Climate Change, Paper Towels and Wind Power…

We’ve been looking at some general principles from the Bible regarding the environment in our continuing Biblical Anthropology study. Yes, caring for the environment is a part of our Christian life, and out of that I’ve noticed four principles that God’s Word teaches:

1. We care for creation for the glory of God. That’s our ultimate purpose.
2. We care for creation to benefit people (quality and length of life).
3. We care for creation through local responsibility. In other words, our priority is our local area.
4. We care for creation through our general obedience to God. General obedience can be a blessing to the land, or God may directly bless the land when the people on it are obedient.

As we talked about before, it is possible to cooperate with unbelievers to care for the earth – we certainly should! But we also should not underestimate how drastically different our purposes and approaches may be.

So let’s talk about some of the ideas out in the world today.

When we were discussing this as a church, COP26 had just wrapped up. “COP” stands for Conference of the Parties, and it’s a conference that is held each year by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It’s interesting to look at their material, although the message from COP26 or COP27 is the same as what we’ve been hearing for many years. Here’s the introduction in the official brochure for the conference:

CLIMATE CHANGE IS THE GREATEST RISK FACING US ALL. Around the world storms, floods and wildfires are intensifying. Air pollution sadly affects the health of tens of millions of people and unpredictable weather causes untold damage to homes and livelihoods too. But while the impacts of climate change are devastating, advances in tackling it are leading to cleaner air, creating good jobs, restoring nature and at the same time unleashing economic growth.

Despite the opportunities we are not acting fast enough. To avert this crisis, countries need to join forces urgently.

COP26 Explained

We’re not going to take the time to analyze all the ins and outs of “global warming”. But it may be useful to at least take a look at some of the suppositions that are being made in this whole discussion, and at least point out that there’s another side to the story. Because we tend to hear only one side.

So what is the basic message? First, the earth is becoming warmer. Well, that’s true, but of course it all depends on the segment of time you’re measuring, where you’re measuring, and so on. It’s certainly warmer here than it was in January. Is it warmer than it was a year ago? Maybe. But many scientists and historians believe that the world was once quite a bit warmer than it is now.

Of course, quite often now we refer not to global warming, but simply “climate change”, a basically impossible-to-measure metric. But we’ll stick with warming for now, since that is still a common claim.

The second supposition is that this warming is because of humans and/or their specific activities.

The third supposition is that we can do something about this change in temperature. Well, there are quite a few scientists that would disagree here as well, or at least say that the changes we might make would make only a minute difference. In the United States, for example, thousands of scientists signed a petition with quite a different point of view. And that is by no means an isolated example.

Again, my point right now is not to defend one side or the other, but just to give a reminder that there are people – even scientists in the field – with different points of view. But we have some more suppositions:

The fourth supposition is that natural disasters are increasing. Now if you actually sit down and look at the statistics, you’ll see that … it depends. Again, what segment of time are you looking at? What criteria are you using? (I refer you to the old but useful book, How to Lie with Statistics.) It’s easy to find an unusual natural disaster here, or a time frame in which they’ve become worse. But in many cases they have actually decreased. But this is the general claim.

The fifth supposition. These disasters are specifically increasing because of climate change caused by human beings.

Finally, this is a CRISIS. An emergency. It’s almost too late – or may already be too late.

Why list all these suppositions? Because you may agree with some, and not others. In fact, you may agree with 1-5, and reject 6. This is very common with a lot of the narratives that are pushed on us. We just skip from the first supposition to the last and expect everyone to come along, and perhaps ignore one or two very weak links. It’s very useful to sit down and list exactly how we logically get from one to the other to the other.

Another common thing to check for: Are we commonly only hearing one side of the story? Is debate being shut down? That doesn’t prove that the other side is right, but it is cause to be on alert.

I remember many years ago when they started to install electric hot-air blowing hand dryers in public bathrooms. They would put little signs on them, explaining that they’re much better for the environment than using paper towels.

But I always thought – wait. In Canada, paper towels (at least at the time) were coming from sustainable forestry. That is, the trees were carefully farmed, replanted, and so on. So what about all the new complex electronic parts that we are now manufacturing for these much more sophisticated machines? Where does the metal come from? Where does the electricity come from? I bet these need a lot more repairs – which means tools, replacement parts, delivery, the driving of the repair person…

Things are not always as simple as they seem. As an interesting side note, some studies have shown that hand dryers actually mean more bacteria on your hands, which is why some researchers recommend for hospitals that they use – you guessed it – paper towels. 🙂

There are simply aspects of this whole story that you rarely if ever hear. You’ve heard a lot about CO₂ – carbon dioxide. Sometimes media makes it sound like it’s a poison that we need to eradicate from the planet. But CO₂ means more plant growth – a greener planet. Plants eat CO₂ for breakfast – it’s part of the photosynthesis process that you learned about in school. This indeed seems to be happening – larger harvests, more available food. (Here’s a brief video from NASA on this – you may not agree with everything in the video, but it makes the basic point.)

Many are very concerned about “sustainable technologies”. For example, you may have heard a lot about wind power. In fact, you may have seen evidence of this technology rising from the landscape in your local area.

Wind power sounds like a great idea. But let’s think about the constant repairs that these huge machines require. The problems with the birds that are killed. The farmland that they take over. Sometimes forest areas are levelled to make room for them. Minerals are mined and parts are transported from around the world using – well, gasoline, in many cases!

As we were going over this topic at our church, plastics were a huge topic. Are plastics really pure evil? They have allowed us to transport food in a hygienic and easy way. Give our medicines. Protect ourselves from diseases. And now we know that it can be converted into a very clean fuel. Yes, like everything else, we should use plastics with wisdom. But plastic can be a huge benefit to the community.

There are many sides to every story. And if there is no public debate allowed, it’s a lot more difficult to find the truth. There are some complex issues here, but it doesn’t hurt to dig a little deeper and have a little discussion.

Now, all of this discussion of how warm the planet is and how much carbon dioxide is healthy and how we should use plastics is important – but there are some issues that are much more serious. We’re going to stay with materials from the United Nations next time, and take a closer look at some recommended responses to environmental issues.