Denmark just became the world’s first nation to pay money for its contribution to “loss or damage” caused by climate change. At the first face-to-face meeting of UN nation leaders in three years, caused by the pandemic, Danish development minister Flemming Møller Mortensen announced that Denmark would contribute $13 million which the UN will administer. He said in a prepared statement, “It is grossly unfair that the world’s poorest should suffer the most from the consequences of climate change, to which they have contributed the least.”
For some time now, UN General Secretary António Guterres has been asking wealthy UN member nations to tax fossil fuel companies and use the money to help poor nations that are suffering the most from the destruction caused by heating the planet. Many third world nations that are suffering the most from climate change have been calling for nations to do has Denmark has announced this week. It remains to be seen if it is the start of a significant movement.
I suspect that oil and gas companies eventually will suffer a similar fate as have tobacco companies in that both industries lied to the public for decades about their products, claiming they were not detrimental to human health when in fact they were, and they knew it. It is now thousands of lawsuits that have been filed around the world by both nations and NGO organizations against oil and gas companies for this destruction that they have caused to planet earth. Of course, just about all human beings are culpable in this destructive raising of earth’s atmospheric temperature by about 2 degrees since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Perhaps the worst devastation is that it is causing ice to melt and thereby raise ocean levels, causing low lying lands to flood.
The apocalyptic book of Revelation in the Bible has a verse about the destruction of the earth such as this human-induced global warming. This visionary book reveals that 24 angels, called “elders,” rule life in heaven in cooperation with God’s sovereignty. And they lead in heaven’s worship of God. In vision form, this book states concerning the end of this age on earth:
“Then the twenty-four elders who sit on their thrones before God fell on their faces and worshiped God, singing, ‘We give you thanks, Lord God Almighty, who are and who were, for you have taken your great power and begun to reign. The nations raged, but your wrath has come, and the time for judging the dead, for rewarding your servants, the prophets and saints and all who fear your name, both small and great, and for destroying those who destroy the earth'” (Revelation 11.16-18 NRSV).
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