THE WEEK

New Beltway bumper sticker: warning: this car PROTECTED BY CARL ROWAN.

The “futurist” at The Economist—he is the gentleman charged by tradition with defining national and global problems ten years down the line—likes to point out that it has almost never been the case, since Walter Bagehot established the tradition over a hundred years ago, that a problem foreseen turned out to be the problem that eventuated. For instance, we haven’t run out of oil, as was predicted fifty years ago, nor perished from nuclear war, as is predicted every few minutes. Whether the Greenhouse Threat will go down a decade hence as another twitch from Club of Rome types we do not know. There have been oscillations in global temperature over time (it was cold cold cold in the seventeenth century, warmed up in the eighteenth, and has risen and fallen since), but evidence accumulates that the so-called greenhouse effect is man-made. What to do? There is a sense in which true global action is enjoined on us, if the scientists tell us by the end of the year (they are attempting to meet that deadline for a reliable report) that joint action is necessary. On the other hand, how much is carbon dioxide in Africa contributing to the greenhouse effect? Or—for that matter—in the Soviet Union? More blacks in South Africa own automobiles than whites in Russia. It is soothing to know that there is nothing to be done about it—for a while.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

New Beltway bumper sticker: warning: this car PROTECTED BY CARL ROWAN.

The “futurist” at The Economist—he is the gentleman charged by tradition with defining national and global problems ten years down the line—likes to point out that it has almost never been the case, since Walter Bagehot established the tradition over a hundred years ago, that a problem foreseen turned out to be the problem that eventuated. For instance, we haven’t run out of oil, as was predicted fifty years ago, nor perished from nuclear war, as is predicted every few minutes. Whether the Greenhouse Threat will go down a decade hence as another twitch from Club of Rome types we do not know. There have been oscillations in global temperature over time (it was cold cold cold in the seventeenth century, warmed up in the eighteenth, and has risen and fallen since), but evidence accumulates that the so-called greenhouse effect is man-made. What to do? There is a sense in which true global action is enjoined on us, if the scientists tell us by the end of the year (they are attempting to meet that deadline for a reliable report) that joint action is necessary. On the other hand, how much is carbon dioxide in Africa contributing to the greenhouse effect? Or—for that matter—in the Soviet Union? More blacks in South Africa own automobiles than whites in Russia. It is soothing to know that there is nothing to be done about it—for a while.