AUGUST 11 2018
WHO IS TO BLAME FOR CLIMATE CHANGE:
CAPITALISM
or
HUMAN NATURE
or???
The New York Times, its magazine insert on the August 5 Sunday Edition, had a 31,000 word essay – more like a small book – dealing with CLIMATE CHANGE, the first time a major paper gave such prominence to this global disaster.
Here is its opening statement.
“This narrative by Nathaniel Rich is a work of history, addressing the 10-year period from 1979 to 1989: the decisive decade when humankind first came to a broad understanding of the causes and dangers of climate change.
“It tracks the efforts of a small group of American scientists, activists and politicians to raise the alarm and stave off catastrophe. It will come as a revelation to many readers — an agonizing revelation — to understand how thoroughly they grasped the problem and how close they came to solving it.
“The world has warmed more than one degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. The Paris climate agreement — the nonbinding, unenforceable and already unheeded treaty signed on Earth Day in 2016 — hoped to restrict warming to two degrees. The odds of succeeding, according to a recent study based on current emissions trends, are one in 20. If by some miracle we are able to limit warming to two degrees, we will only have to negotiate the extinction of the world’s tropical reefs, sea-level rise of several meters and the abandonment of the Persian Gulf. The climate scientist James Hansen has called two-degree warming “a prescription for long-term disaster.” Long-term disaster is now the best-case scenario. Three-degree warming is a prescription for short-term disaster: forests in the Arctic and the loss of most coastal cities. Robert Watson, a former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has argued that three-degree warming is the realistic minimum. Four degrees: Europe in permanent drought; vast areas of China, India and Bangladesh claimed by desert; Polynesia swallowed by the sea; the Colorado River thinned to a trickle; the American Southwest largely uninhabitable. The prospect of a five-degree warming has prompted some of the world’s leading climate scientists to warn of the end of human civilization.”
The article ends with these words:
“The author still believes that it might not be too late to preserve some semblance of the world as we know it. Human nature has brought us to this place; perhaps human nature will one day bring us through. Rational argument has failed in a rout. Let irrational optimism have a turn. It is also human nature, after all, to hope.”
Doesn’t look very hopeful, does it? It seems that my apocalyptic views have been too optimistic.
Naomi Klein, famous Canadian writer, award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist and author of such international bestsellers as “This Changes Everything”, disagrees with the New York Times’ conclusion that human nature was at fault. Her thesis is that “Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not “Human Nature”.
Her 3100 word rebuttal ends as follows,
“We aren’t losing earth — but the earth is getting so hot so fast that it is on a trajectory to lose a great many of us. In the nick of time, a new political path to safety is presenting itself. This is no moment to bemoan our lost decades. It’s the moment to get the hell on that path.”
She thinks Socialism will save us!!
Who or what is really to blame?
Today we are seeing an enormous shift in the public perception of climate change: the end of the world has suddenly become popular.
More and more believe that Climate Change will continue unabated as the battle is against the combined forces of government (The USA comes to mind), industrial lobbies, and public apathy. We are like people hooked on drugs, on alcohol and on tobacco all at once: we all are CARBOHOLICS. To wean ourselves off this carbon addiction has become impossible, because everything, every action, every job we have, every bite of food we eat, every convenience we enjoy, every vacation we take, means another bit of carbon in the air, means another nail in the coffin of what we call mother earth.
So what do we do? Cut down? Change?
No we can’t, so we ignore all climate disasters, ignore all giant fires, ignore all huge heatwaves, ignore all drastic droughts. None of these weather events are having an impact on the public’s views on climate.
Take Boreal forests. They store enormous amounts of carbon that today’s mega-fires release, speeding up the heating process. Take Peatlands near the Arctic. They also contain megatons of carbon and mercury that is freed by today’s tundra fires.
Then there’s Siberia with the world’s largest boreal forests, already suffering more tree loss from fire than any other region. This, the planet’s biggest carbon stores threatens to become huge carbon sources instead, supercharging global warming. The deliberate illegal burning of enormous tracts of Amazon rainforest—more than 100,000 fires were detected by satellites in Brazil in September 2017—is another example of global threat, just as the Indonesian peat fires, also illegal and also done for agricultural land clearing. Now we can add boreal forest mega-fires and increasingly flammable tundra to the list of not-quite-natural disasters darkening our planetary future.
This fall we will see the Arctic Ocean free of ice. Who cares: nobody lives there. Still the Arctic Ocean hasn’t been free from ice for millions of years! Yet, there, in the shallow Arctic Seas, there’s where the methane is. Now, today, this very moment, this gas, 100 x more lethal than mere CO2, is about to come into play, rocketing the temperature sky high.
What is the result?
ARCTIC NEWS – have a look – reports that millions of people will die almost instantly when going outside in temperature of 35 Degrees Celsius and humidity of One Hundred Percent. People everywhere in the Middle East and South East Asia face that prospect in the near future.
It is true that much of the damage that might have been avoided is now inevitable. And yet….. Both Naomi Klein and the New York Times author still believe that it might not be too late to preserve some semblance of the world as we know it.
Says the Times piece: “Human nature has brought us to this place; perhaps human nature will one day bring us through. Rational argument has failed in a rout. Let irrational optimism have a turn. It is also human nature, after all, to hope.”
Naomi Klein has at least the common sense to refrain from stupid remedies: “We aren’t losing earth — but the earth is getting so hot so fast that it is on a trajectory to lose a great many of us.”
HOPE IN WHAT?
Here’s some personal stuff.
As a kid every Sunday afternoon I had to go to church for the second 90 minute service and was exposed to the preaching of the Heidelberg Catechism.
That fundamental confession was written some 450 years ago by two fellows in their early twenties. They wrote Question & Answer 8:
Question. But are we so corrupt
that we are totally unable to do any good
and inclined toward all evil?
Answer. Yes, unless we are born again
by the Spirit of God.
I believe that in 1568 it was still possible to live a ‘clean’ life. The CO2 count was stable at 280 ppm, perhaps even lower, because Europe was then in a grip of a little ice-age. The lower the CO2 count, the colder the temperature and the higher it is, the warmer it gets. Very basic science.
Also my grandparents, born in the 1860-70’s, still could and did live clean lives, environmentally speaking. They also lived pious ones. I know. Their example is always before me. Their piety has formed me through my parents, to the third generation, and I believe even into the fourth. Yes, something stuck with me, making me the Calvinist I am, weaned on and spoon-fed with the Heidelberg Catechism.
Yes, especially today I believe that we are so corrupt
that we are totally unable to do any good and inclined toward all evil, even when we are born again by the Spirit of God.
I better explain this.
Climate Change is today’s defining issue because it is a global phenomenon, and will affect everybody and everything on earth.
I realize, I am prone to make sweeping statements, based on gut rather than scientific observation, but then I use different criteria, such as the Bible, totally unheard of in today’s reporting. Also my reactions are coloured, no doubt, by events that occurred in my life, such as the Great Depression – 1930-39 – World War II, and simply my long life in business, always dealing with people.
My real reasoning is that, since we all use carbon-based fuel all the time, we are, no matter how holy we live, tainted by climate-changing substances. Based on that, and that alone, makes me suggest that there is not one person in the Western world who fits the bill of ‘born again’, unless that person constantly asks for forgiveness as doing such a simple thing as turning on the hot water, causes a flicker of pollution. Jesus could not be around today, living in today’s white society, without sinning.
Oh my! Who then can be saved!
One of the main obstacles to living holistically is THE CHURCH.
The trouble is that the church has mainly gone to bed with the Bible at the expense of Creation. At the danger of repeating myself I once again emphasize John 3:16 – God so loved the COSMOS – because the church by and large has succumbed to a dualistic view of life, separating God from his creation – the exact opposite of holistic.
Imagine honoring Johann Sebastian Bach without any reference to his music.
Creation is, and always will be God’s ETERNAL, PRIMARY AND DIRECT WORD, personified in Jesus, while the Scriptures, important as they are, will always be God’s TEMPORARY, SECONDARY AND INDIRECT WORD.
By believing in the Bible only, God’s secondary, impermanent and indirect Word, and regarding this as adequate for being born again by the Spirit, is at best a doubtful proposition. A person can’t be half-pregnant, can’t be conditionally ‘born again’.
To me Romans 1: 20 sums it up: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”
“Do you understand what you read?” asked Philip when he met up with the Ethiopian nobleman who had made a special trip to Jerusalem to search for the TRUTH (Acts 8: 34).
Here in Romans 1: 20 we are told that by observing ‘nature’, recognizing its beauty, appreciating its harmony, admiring its coherence, treasuring its interdependence, we must conclude that only divine action was able to create such marvels, leaving us without the slightest excuse.
Note: the text does not mention the presence of the Bible at all, the sole tool the church employs.
O, clever Satan! The church has swallowed the Heaven Heresy hook, line and sinker. Even worse: it sees the earth, God’s Earth, as evil.
So here is my take on things. It is not just Capitalism – that too – it is not just human nature – that too – it is especially convential Christianity that has been the most significant factor in causing this global disaster to happen.
Jesus was killed by the church of his day, urged on by THE EVIL ONE. Today history is repeating itself: we are urged on BY THE EVIL ONE whose total aim is to destroy God’s Creation.
The church, by and large, has preached HEAVEN, has proclaimed escape from the earth, has abandoned God’s planet, at the instigation of THE EVIL ONE, who preferred – as Milton put it in PARADISE LOST – “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”
Satan purposely is creating HELL on Earth. Yes the Devil and his cohorts have only one goal: destroy God’s earth, and it has come in the form of Hell and High Water.
“Christians” ought to know better, Christ died to restore the earth. That’s about to happen. That’s why we have to live the beginning of that resurrection life NOW, Today, August 11 and beyond.
And if your church does not preach that sort of life: call the minister to account.