Teetering on which edge?

It is now reasonable to consider global prosperity. There can be a day when no person's life needs to be consumed by mere survival, when no person's actions need to be motivated solely by resistance to starvation. There can be hope.

In a relatively brief period of history, people free to apply human ingenuity have attained remarkable standards of living in what have come to be known as developed countries. People in developing countries of Asia and Latin America are rapidly catching up.

The role of freedom

Freedom makes it possible: freedom from oppressive governance, from restrictions on commerce, from the need to perform most work manually. Where government restraint and cheap energy give human ingenuity room to work and people freedom to enjoy the rewards, prosperity can be the rule and poverty the exception.

This can happen worldwide. Government restraint is in fashion. Energy is cheap and likely to stay that way. Global communications and liberalized trade broaden and strengthen the trends. Even Africa, with so much of its population still mired in survival economics and tribal politics, shows new signs of economic life.

It's all too much for the world's ruling elite.

"We as a species, as a planet, are teetering on the edge," declared United Nations General Assembly President Razali Ismail of Malaysia last month in New York, "living unsustainably and perpetuating inequity and may soon pass the point of no return."

So it went last month at the U.N.'s Earth Summit and the economic summit of leading industrialized nations in Denver. The ruling elite declared the sky to be falling and demanded no less than subversion of economic progress to environmentalist supposition.

The elite have been duped into believing that human activity is warming the planet and threatening disaster. Their evidence: a tentative suggestion by a U.N. scientific group that human effects appear in climate data.

The so-called human signal is no reason to panic. Its existence and extent are far from certain and minuscule among phenomena not traced to humans. Yet it's enough to rally European leaders. British Prime Minister Tony Blair tells Britons they'll have to change their lifestyles to combat global warming. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl blithely declares that "the Europeans are simply further along on the issue" of global warming than Americans and others brazen enough to question warming theories. European Commission President Jacques Santer wails that "the future of the planet is at stake."

It is natural for people newly equipped with computer models to overstate their collective role in climate phenomena. The humbling fact is that climate changes, with or without human help, in ways far too large and complex for computer models to predict. Yet when people come to believe they dominate nature, their leaders seem all the more powerful. This may be why the elite leap so readily to the worst warming presumptions.

U.S. President Bill Clinton rescued the Earth Summit from itself by sustaining his government's opposition to specific targets and timetables for greenhouse-gas emissions. But Clinton still felt obliged to assert the nonexistent certainty of the warming threat and to stoke worst-case fantasies about a 2-ft sea level rise.

Edge of progress

If the world, as Ismail says, teeters on any edge, it is of economic and-yes-environmental progress such as it has never known. The ingredients are at hand: spreading freedom and trade, flourishing technology, and cheap energy. All that stands in the way are vestigial impulses to compromise liberties in service to state prerogatives.

Freedom-loving people should wonder which prospect frightens their leaders more: a world cringing in panic over an uncertain centigrade degree or two of global temperature or one soaring on the wings of freedom and general hope. There's no question which option better serves interests of the ruling elite.