Foreseeable Consequences

A very long time ago I attended a lecture on Nationalism given by a history professor from Columbia. The professor spoke with a heavy Balkan accent and his thesis was that Nationalism had caused much grief through the centuries, and would cause more. He knew what he was talking about. It would have been nice if Saint John Paul II had been at that lecture. Maybe he would have been less hasty to encourage the breakup of Yugoslavia. Almost three decades later the Pope would be the first to recognize Catholic Croatia as an independent state. He would then watch as first Croatia and then Bosnia and Herzegovina descended into precisely the ethnic cleansing my professor had predicted. John Paul II would call for peace but the die was cast. In 1995 Dutch peace keepers would also watch as an Orthodox Serbian army slaughtered 7000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica, the slaughter commemorated yesterday when an angry crowd threw rocks and chased away the Serbian President. I doubt the Pope intended the carnage that would follow the breakup and it may well have been inevitable with or without his recognition of Croatia but the consequences were entirely foreseeable. He of all people should have known that. Now we have another Pope weighing in on a matter that will likely have results I very much doubt he intends. In coming down squarely on the side of anthropogenic global warming alarmism, and calling for the discontinued use of fossil fuels, Pope Francis has allied himself with a cause in which his concern for the poor is not widely shared. Most mitigation proposals call for discouraging the use of fossil fuels by making them more expensive. The obvious negative impact on the poor is largely ignored. Francis does take note but offers no alternate source of energy save solar, not just expensive but also unreliable. Without inexpensive, plentiful, and dependable energy the world's poor cannot hope to escape their poverty. Without it the prosperous West cannot help them. We can only join them in their penury. The worst of it is that none of the proposals on offer hold out hope for the planet. They simply call for draconian measures at enormous expense as we watch the oceans rise and presumably come to a boil. At best the process may take a few decades longer. There has to be a better way, and I believe there is. Let's focus on the poverty issue. A more prosperous world can afford to clean itself up and people who are no longer struggling just to survive will demand it. The United States is a much cleaner place than when I was a child. China is well on its way to cleaning up the air pollution so evident during the Olympic Games held there. India will not be far behind, and who knows, maybe even sub Saharan Africa. We know how to do this. We have made enormous strides in recent decades. Let's talk about why that happened and how we can make more of it happen. Yes, the gains have been uneven and we can talk about that too. A world of seven billion people is able to feed itself yet people are still going hungry. Let's see if there aren't more things we can do about that. There are more refugees today than at any time in a generation, many of them children without access to school. We figured out more than a hundred years ago that it is in everyone's best interest to see to it all our children get a decent education. Let's fix that. There is a lot we can do. Let's get to it. Then if the earth does warm we'll be better able to deal with it.