmers with wavelengths deemed arrows, nodding to the familiar glyphs of radiative transfer. But here, those vectors serve a different purpose. They do not model—they warn, dramatize, and accuse of grave misdirection.

And that is the signal: we are no longer in the realm of explanation. We are in the theater of myth.

This essay enters through that image because it belongs to a larger story—one in which physics, policy, and visual rhetoric merge to craft a new cosmology: not of gods and heavens, but of gases and graphs. The tale it tells is familiar—problem, villain, solution—but the elements have changed. Instead of devils in fire, we have carbon in flux. Instead of saints, we have solar panels and wind turbines. Instead of salvation, we are promised net-zero.

What follows is not a repudiation of science, but an interrogation of its symbols—and the cultural work they perform. We begin with the gas itself.

Recasting CO₂: A Life-Giving Gas Under Scrutiny

Before it became an emblem of planetary peril, carbon dioxide was—and remains—a silent participant in the choreography of life. Every forest breathes it in; every exhale gives it back. It is neither toxin nor waste, but a thread woven through ecosystems, organisms, and even our own respiratory rhythm.

In photosynthesis, plants absorb sunlight, water, and CO₂ to generate sugars—the building blocks for all terrestrial life. This carbon-fixation process not only sustains plant growth but also moderates atmospheric balance. Without atmospheric CO₂, photosynthesis would cease, crops would wither, and the global food chain would unravel.

Far from being a pollutant, CO₂ is also a regulator of human physiology. Contrary to popular assumptions, our urge to breathe is not primarily triggered by low oxygen—but by rising levels of carbon dioxide.[1] Specialized chemoreceptors in the brainstem monitor CO₂ concentration in the blood; when it climbs above a certain threshold, the body receives a command to inhale. In this way, CO₂ governs the rhythm of respiration and helps maintain acid-base equilibrium through its influence on blood pH.

The role goes deeper still. The Bohr Effect, a principle in respiratory physiology, describes how carbon dioxide facilitates oxygen delivery. Elevated CO₂ in tissues signals hemoglobin to release its bound oxygen—a subtle, crucial exchange that ensures muscles and organs are properly nourished. When CO₂ levels fall too low—as happens in chronic hyperventilation—oxygen remains stubbornly bound to hemoglobin, leaving tissues paradoxically under-supplied.

Practices that temporarily retain CO₂—such as controlled breath-holding exercises—appear to enhance this natural efficiency. By gently elevating blood CO₂, they improve oxygen unloading, promote vascular dilation, and may, over time, refine respiratory resilience. While popular claims about “alkalizing” the body through breath retention oversimplify the underlying chemistry, it is accurate to say that carbon dioxide helps stabilize internal balance in ways often overlooked by its critics.

To cast CO₂ as a poison, then, is not merely misleading—it inverts the truth. It is not the antithesis of life, but its facilitator. And yet, this vital, invisible gas has become the chief scapegoat in our modern environmental conscience—stripped of its context, vilified by misnomer, and marked for symbolic exile.

In the sections that follow, we will trace how this mischaracterization took root, how it distorted the physics that once sought to describe it, and how it now fuels an industrial pivot whose environmental promise often obscures its material cost.

[1] This respiratory drive is regulated by central chemoreceptors in the medulla oblongata, which respond to changes in arterial CO₂ and pH. Peripheral chemoreceptors in the carotid and aortic bodies also contribute, but to a lesser extent. See: Guyton & Hall, Textbook of Medical Physiology, 14th ed., Chapter 40.

The Physics Problem: Heat Trapping or Metaphorical Inertia?

Few images in modern environmental science are more widely invoked—and more poorly scrutinized—than the idea of greenhouse gases “trapping heat.” It is a metaphor that has become mantra, recited in classrooms, policy briefings, and weather reports, where radiative physics is compressed into the comforting logic of insulation. And yet, the metaphor is misleading in both substance and implication.

To begin with the literal: carbon dioxide does not “trap” heat in the way a blanket holds warmth or a greenhouse pane stifles airflow. CO₂ participates in a dynamic, continuous exchange of electromagnetic radiation. It absorbs and re-emits infrared energy at specific frequencies—redistributing, not detaining, the outbound flow of energy from Earth to space. There is no static reservoir, no thermal net. The system reaches a new equilibrium through changes in altitude and pressure where this radiative balance is resolved.

The term “back-radiation,” often paired with bright arrows returning to Earth's surface in popular energy budget diagrams, furthers the confusion. It suggests a reversal of thermodynamic flow, as though CO₂ sends warmth downward like an emitter of secondary sunshine. In reality, these radiative emissions occur omnidirectionally and proportionally—some heading outward to space, some toward Earth—governed not by intention but by probabilistic quantum interactions. Nothing is “trapped”; energy moves. Always.

As this metaphor began to fray under scientific scrutiny—its friction with thermodynamic principles and quantum behavior becoming too stark to ignore—it was quietly replaced. The new narrative speaks not of “trapping” heat, but of slowing its escape. It is a softer claim, with a nod toward nuance: infrared energy still leaves Earth, just later, more reluctantly, as if lingering under atmospheric suggestion.

But this too is a rhetorical sleight of hand. It implies temporal delay without specifying what is delayed, where, or how long. The physics of absorption and emission are instantaneous on human timescales. Photons are absorbed and re-emitted in femtoseconds—not hours, days, or decades.[2] The word “slowing” summons the image of congestion, with bottlenecks and queues, instead of properly characterizing a system governed by probabilistic equilibrium, not thermal traffic jams.

“Slowing” inherits the moral architecture of “trapping” while shielding itself more cunningly from technical challenge.[3] It promises to sound more scientific while remaining no more physically precise than its predecessor. And like its ancestor, it colors policy, pedagogy, and perception.

If climate communication were simply imprecise, we might forgive it. But imprecision here has consequences. It breeds faulty models, exaggerated inferences, and policies predicated on a thermal fiction. Diagrams become doctrines, their arrows incantations. Thus, is metaphor mistaken for math—poetry for precision.

In the sections that follow, we will explore how this mischaracterization of radiative physics fed not just fear, but momentum to overhaul civilization's entire energy infrastructure. For once thermal energy is believed capable of being imprisoned—or delayed—revolution feels justified. The industrial counteroffensive—the “green” transition—was not just a policy shift. It was an exorcism. And like all exorcisms, it begins with misdiagnosis. Nowhere is this misdiagnosis clearer than in the illustration below:

[2] Radiative absorption and re-emission by CO₂ molecules occur on timescales of femtoseconds to picoseconds. While the climate system’s full response to CO₂ forcing unfolds over months to centuries due to oceanic and atmospheric feedbacks, the radiative interactions themselves are effectively instantaneous. See: Stjern et al., The Time Scales of Climate Responses to Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols, Journal of Climate, 2023.

[3] The metaphor of greenhouse gases “trapping heat” has long been central to climate communication, but its limitations have been widely acknowledged. In response, communicators have increasingly adopted the language of “slowing the escape of heat” to preserve emotional resonance while sidestepping physical inaccuracies. This shift is discussed in Using Metaphor and Analogy in Climate Change Communication (Cornell University Press, 2017), which notes that metaphors like “heat-trapping blanket” were promoted by the FrameWorks Institute and NNOCCI to enhance public understanding, despite their scientific shortcomings. See also: JSTOR article on metaphor use in climate communication.

The Rise of Visual Misinformation: A Case Study in Diagrammatic Authority

Among the most widely circulated scientific images of the 21st century is the NASA GISS “Earth’s Energy Budget” diagram (shown above). It appears in textbooks, government reports, and media explainers—its authority presumed by its institutional origin. But beneath its clean lines and numerical precision lies a visual narrative that subtly distorts the physics it claims to represent.

The diagram presents Earth as a slightly curved plane, suggesting a sphere while in practice modeling a flat disc—a gently arched rendering that disguises its two-dimensional energy accounting beneath a veneer of realism. At first glance, the slight curvature at the top edge cues the viewer to see a globe. But this is not a full sphere—only a horizontal slab with metaphorical skin, rendered at an angle that evokes roundness while performing the math of a flat Earth. The solar radiation is drawn as perpendicular, evenly distributed beams falling across a broad plane, and the energy flows are calculated per square meter across that undifferentiated surface. In effect, it operates on flat-Earth accounting disguised as spherical representation.

That illusion is what makes the image persuasive. The curvature tells the reader, “This is a globe,” while the numbers quietly behave otherwise. The angled view isn’t just an optical choice—it’s a visual decoy that grants atmospheric processes the appearance of depth without actually engaging three-dimensional energy dynamics. It isn’t merely a drawing. It’s a performance of science.

Most notably, the diagram features a large downward arrow labeled “Back Radiation”, typically around 333 W/m², nearly equal in size to the incoming solar flux. This arrow implies that the atmosphere is sending energy back to the surface at nearly the same rate the Sun delivers it—an implication that, while numerically derived from radiative transfer models, misleads by omission. It fails to distinguish between net energy flow and gross radiative exchange, leaving the viewer with the impression that the atmosphere is a second Sun.

The image also reinforces the metaphor of “trapping” or “slowing” heat through its directional asymmetry. Outgoing energy is shown as being intercepted and redirected downward, but the temporal and spatial dynamics of radiative equilibrium are nowhere to be found. There is no indication that these exchanges occur probabilistically, continuously, and at varying altitudes. The diagram freezes a dynamic system into a static tableau—and in doing so, reifies metaphor as mechanism.

Moreover, the diagram’s visual symmetry—equal-length arrows, balanced inputs and outputs—suggests a kind of mechanical equilibrium that belies the complexity of climate feedbacks, cloud dynamics, and spectral absorption. It is a diagram of thermal closure, not energy flux—a visual still life that suggests resolution rather than process.

That this image is in the public domain is its own quiet irony—freely circulated, fiercely believed, and rarely questioned.

The diagram does not lie—but it frames—inviting belief, not in physics, but in the picture. And in that framing, it naturalizes a myth: that energy is trapped, that the atmosphere is a thermal mirror, and that the physics of climate can be reduced to arrows and sums.

In the sections that follow, we will examine how such visual simplifications have paved the way for industrial solutions whose material costs remain largely invisible—just outside the frame.

The Green Veil: Industrial Resurrection by Another Name

When carbon dioxide was recast as a villain, the world demanded a hero. But no hero emerged—only a portfolio, which included:

• solar 

• wind 

• battery storage

• electric cars 

• smart grids 

• hydrogen hubs

This pantheon of technologies was not merely offered as a set of solutions but enshrined as salvation. And beneath it, a renaissance of extraction—of minerals, metals, and materials newly sacred to the cause. 

It is no coincidence, then, that the same diagrams which dramatize imbalance also legitimize intervention to correct it. Once the atmosphere is imagined as a sealed chamber with trapped or delayed heat, engineering a way to restore balance becomes a moral imperative. The narrative licenses not just remedies, but replacement industries—requiring new machines, new materials, and new dependencies. The climate must be saved—by those who can afford to reshape the material world in its name.

The result is a transformation that divides along familiar lines. Wealthy nations orchestrate the transition while poorer ones absorb its weight—in mining waste, exploited labor, and land loss. Resources flow north; impacts linger south. Environmental virtue, in this context, becomes a function of purchasing power. To be green is not merely to reduce emissions, but to afford the infrastructure that outsources them.

And so, the mineral age returns with a green halo. To decarbonize is to dig anew: lithium from Chile’s salt flats for battery electrolytes, cobalt from the Congo’s fault lines for cathode stability in lithium-ion batteries, rare earths from China’s riverbeds for the magnets that spin wind turbines and drive electric motors, silver from Mexico and elsewhere to form the conductive fingers of solar cells, copper from Peru’s mountains for every wire, coil, and connector that carries the new current. These are not symbolic substances—they are functional prerequisites. Each technology christened “clean” depends absolutely on these extracted minerals, woven into its circuits, blades, cells, and storage. The emissions may be displaced, but the appetite—for growth, control, and ever-faster production—is not.

To illustrate what is often abstracted away, the following table lists the specific minerals for the technologies they enable:

The industrial pivot—from fossil fuel dependence to mineral-intensive “green” technologies—is choreographed through policy and narrative alike. Nations subsidize green infrastructure while outsourcing the messier parts of its supply chain. Carbon accounting becomes a geopolitical ledger, where emissions are counted at points of combustion, not at points of origin. A wind turbine built in Europe with rare earths mined in Asia and steel forged in India becomes a European triumph. The NASA diagram—static and sealed—does not show the shipyards where “clean” technologies, forged across continents, are loaded and sent off on oil-burning vessels to greener futures.

But the deeper choreography is rhetorical. The shift from “trapping” to “slowing” allowed the myth to wear new attire. Where once the atmosphere was imagined as a prisoner’s cell, it is now portrayed as a system of gentle delay—one we might negotiate with, optimize, or game. Greenhouse gases became levers, and climate became a system to be managed, tweaked, or traded. Science did not leave; it was recruited. In this story, even urgency becomes an asset. Crisis accelerates demand, public fear legitimizes speed, and speed justifies shortcuts. Environmental concern mutates into industrial compulsion, its cloak dyed in the symbolic palette of redemption—green robes worn in a crusade against carbon.

None of this is hidden. It is simply not diagrammed. The iconic visuals show balance, energy, radiance. They do not show the ports, the pits, or the laborers beneath fluorescent lights in lithium brine fields. The myth lives not because it is true, but because it is elegant. It assigns blame without ambiguity and offers redemption by way of innovation.

After the Myth: What Science Cannot Fix

To call something a myth is not to dismiss it. Myths endure because they satisfy: they offer cause, effect, villain, and remedy. They shape the visible and prescribe what must be done. In that sense, the greenhouse effect—rendered diagrammatically—functions as a modern myth. It explains imbalance, assigns blame, and grants license to intervene. The myth was not smuggled into science; it was cultured there.

But once the myth is seen as such, what remains?

What remains is a science that still collects data: radiative fluxes, warming oceans, vanishing ice. But observation is not immunity. Even honest measurements can be recruited into flawed frameworks, their signals distorted not by the instruments, but by the meanings imposed upon them.

The diagram—a sealed chamber animated by arrows and fluxes—was never a mirror of nature. It was a script. Not just describing energy flow, but prescribing meaning: who disrupted balance, and who must restore it. The problem was not only the meanings these numbers acquired—but the numbers themselves, derived through methodological shortcuts: adding intensities, abstracting fluxes, smoothing out contradiction in service of a visual fiction.

With the myth stripped away, the scientific image is no longer compelling in the same way. Rather it becomes the veneer of fraudulent methodology. Thus, a flux diagram cannot continue to house a villain. A confidently articulated forcing cannot offer narrative closure. A delayed photon cannot cry out for resource extraction, assembly lines, or offshore wind leases. What science measures may remain true to its instrumentation—but its power to persuade never resided in the contrived numbers; it lived in the story the numbers were made to serve.

After the myth comes the aftermath—along with the bad math it once concealed. The promise of a clean transition obscured its own conditions: not just more machines, but more land, more sacrifice, more waste products, and more silence—about who bears the cost, and what is lost in the name of climate salvation. Without the myth to soften its edges, the new infrastructure appears for what it truly is—vast, mining-intensive, land-hungry. Wind farms colonize once-green hillsides and cloudless skylines. Solar arrays flatten deserts into metallic grids. Transmission corridors carve through forest canopies. The landscape is redesigned, not by what it needs, but by what must be delivered to satisfy a flawed vision.

Some have called this a necessary compromise. But that framing implies a choice. For many—human and more-than-human—no choice was offered. The bird disoriented by turbine flicker, the cactus displaced by mirrored panels, the community severed by transmission routes—none are counted in climate accounting. They are externalities to a model optimized for something else entirely: carbon abatement at speed and scale.

What remains after the myth, then, is not only the silence of the diagram but the silencing of other ways of seeing. Landscapes reimagined as throughput, futures reduced to gigawatts, solutions flattened into schemas. And perhaps most unsettling of all: the realization that what we mistook for science may have always been theater, and what we mistook for moral progress may have simply been acceleration—of extraction, of enclosure, of harm, moving ever faster beneath a different flag.

Scarcity Disguised as Substitution

Not all technological transitions are genuine replacements. Some are regressions in disguise—shrinking capacity or reliability while presenting themselves as forward leaps.

Much of the green promise rests on the assumption of energy equivalence—that renewable sources can fully supplant fossil fuels without substantial compromise. But energy is not just a quantity; it has qualities. The new sources differ not only in origin, but in energy density—how much power they deliver per unit of space or mass—as well as in reliability, storage, and timing.

Fossil fuels store millions of years of ancient sunlight in portable, combustible form. A barrel of oil, easily transported and burned on demand, contains about 1,700 kilowatt-hours of energy—enough to power an average American home for two months. This is what is meant by “high energy density”: small amounts, large returns.

In contrast, the alternatives are more fickle. Solar panels produce electricity only when the sun shines. Wind turbines generate only when the wind blows. These sources are not just intermittent—they are unpredictable, delivering energy in rhythms set by nature, not need. Because of this, renewable systems require vast land areas, extensive infrastructure, and intricate coordination to provide the same level of service.

When the air is still or the skies are overcast, the turbines idle and the panels fall dormant. And so, the modern electrical grid—the real-time network that powers homes, hospitals, factories, and servers—must perform a new choreography: drawing power when it’s available, curtailing use when it isn’t, importing surplus from neighboring regions, exporting when in excess, pausing energy-intensive operations, compensating with backup generators. Every step is a work-around.

This is not a true replacement of one energy system by another. It is a fragile replication of function under stricter constraints. What is advertised as replacement is more often reduction—managed not by breakthrough, but by subsidy, rhetorical flair, and imposed restraint.

And even this fragile system leans on legacy fuels to prop it up. In many regions, renewables are buffered—that is, stabilized and supplemented—by natural gas turbines, diesel backup systems, and electricity imports from coal-dependent neighbors. The emissions may shift location, but the combustion persists.

And yet, the public narrative insists on continuity—that energy services will remain unchanged, lifestyles uninterrupted, only the inputs swapped out. It is a comforting story. Because to admit that this is not a true replacement of one energy system by another—but scarcity disguised as transition—would be to puncture the illusion that we can keep everything the same, powered by different means.

Escaping Intellectual Carbon Capture

Capturing CO₂ generated by burning fossil fuels before it is released into the atmosphere, we are told, is a technological fix—a means of storing the unwanted, sequestering the dangerous, undoing what we’ve done. But perhaps the more urgent task is to undo the intellectual capture by the carbon myth itself—to abandon the fantasy of siphoning molecules and instead recenter our thinking on the functions they actually serve within Earth’s atmosphere.

We must reclaim CO₂ from the falsity of its monstrosity. It is not evil. It is not a toxin or a pollutant. It is a fluent intermediary in the thermodynamic balancing act that makes life possible. The very air we exhale is rich with it. Every breath is a contribution to the atmosphere—yes, but also a reminder that carbon is not an intruder, but a participant.

To think clearly about climate is to resist metaphors that obscure. We must demand truth in physics—accurate depictions of mechanisms, not fables. This entails humility in modeling—acknowledging uncertainty, feedbacks, and the limits of prediction. And it requires honesty in visual rhetoric—favoring clarity over iconography that stirs fear more than understanding.

This essay does not deny environmental disruption, nor consequences, nor the need for ecological stewardship. But it refuses the mischaracterization of carbon as demon, the presentation of diagrams as purely scientific, and the advocation of “green” as inherently good. It argues that we must learn not only to mitigate but to see more clearly: to recognize when substitution is not salvation, when transitions deemed progressive actually shrink rather than extend human potential.

In this light, CO₂ is not a monster, but a messenger—a tracer of combustion, metabolism, and industrial ambition. It speaks of what we value, what we extract, and what we burn to sustain our comfort. To truthfully capture it intellectually is to listen more closely, to draw meaning not just from charts and models, but from the errors we’ve erected—and glorified—in the myths we build around these.

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References

1. Guyton, Arthur C., and John E. Hall. Textbook of Medical Physiology. 14th ed., Philadelphia: Elsevier, 2021. Chapter 40.

2. Stjern, Camilla W., et al. The Time Scales of Climate Responses to Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols, Journal of Climate 36, no. 1 (2023): 249–268. 

3. Anne K. Armstrong, Marianne E. Krasny and Jonathon P. Schuldt, Chapter 9 Using Metaphor and Analogy in Climate Change Communication, in Communicating Climate Change, pages 70-74, Cornell University Press, 2018, Ithaca, New York. 

4. International Energy Agency. The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions, Paris: IEA, 2021. 

5. U.S. Department of Energy, National Blueprint for Lithium Batteries 2021–2030. Washington, DC: Federal Consortium for Advanced Batteries, 2021.

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