A Global Solution

THE Toronto conference, mentioned earlier, ended with a fervent appeal for international cooperation on the problem of the greenhouse effect. “Standing before a 40-foot-wide [12 m] photorealist painting of a cloud-studded skyscape,” reports Discover magazine, “prime ministers Brian Mulroney of Canada and Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway pledged that their countries will slow fossil fuel use.”

Mrs. Brundtland, the Norwegian prime minister, is chairwoman of the UN World Commission on Environment and Development. “The impact of world climate change may be greater than any challenge mankind has faced, with the exception of preventing nuclear war,” she observed. She called for an international treaty to protect the atmosphere from further degradation.

What would such a treaty involve? Dr. Michael McElroy of Harvard University, in a paper before the conference, put it this way: “Ultimately we should curtail drastically our use of fossil fuel. This will be no easy task. How can we persuade countries such as China with abundant sources of coal to limit development and use of their most available and inexpensive fuel? We need an international approach. . . . We need to develop incentives to persuade the Third World to follow a wiser course than we.”

But how is the Third World likely to respond to such persuasion? The affluent Western life-style desired by the populations of poor countries requires enormous energy resources. Automobiles, those glittering symbols of power and success, need gasoline unless they are to be used as mere lawn ornaments. Flashy, aggressively marketed products need plastic wrapping, which Dr. Lester Lave of Carnegie-Mellon University calls “congealed energy.” New highways and skyscrapers and showpiece international airports and shopping centers require huge amounts of energy to build and illuminate and maintain. Now the rich nations, in effect, propose saying to the poor ones: ‘We’ve already got our rich life-style. Suddenly we have become very concerned about the environment. We’re sorry, but you can’t have what we already have. You need to be “wiser” than we were. You can’t use all this cheap energy as we did. You’re going to have to use more expensive energy and grow more slowly, make your people wait longer to have the life-style we tell them they should emulate.’ How is that likely to go over in the Third World?

Recognizing this problem, Dr. McElroy continues: “This will require, inevitably, a transfer of resources from us [the developed countries] to them [the Third World]. . . . It would seem appropriate that it be funded by a tax on fossil fuels, the source of so many of our problems. It is unclear how such a tax should be administered. It would appear to require an international body with unprecedented power and autonomy. Inevitably this will require that nations delegate at least a portion of what they considered previously inalienable rights to independent deliberation and action.”

But how realistic is this hope? Are the rich nations likely to give sovereignty and taxation power voluntarily to some international body in order to transfer money to the poor nations and combat the greenhouse effect? The rich and powerful nations on our planet did not get to be rich and powerful through this kind of farsighted altruism. They are very jealous of their national sovereignty. Are they going to change now because some scientists are upset about the greenhouse effect?

Real World Sovereignty

To deal with a global menace such as a runaway greenhouse effect, what is needed is not resolutions, hopes, and platitudes but a real world government, capable of enforcing environmentally sound policies from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Man’s history up to now does not supply reason to hope that he will soon develop such a government. “We have, during our history, made all the mistakes you can imagine, and we have made every one of them over and over again, producing an infinite series of different variations and modifications of each major error, never really learning anything,” laments science writer Allan Wirtanen in New Scientist magazine.

Serious students of mankind’s history see one big lesson in all of this​—man’s inability to take care of the planet independently of his Creator. Does that sound too “religious” to you? Not “scientific” enough? A little “naive” perhaps?

Yet, which is more naive​—to hope that mankind will reverse its sad history, overcome national, political, religious, and cultural barriers and take farsighted action to avert disaster in the next century—​or to believe that God will intervene before it is too late? The Creator has promised in his Word to “bring to ruin those ruining the earth.” (Revelation 11:18) There is ample historical and scientific evidence that he intends to do just that. Why not take a few minutes to look up the promises made regarding our earth in the Bible at Psalm 37 and Isaiah chapters 11 and 65. Compare these with the current bleak greenhouse predictions. Which truly describe the future of the earth? Don’t you think you owe it to yourself and your children to find out?