The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
The Christian Century had a brief news article which was as alarming as it was astounding. It said that whenever an airliner crosses the Atlantic to Europe, it emits one ton of carbon dioxide into the air per passenger. That is 2000 pounds of carbon dioxide in exhaust for every person on the plane. There are 2500 trans-Atlantic flights per day
If getting me across the Atlantic one way created one ton of C02, I calculate that I am personally responsible for thrusting perhaps sixty tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over the last fifty years on as round-trip basis, and that was only to get me across the Atlantic. That is far more alarming to me than it is astounding.
I have flown many additional thousands of miles in this country, and I crossed the Pacific once. I also have driven many hundreds of thousands of miles in a car. I never knew how much of a profligate polluter I was until I read that short and seemingly innocuous squib in a liberal Christian magazine. But now my air mileage makes me feel far more guilty than my land mileage had previously accomplished.
You may choose to argue with the numbers. After all, they are merely estimates. But the reality is that millions of Americans who have lived in the past fifty or seventy-five years are far greater enemies of the atmosphere than are half the world’s population. People living in Sub-Saharan Africa or the “-stans” in Central Asia or the Amazon Basin or in the Andes Mountains don’t travel nearly as often or as far as most Americans.
Researchers are working on nuclear or solar or hydrogen power for airplanes. May God prosper their efforts, and may His inspiration accomplish it very quickly! Until that happens, however, countless numbers of people will continue to fly in airplanes. Passenger ships shall not replace planes as a means of crossing oceans, nor shall trains or cars be frequently utilized to cross whole continents, or even mere time zones. They are too slow for modern travelers, and probably too costly as well.
We are killing the planet, and many of us know it. Are we likely to stop nearly all of our personal polluting, cold turkey? Not on our lives. Few of us are willing or able to jettison our current standard of living to move to three acres of land somewhere next to nowhere and grow vegetables until we shuffle off this mortal coil from protein deficiency. It just won’t happen.
In the meantime we shall continue to pump our personal tons of carbon dioxide into an ever-warming atmosphere. If governments around the world do not band together to prevent us from choking ourselves to death, and if individually we don’t take some of the steps we can take to slow the process, humanity may be doomed.
So - - - - - whaddayathink?
John Miller is Pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC. More of his writings may be viewed at www.chapelwithoutwalls.org.