Mediaculture

My father used to tell me there are no free lunches. Whenever something appeared too good to be true, he said, it probably was.

Meanwhile, many of us want our free lunches. We want easy solutions to difficult problems. And the more difficult the problem, the greater our denial or resistance to solving it becomes.

One of those great problems—an enormous one—is climate change (a better term, perhaps, than global warming, since people will say, as a cold day hits, “What global warming?”).

Tackling this problem will involve sacrifice, something most of us are adverse to. We hold on to the hope that some easy solution will present itself and we won’t have to change our behavior.

A new book out reinforces this hope. SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (William Morrow, $29.99) tells the story of New York City in 1880 facing the enormous problem of too much horse manure. By then, more than 150,000 horses lived in New York, and each one relieved itself of, on average, 22 pounds of manure per day. Officials saw no solution to this. But by 1912, autos in New York outnumbered horses, and in 1917, the city’s last horse-drawn streetcar made its final run.

“When a solution to a given problem doesn’t lie right before our eyes, it is easy to assume that no solution exists,” the authors write. ‘But history has shown again that such assumptions are wrong.” What they don’t say is that autos then created their own problem, which we face today.

Levitt and Dubner tell this story to make the point that we don’t need to worry about climate change because some solution will present itself.

They go on to claim that the global-warming threat has been exaggerated, and they offer possible schemes that could fix the problem. But neither Leavitt, an economist, nor Dubner, a journalist, has any training in science.

Climatologist Raymond T. Pierrehumbert has already offered a scathing critique of their ideas, writes Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker (Nov. 16). He says the authors “failed to do the most elementary thinking.”

Kolbert writes that some of Levitt and Dubner’s ideas are an attempt “to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction.”

Certainly scientists can make errors and practice groupthink at times, but the evidence for climate change is overwhelming—so much so that one suspects the motives of those countering it. Is it short-term self-interest, fear of change?

It’s the poor of the world who are most affected by climate change. Jim Ball in Sojourners (December) lists “some possible consequences of global warming in the forthcoming decades”:

• 40-170 million people put at increased risk of hunger and malnutrition;

• 1-2 billion people already in a water-stressed situation seeing further reduction of water availability;

• 100 million people impacted by coastal flooding and millions more by inland flooding;
  nearly 3 billion people at increased risk for violent conflicts; and more.

In that same issue, Janet L. Parker argues that “fear rarely leads to enlightened collective action for the common good.” Instead, she writes, we should emphasize Jesus’ command to love our neighbor as ourselves.

At the heart of facing climate change is our need as Christians to love God’s creation and be willing to sacrifice our self-interests in order to show that love.