There are 10s/100s of pollutants. Hydrocarbons, VOCs, free radicals, dust, smog, microplastics, and more. Why are only CO2 emissions so universally used as a metric for climate targets? Surely measuring just the greenhouse effect isn’t sufficient as an indicator of overall climate health.

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There are 10s/100s of pollutants. Hydrocarbons, VOCs, free radicals, dust, smog, microplastics, and more. Why are only CO2 emissions so universally used as a metric for climate targets? Surely measuring just the greenhouse effect isn’t sufficient as an indicator of overall climate health.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

1) Most of those other species aren’t actually bad for the climate from a GHG perspective, they’re just bad for living things in the vicinity of where they’re being emitted.

2) CO2 is the lion’s share of both the emissions and the influence on Greenhouse Warming, even if it’s a relatively weak GHG.

3) From a combustion and power production standpoint, not only are you basically guaranteed to produce CO2, but you actually *want* to produce CO2…and nothing else. Essentially any other emission (other than water vapor) is unused energy, and thus lost efficiency (which, from a consumer standpoint, is wasted money). Hence, as regulators chase efficiency standards, it becomes easiest to relate all other GHGs to their equivalent mass of the GHG that you want to be producing (as opposed to other GHG species).

4) The goal has never been to form an indicator of “overall climate health,” only GHG potential. There is no single metric of “overall climate health,” other than (in a roundabout way) population figures from at-risk species.

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