Why do White Nationalists care whether CO2 is a pollutant or not?

It can't be, because then climate change would be a matter of concern.

As many of you know, I hang out a lot in the far-right places of the internet. The other day I was scrolling through a forum on Stormfront about climate change and kept running into a kind of funny perspective, which assured everyone that "CO2 is not a pollutant…it’s something else.”

At first glance, this seems like just a sort of dumb comment. But when you think about it more, it’s kind of a weird thought. I mean really, for you is CO2 a “pollutant” in your eyes? It doesn’t really have a direct impact on human health, per se, but it certainly implies some kinda of devastation.

Google says this: “Is carbon dioxide an air pollutant? Carbon dioxide is not considered an air pollutant, as it occurs naturally in the air. However, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has significantly increased due to human activity.” So, there’s agreement here between Google and Stormfront. But as someone on the left I basically have never thought about CO2 as a pollutant or not…it just, didn’t occur to me to ask.

Within mainstream left-leaning environmentalism there is a sense that elevated levels of CO2 imply harm, and that to lower those levels implies some kinda of care. This emission-harm and sequestration-care binary is global, and thus to emit is to harm the globe and to sequester is to care for the globe. In mainstream environmentalism then CO2 is a moral marker organized around harm and care for a global community. And notably, this has nothing at all to do with pollution. Whether CO2 is a pollutant or not does not matter, does not even fit into this moral framework. But, so why do white nationalists care so much about whether CO2 is a pollutant or not?

In 2013, Feinberg and Willer published this elegant little study called The Moral Roots of Environmental Attitudes where they “found that contemporary environmental discourse is based largely on moral concerns related to harm and care, which are more deeply held by liberals than by conservatives.”

Importantly though, they “found that reframing pro-environmental rhetoric in terms of purity, a moral value resonating primarily among conservatives, largely eliminated the difference between liberals’ and conservatives’ environmental attitudes (Study 3).”

For liberals, whether CO2 is a pollutant (impure) or not does not matter—if it will lead to a harmful consequence it is bad. This is liberal consequentialist logic 101. But for conservatives, whether something is a pollutant or not really really matters. We might even say that it is the conservative moral frame for seeing an environmental problem as a problem to begin with.

So why do white nationalists care about CO2? Well, the answer is that more than a handful of them are climate deniers, specifically the flavor of climate deniers that think it’s extremely important to, wrongly, point out that “Jewish people are behind most scientific journals” and that “The jewish people are behind the idea of climate change” and that “Climate change is just a government invention to increase regulation and control over our lives.”

In other words, if CO2 is a pollutant, the atmosphere could potentially be impure, and thus there is a problem. But if “CO2 is not a pollutant…it’s something else” well then, what’s the problem? Everything is still pure. Whether climate change is a matter of fact or not doesn’t matter, because for many white nationalists it is not a matter of concern.

Let me say that again: regardless of whether it is a matter of fact, it is not a matter of concern. For liberals, the harmful implications of CO2 have organized an enormous politics. For conservatives, the atmosphere has yet to be come obviously contaminated enough to warrant attention.