Carbon Dioxide as a pollutant?

This is just a short post about something that bothers me about word usage in relation to carbon dioxide. I've noticed more and more sources referring to it as a pollutant. For example, the US Environmental Protection Agency considers it a pollutant, and plenty of other credible sources such as National Geographic use this term too. So why do I think it's a problem?

Labels can be very powerful. They can stifle discussion and make it very hard for issues to be debated clearly. This is because many words are not neutral in tone, but rather come with pejorative or ameliorative connotations that sway thinking about the things they are attached to. A great example of this is the pro-life vs. pro-choice debate. By labelling something as pro-life, you make it very hard to argue against it without constantly having to deal with the implication that if you disagree, you are against life itself. We can see the same trick when referring to someone as, say, a climate change denier or a holocaust denier. The use of the term denier seems to be accurate and probably justified in these cases, but there is no doubt that it's a pejorative and that it sets the tone of discussion, which would make it much easier to dismiss the denier if he actually had some valid arguments.

While labels can affect the tone of discourse, they can also become dangerous when the meanings behind that label are used to justify policies and actions. For example, the term piracy for copyright infringement has been used to justify draconian measures and confuse people as to the legality of these measures. It is much easier to trick people by saying piracy is stealing than the more obviously untrue copyright infringement is stealing. It is like labelling speeding as murder and then advocating harsher punishments to stop murderers!

We've also seen this trick used recently in the US with the war on drugs and the war on terror. By incorrectly labelling something as a war, there is the real danger that laws regarding wartime policies can get invoked and abused. A rhetorical device becomes a legal justification.

So back to carbon dioxide and the term pollutant. I think this is a bad term because, as far as I'm aware, a pollutant is always a substance that is undesirable. A substance where, if you could, you would reduce it to zero in a given situation. Fecal matter would be a pollutant in drinking water because the desired amount is zero. CFCs in the atmosphere are a pollutant for this same reason. But carbon dioxide is of course not like this. There is currently an excess of it in the atmosphere above the desirable levels, but the desirable level is not zero. We would never want zero carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, the way we would desire zero levels of actual pollutants.

As a comparison, when a town becomes flooded from storms, no one ever, ever, complains about water pollution (as in the water itself being pollution). There is absolutely a problem of excess water at that point in time that needs to be reduced, but to call it a pollutant would just be to confuse, not clarify.

So let's work on dealing with the real problem of excess carbon dioxide in our atmosphere without ruining the meaning of another word through overly broad and incorrect application. Otherwise my head will literally explode!