The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

Because God is the Creator, He owns everything (see Psalm 50:10-12).  And, as the Sovereign Creator and Owner, He gives us all things that are a part of life, trusts us with them and expects us to manage all things well.  He is the owner; we are His stewards.  A biblical view of stewardship, therefore, centers on utilizing and managing all the resources God provides for His glory and the betterment of His creation; it is managing everything He brings into our lives in a manner that honors Him.

The principle of stewardship is rooted in the Creation Ordinance of God.  In Genesis 1:26–28, we see the creation of human beings—made in the image of God—and the subsequent call on His image bearers to imitate Him by being productive. Fundamentally, stewardship is about exercising our God-given dominion over His creation, reflecting the image of our creator God in His care, responsibility, maintenance, protection, and beautification of His creation.

Human beings are both interdependent with God’s physical creation and yet unique within it.  Humans alone bear His image.  An important aspect of being God’s image-bearers is that humans have dominion status.  God declares in Genesis 1:26-30 that humans have the responsibility to rule (have dominion) over His world.  Humans are to serve and watch lovingly, almost worshipfully, over God’s creation.

Our interdependence with the rest of God’s world is manifested by our daily dependence on water, sun, air and food to sustain life.  There is indeed a global ecosystem.  It therefore matters to God how we oversee and manage water, the trees and animals.  It matters to God how we farm the land, engage in the mining of minerals, drill for oil, etc.

Francis Schaeffer has argued that humans have two relationships–one upward and one downward.  The upward relationship accentuates the personal relationship humans have with God through Jesus Christ; a relationship not enjoyed by the rest of the created order.  The downward relationship accentuates the “creaturely” relationship that humans share with the rest of the created order (see Genesis 2:7 and Job 34:14-15).  Believers therefore have a profound stewardship responsibility:  Exercise dominion over God’s world as we manage His world for our benefit and for His glory.

How are we, dominion stewards of God’s world, doing in our stewardship responsibilities?  It is difficult to conclude that we are managing things well.  For example, we cannot deny that our climate is changing.  For more than a century, scientists have understood the basic physics behind why greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide cause warming. These gases make up just a small fraction of the atmosphere but exert outsized control on Earth’s climate by trapping some of the planet’s heat before it escapes into space. This greenhouse effect is important: It’s why our planet so far from the sun has liquid water and life.  However, during the Industrial Revolution, people started burning coal and other fossil fuels to power factories, smelters and steam engines, which added more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Ever since, human activities have been heating the planet.  Julia Rosen provides a few undeniable facts:

• Average global temperatures have increased by 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.2 degrees Celsius, since 1880, with the greatest changes happening in the late 20th century. Land areas have warmed more than the sea surface and the Arctic has warmed the most—by more than 4 degrees Fahrenheit just since the 1960s. Temperature extremes have also shifted. In the United States, daily record highs now outnumber record lows two-to-one.
• This warming is unprecedented in recent geologic history. A famous illustration, first published in 1998 and often called the hockey-stick graph, shows how temperatures remained fairly flat for centuries (the shaft of the stick) before turning sharply upward (the blade).
• Surface temperatures actually mask the true scale of climate change, because the ocean has absorbed 90 percent of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases. Measurements collected over the last six decades by oceanographic expeditions and networks of floating instruments show that every layer of the ocean is warming up. According to one study, the ocean has absorbed as much heat between 1997 and 2015 as it did in the previous 130 years.
• We also know that ice sheets and glaciers are shrinking while sea levels are rising.  Arctic sea ice is disappearing. In the spring, snow melts sooner and plants flower earlier. Animals are moving to higher elevations and latitudes to find cooler conditions. And droughts, floods and wildfires have all gotten more extreme.

So, what do we do?  Bjorn Lomborg, President of the Copenhagen Consensus and visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, offers a balanced approach to thinking about climate change.  Humorously he writes, “More than one million people die in traffic accidents globally each year. Overnight, governments could solve this entirely man-made problem by reducing speed limits everywhere to 3 miles an hour, but we’d laugh any politician who suggested it out of office. It would be absurd to focus solely on lives saved if the cost would be economic and societal destruction. Yet politicians widely employ the same one-sided reasoning in the name of fighting climate change . . . That assertion lets politicians obscure—and avoid responsibility for—lopsided climate-policy trade-offs. Lawmakers contend that because climate change is real and man-made, it is only scientifically logical that the world end fossil-fuel use. Any downsides are a mathematical inevitability rather than something politicians chose to inflict on constituents.”

For example, the Biden administration has set the goal of achieving a net-zero emissions economy by no later than 2050. President Biden has pushed costly yet ineffective programs such as the Inflation Reduction Act to reduce U.S. emissions. Lomborg observes that “This way of thinking conflates climate science and climate policy. Man-made climate change exists, but what societies do in response is still a matter of choice. When politicians tell us we must ‘follow the science’ toward extreme climate policies, they are really trying to shut down the discussion of enormous, unsustainable costs . . . Climate change is a real problem but isn’t the imminent existential crisis of which the media and activist politicians breathlessly warn.”

Lomborg further details the following conclusions:

• The data show that climate-related deaths from droughts, storms, floods and fires have declined by more than 97% over the last century, from nearly 500,000 annually to fewer than 15,000 in the 2020s. That’s a real human cost but far from cataclysmic. More people die in traffic accidents in an average week.
• Pervasive environmental fear-mongering has encouraged anxious protesters across the world’s wealthiest nations to proclaim that we “just stop oil,” along with coal and gas. That’s as ludicrous as trying to end traffic deaths by setting speed limits to near zero worldwide. Their demands would prevent some deaths but also destroy life as we know it.  Why?  Over the past two centuries, global life quality has dramatically improved, to a large extent because of an incredible increase in energy, mostly from the harnessing of fossil fuels. That has made agriculture, industry and transportation vastly more productive. Average life spans have more than doubled, hunger has dramatically declined, and real income has increased tenfold. We risk all that progress if we just stop using fossil fuels.
• The world still gets four-fifths of its energy from fossil fuels, because renewable sources rarely provide good alternatives. Half the world’s population entirely depends on food grown with synthetic fertilizer produced almost entirely by natural gas. If we rapidly ceased using fossil fuels, four billion people would suddenly be without food. Add the billions of people dependent on fossil-fuel heating in the winter, along with our dependence on fossil fuels for steel, cement, plastics and transportation, and it is no wonder that one recent estimate by economist Neil Record showed an abrupt end to fossil fuel use would cause six billion deaths in less than a year.
• A new peer-reviewed study of all the scientific estimates of climate-change effects shows the most likely cost of global warming averaged across the century will be about 1% of global gross domestic product, reaching 2% by the end of the century. This is a very long way from global extinction.  Draconian net-zero climate policies, on the other hand, will be prohibitively costly. The latest peer-reviewed climate economic research shows the total cost will average $27 trillion each year across the century, reaching $60 trillion a year in 2100. Net zero is more than seven times as costly as the climate problem it tries to address.

Wisely, Lomborg counsels, “Global warming is a real challenge. Over the next century the costs associated will be the equivalent of one or two recessions. The common-sense response would be to recognize that both climate change and carbon-cutting policies incur costs, then negotiate a balance that puts the most effective measures first . . . Our goal in forming climate policy should be the same we bring to traffic laws and any other political question: achieve more benefits than costs to society. A richer world is much more resilient against weather extremes. In the short term, therefore, policymakers should focus on lifting the billions of people still in poverty out of it, both because it will make them more resilient against extreme weather and because it will do so much good in a myriad of other ways. For the longer term, governments and companies should invest in green-energy research and development to drive down the costs and increase the reliability of fossil-fuel alternatives.”

Human beings are accountable to God for how they manage His planet.  Thus, we cannot ignore the reality of climate change and human responsibility for it.  But, draconian measures stipulated by government need balance, careful thought and wise policies that “achieve more benefits than costs to society.”  Most governments are not doing this.  Instead, most, including the United States, are sowing seeds of fear and panic and proposing policies that are neither wise nor prudent.

See Bjorn Lomborg, “‘Follow the Science’ Leads to Ruin” in the Wall Street Journal (14 March 2024) and “Climate Change Hasn’t Set the World on Fire” (31 July 2023); and Julia Rosen, “The Science of Climate Change Explained: Facts, Evidence and Proof” in the New York Times (6 November 2021).