Less talk less about Climate and more about the Environment

For years, climate change has dominated the environmental agenda. Governments, media outlets, philanthropists, and schoolchildren have all rallied around carbon dioxide as the chief villain of our ecological story. The narrative is familiar: unless CO₂ emissions are drastically reduced, civilization faces rising seas, collapsing ecosystems, and runaway temperatures. Global summits obsess over emissions targets. Climate models are treated like sacred scripture. Yet many of the most dire predictions have fallen flat. Miami is still dry and hosting Art Basel. The Arctic continues to refreeze each winter. Madrid hasn’t turned into a Saharan outpost.

This disconnect between forecast and outcome has eroded public trust — not just in climate models, but in environmentalism as a whole. The danger now is apathy. In tuning out the noise around climate, many people have tuned out ecological issues altogether. And that’s a costly mistake, because while the planet does continue to warm modestly, a host of other environmental threats — more immediate, tangible, and solvable — are quietly being ignored.

Air pollution, for example, kills an estimated seven million people a year. Deaths from extreme weather, by contrast, hover around 50,000 and have declined steadily over the past century thanks to better infrastructure and emergency response. If we’re prioritizing by impact, cleaning up city air is more urgent than modeling the atmosphere in 2100. But you wouldn’t know it from where the attention — and the money — goes.

Freshwater scarcity is another overlooked crisis. More than two billion people now live under water stress, a problem driven less by climate than by poor irrigation, aquifer depletion, and waste. Soil degradation is yet another silent disaster. More than 30% of the world’s arable land has been lost to erosion, salinization, and unsustainable agricultural practices. Without healthy soil, there’s no food security — and no climate mitigation either. Trees don’t grow in dust, and neither does wheat.

In our oceans, overfishing has depleted nearly 90% of global fish stocks. Ocean acidification, a lesser-known result of CO₂ dissolving in seawater, is disrupting marine ecosystems. Meanwhile, plastics choke wildlife and accumulate in the food chain. These are not future risks. They are present-day consequences.

Toxic chemical pollution is spreading with barely a whisper. PFAS, BPA, phthalates — these so-called “forever chemicals” are now found in blood, breast milk, and even placentas. They’re tied to hormonal disruption, infertility, and cancer. Yet while climate change commands entire bureaucracies, the regulation of these chemicals remains fragmented and underfunded.

Even biodiversity loss — which gets lumped under the climate banner — is more directly caused by habitat destruction, deforestation, and monoculture farming than by temperature rise. Ironically, carbon dioxide, while vilified in political discourse, is also a global fertilizer. Satellite data from NASA confirms that the planet has become greener over the past 30 years, in part due to rising CO₂ levels. Forests and plants grow faster, absorb more sunlight, and expand into marginal lands. That doesn’t mean emissions should be unchecked, but it does mean the story isn’t as simple as “CO₂ equals death.”

The obsession with carbon has also created perverse incentives. Forests have been clear-cut in the American Southeast to produce wood pellets for European “green” energy targets. Lithium and cobalt mining for electric vehicle batteries has caused pollution and human rights abuses. These are carbon-compliant policies that are environmentally destructive in every other way.

Even urban warming, often blamed on climate change, is frequently a design issue. Cities heat up because they’re covered in asphalt and lack greenery — not because of global emissions. Cooling them down might be as simple as planting trees and redesigning public spaces, not banning gas stoves.

All this points to the need for what I call environmental pluralism — an approach that sees CO₂ as one of many variables, not the only one. It doesn’t reject climate science; it repositions it. If people are asked to care about the environment, they’re more likely to respond to visible problems with immediate solutions: clean air, safe water, unpolluted food, and livable cities. No more climate obsession that results in the frequent destruction of nature with solar panels and wind turbines, we need a more balanced approach that includes nuclear energy.

Environmentalism must be more than a climate PR campaign. It should be a broad, pragmatic agenda based on outcomes, not ideology. Carbon is important. But it’s not the whole story. And pretending it is doesn’t just mislead — it misallocates.

The environment is not a single problem. It is many. And if we want to solve them, we’ll need more than a net-zero slogan. We’ll need a net-wider lens.