Doom and Gloom?

Even if Westerners manage to drastically cut back their energy use, there are huge emerging economies like China and India that would probably be happy to use the oil that we don’t. John remarked that there’s a huge political problem with telling these countries that, after we’ve enjoyed the fruits of industrial prosperity for 150 years, we’ve now discovered that if they do they same they’ll wreck the planet. If I were an Indian, my reaction would probably echo the Church Lady: “How convenient.”

We are not just talking about fruits like TVs and cell phones, either. Modern medicine requires a lot of energy, too — the running of hospitals and their equipment, the research involved in creating drugs and in mass-producing them, all take lots of juice. Furthermore, it is well known that one of the big problems with medicine in the poorer parts of the world is physically getting it to people living out in trackless villages; building and running such an infrastructure would also take lots of energy.

The fact is, Christian fundamentalists and Republican congressmen aren’t the only people in the world who fail to place their trust in Western scientists. From what I’ve seen many Africans aren’t even sold on the accepted scientific understanding of HIV, and that’s certainly had a bigger impact on them so far than global warming. It’s painful to watch, but I also don’t see it as an unmitigated character flaw. The Western world has earned its mistrust.

Another phenomenon I have seen is what happens if something is successfully prevented. Often as not, the non-event causes a lot of people to wonder if the whole thing was worth the cost, or maybe even a big con, because, you know, nothing happened. I’ve seen it with the Y2K bug, with some averted African droughts, with recent terrorists plots that the feds said they foiled. This quality of the human character is not uniformly positive, but on the other hand, prevention always looks better in hindsight. In the present, it involves a weird state where nothing is actually going wrong, but everyone is maximally afraid of what could go wrong. In the English language, that state is generally called paranoia....

Certainly Christian mores like supporting local communities and rejecting materialism can help fight global warming; but on the other hand, anointing scientists as prophets, making utilitarian calculations about what solution will kill the fewest people, and justifyng the power of government as a means to an end are actions that might combat global warming but aren’t exactly Christian. As with premillennialism, a little less grand theorizing and a little more trust in God might be in order.

[via The Musings and Teachings of Camassia]