Virtue ethics on Radio National, feat. Stanley Hauerwas
Resonding to a comment by Lynton, here is a start at defining what ‘stewardliness’ means in the area of global warming. If one accepts the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC) objective* of “the stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous** anthropogenic interference with the climate system”, and their figure of 2 degrees C as the maximum allowable global average temperature increase over pre-industrial levels, then stewardliness means working in whatever circles one has authority over or influence in to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We all at least have some authority over our own lives, and possibly also over a household, or business unit, or church etc etc.
* lots more of this sort of stuff in Dr Bert Metz’s presentation from the CC conference
** see local prof Peter Barrett’s article for what ‘dangerous’ means.
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Why should Christians accept the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC) objective?
because not everything out of the UN is complete humbug
Because it repeats the Christian’s initial thrice: CCC, quenching our fallen human nature’s narcisist need
Um, what?
Ahhh, he would mean Calvinist Cadet Corps.
Tim, why wouldn’t Christians accept it? Why shouldn’t they infact work even harder to keep global warming as low as possible?
Ken Ring has something to say about global warming. His article on ozone depletion is interesting, also.
Re 6: Why should they? I’m hoping someone will provide biblical reasons as to why I should start putting heaps of time and energy into ensuring the world cools down. What is actually wrong with the world getting warmer? What’s wrong with emitting carbon?
Thanks Dan. Who’s Ken Ring? Should we trust him more than the UN’s climate scientists?
Tim, see that article I linked to from Peter Barrett about why CC is bad news. Also possibly of interest is this statement on climate change from bunch of evangelical leaders (including Rich Warren) which sums the whole thing up pretty well.
And who’s saying heaps of time & effort? I’m thinking of incremental cumulative changes in whichever spheres you have influence.
A biblical reason for being concerned about global warming is the principle of caring for the creation. If we are damaging the world’s ecosystem for the sake of our own good pleasure, greed and selfishness we should be ashamed and change. The science, on the whole, shows we are doing this and therefore I believe it is a major concern for Christians.
There are many negative consequences of warming the earth up, for example, higher sea levels flooding coastal land, more severe storms, killing of many sea creatures due to both temperature and increase CO2 in water, and extreme water shortages. You can see more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_global_warming
Tim, there’s a certain amount of give/slack in any ecosystem – e.g. a fish population in a particular lake could maintain itself indefinitely up to a certain percentage being eaten by me every year, but if you went over that threshold they’d die off. I’m saying in some ways we’re living beyond the resilience of the world’s ecosystems.
If you are worried about emissions generated by your long-distance travel, you can purchase carbon credits at for instance http://www.carbonplanet.com/. Hurray!
Hmm. Yeh. It’s not that we are having an impact on ecosystems. It’s that we are having a large and destructive impact on so very many ecosystems, and that in a hugely unsustainable way (obvious example massive, unsustainable deforestation of natural forests). And the reason why?
Convenience, laziness, greed, contentment with the status-quo of the world. We are far too happy, taking the one ‘talent’ of stewardliness that we get handed by the world and sitting on it, thinking that in the end God will be happy with having that one talent to show for ourselves in the end.
We should be rising above that, taking that one talent, investing it. Growing it. Put a little back into restoring Creation in imitation of the complete restoration of our lives by God.
By all means don’t look at me as an example in this regard. I positively suck.
Damn,
someone kick me, I’m starting to wax lyrical like Aaron.
And yeh, just read that link from Ken Ring. I’m no screaming Global Warmer person (though I do believe that there is solid evidence pointing to it. And if we are wrong and act on it, what is the loss. And also I wouldn’t be surprised by it due to the crappy way we treat the world in other areas), but that website looked like it was written by a non-scientist attempting to critique science. To be honest, it is actually quite convincing in many places. But then he goes and ruins credibility with some really really dumb stuff. Such as:
“Like CO and N2O, CO2 is heavier than air. By how much? The molecular weight of air is 29, that of CO2 is 44, nearly double. CFCs have a MW of 100. It is therefore utterly impossible for these super-heavy gases to rise to form a ‘greenhouse cover’.” – We know that CO2 and methane and CFC’s get into the higher atmosphere, we can ruddy well measure them. It’s like saying O3 (ozone) is 1.5 times as heavy as air, therefore there can’t be any ozone layer….
“Wind and diffusion can transport gases but that is to do with mother nature, not man” …… Er.. so any gasses produced by man won’t get transported by wind or diffusion. (not to mention ‘mother nature’- Wiccan heretic this Ken must be :| )
“Fact: More CO2 is absorbed by young plants than by grown-up trees. If all we are worried about is CO2 absorption, it would make more sense to cut down the rain forests and plant saplings or even leave it as grass, both of which would absorb far more CO2 than mature trees do. It is hard to imagine environmentalists advocating the cutting down of the rain forests.” Ohh dear. This guy isn’t thinking straight. More CO2 is absorbed BY growing plants, but more CO2 is absorbed IN mature trees. I mean, they are bigger, and made of carbon. Therefore they store more carbon. Stands to reason that cutting them down and replacing them with grass is a net CO2 storage loss.
“It is only a human vanity to imagine that our relatively small inhabited percentage of global surface has the ability to alter the climate of the whole planet.” – humans seem to be more than capable of having global effects on a whole lotta stuff from their small percentage. We have ennacted massive decimation of world-wide fish stocks, forest cover, species diversity, etc. The fact is that we tiny specklets of people are damn good at ruining things.
“To warm a pot of water you have to have heat from below. Has anyone found a big heater yet under the sea that wasn’t there before?” – Putting a pot of water into a warm room will warm it up. Goodness, I wonder where the big under-pot heater is?
“Inaccurate Predictions
Some scientists are sometimes outrageously wrong. In March 1998 they declared that a 2km wide asteroid called 1997 XF11 was on a near collision course with Earth. It was later discovered that the asteroid would miss the earth by at least a million kilometres.” – in astronomical terms, that is pretty darn close.
“There are other arguments against any possibility that runaway global warming could be occurring. Let us for one moment assume that the world IS heating up. Firstly, the evaporation cycle would increase due to the heat. This would also happen if the sealevels rose, because of the greater surface of water available for that evaporation. A greater evaporation cycle means more rain will form and fall back on Earth and, as rain is not selective, there be more to fall on the poles too, creating more ice and snow there.” – More evaporation means more atmospheric water, which means increased greenhouse effect (water absorbs radiation just like CO2 does). More rain falling on the poles making more ice will release more energy into the polar regions, seeing as ice formation is an exothermic process (ie – you make more ice from rain, you heat the oceans/atmosphere more).
Actually that whole ‘incorrect predictions’ thingamy seems to be implying that every big ‘scare’ is simply people trying to make money off people being afraid.
So basically while I do agree with the man that we shouldn’t swallow down everything scientists say about global warming, I don’t like the way he argues (pretty much saying that global warming was completely invented simply to secure research funding), and I don’t like the ‘lets completely ignore it as even a possibility’ stance.
Yeh, and I read his article on Ozone Depletion. The ‘chemistry’ he cites there hurts my brain. As I recall I have previously had a ‘crack’ at that article previously when it was brought up on the Ozone Hole debate a ways back. If you are looking for some inconsistent science, Ken Ring seems to be your man.
Thanks Matt & Tim.
Tim, I would say that learning the extent of our captivity to sin/entanglement in sinful structures is a beginning and imperfect steps are worth taking. Also, it’s not always a question of jobs vs. sustainability, it’s often trinkets vs. sustainability. ‘Sustainability’ is a woolly word, but what I mean by it is “leaving things as good as or better than you found them.” ‘Stewardship’ adds “because the things you think you have are temporarily entrusted to you by someone who cares how you treated them.”
Good golly, even no-Kyoto John Howard believes in climate change. Worst drought in a century, every major Australian city on serious water restrictions and now thirty-plus degree days in October have freaked me out sufficiently.
Re: CO2 in trees.
If you’re using the felled trees to build stuff, then the carbon is still ‘in storage’, so to speak, so felling mature trees and planting new ones will take more CO2 ‘out of the loop’ than will leaving mature trees standing, as Ken says.
Of course it’s a different story if you’re using felled mature trees for fuel, but as far as I understand it much of the rainforestry felled these days is for timber, rather than for fuel.
As you say Mr Baird, while some of what Ring says is mildly convincing, his credibility is questionable. I was really just playing devil’s advocate by linking to him.
Speaking for myself, I think it’s too easy to put the cause of nature before the plight of the widow and the orphan. I see New Zealand’s ratification of the Kyoto Protocol as such.
Dan, how will the KP hurt widows and orphans? I refer you to claim 2 in the aforelinked Evangelical Climate Initiative’s statement: “The consequences of climate change will be significant, and will hit the poor the hardest.”
Healthy forests are also good for keeping a given area of land a few degrees cooler than it would be without the cover.
The KP will, without any doubt, come at an economic cost to the country.
I’m guessing that industry will wear much of that cost, and given that our GDP per capital is significantly lower that comparitive countries in the OECD, it will be the workers that will suffer.
This is a real cost.
The cost of Claim 2 is hypothetical; based on unsubstantiated assumptions of things like sea-levels rising, more frequent heat-waves, etc.
The land might be a few degrees cooler, but the same amount of sun is shining; the same amount of heat is entering the system. The heat just gets sunk into the trees/foliage instead, which have more surface area than the land, so the heat gets dissipated into the air instead. And isn’t warmer air what global warming is all about?
KP will cost money. If the government doesn’t act fast and implement either a carbon tax or carbon trading scheme to transfer the cost of carbon to the emitters, then we will be left to foot the bill.
Economists such as Dr Steve Hatfield-Dodds have shown that deep cuts in emissions still allow for a slower, but positive, GDP growth. Annual income will increase, just at a slightly lower rate (a difference of 0.1% growth of GDA pa between action and inaction in his models).
So aside from the environmental benefits, what are any other benefits of the KP?
Who will enforce our obligations if we fail to meet them?
I’m assuming the UN will look at trade embargoes, etc, should a signatory not honour their end of the bargain?
Other benefits: make baby Jesus smile
Enforcement: Angry Jesus come and smack us, smack us good
I’m not talking about practicing good stewardship or not, but rather the benefits (or otherwise) of the KP.
O I don’t really know, but handled cunningly at government level it could stimulate profitable innovation in lots of areas. The European Union Trading Scheme (which I understand to be analogous to the KP) sounds like it has been reasonably successful in that regard so far. That scheme is also designed to encourage the assistance of developing countries too.
Re- Dan on trees.
What you say is indeed true. However, the storage benefits will be minor (grasses don’t store much carbon over the longhaul because they keep upping and dying and being et (eaten)) Also there are significant ecconomical impacts from deforestation. Take Africa for example. Many places they chop/ burn down trees (build houses etc) and plant nice grassy type crops. What results? Desert. Rain fall becomes screwy, crops die, and the ‘widow and orphan’ (the poor farmers tilling the land) suffer. Hacking down the rainforest would have such large impacts as to be completely unfunny. And that’s just looking ecconomically. There is also the massive array of animal and plantlifes that God saw fit to exist who depend on said trees.
Also, if the KP is implemented good, the polluters should be the ones taking it on the chin, not the employees. But yes, hardships may come of it, and as a near universal truth, when hardships come, they generally strike the lowest of society the hardest.
so who’s planting a vege garden this spring??
It’s already growing – yeah I know it’s easy, up here in sunny northland I dig out the Kakouia(sp) grass, and throw some plants and seeds in the ground; then the pukekoes keep it weeded, the semi tropical rain keep it moist, and my belly keeps it prunned.
Martin/Tunesifter
Kathy has. Lynton is (I think). I am pretty slack but will do the odd bit here and there. Hello Martin!
Tim- By very definition, if you use it up, it is no longer a sustainable resource. Do you have any examples where depletion of a resource has benefitted the poor over the longterm?
Yip mines getting some work done with weekend.
Re 34: Sorry, ‘renewable resource’ may have been the term I should have used.
Well surely the use of wood (renewable) has benefitted the poor when it has been used to build houses for them. And I would argue that oil (non-renewable) has been used to benefit the poor when business that use it have employed lots of unemployed people.
I don’t understand comment 35 sorry Lynton.
Tim, there are stewardly, non-monoculture ways of approaching forestry, so that after getting lots of poor-people-housing wood out of it, there’s still a working forest left behind. E.g. the Menominee Indians approach mentioned by Wendell Berry in his article Conserving Forest Communities, and Dr Sean Weaver’s (from VUW) ideas for profitable sustainable carbon-farm forestry in Vanuatu [2MB PDF] (I think it was Vanuatu, might have been Fiji) from the CC conference.
I haven’t heard anyone argue that we shouldn’t have used lots of oil, just lots of people saying it’s near or past peak production and decreasing availability might cause trouble. Oil is so embedded in all aspects of recent economic history that its difficult/impossible to separate it out and say anything useful about how things might have been without it. Fewer rich Ay-rabs would be one thing, I guess. Fewer Ay-rabs full stop actually.
My comment was in response to comment 31.
Tim: Yes. It might be difficult to prove that use of oil on the whole has been positive for poor people. I don’t know where you’d start with that sort of calculation.
You’re trying to prove that it’s OK to use up a limited resource if it will assist the poor, right?
I think we shouldn’t treat use a limited resource in way which will likely impoverish our descendents. E.g., oil could be burnt at a slower rate, at a rate within the carrying capacity of the global ecosystem (a la my comment #12 above). Which is what the KP is trying to achieve.
Re- 36.
Tim. You chop down all the forest, and build all the poor people homes. Then what happens? You’ve upheaved the raincycle (which forests play a huge part in), it doesnt rain as often, the poor people in their nice wooden homes starve.
Near as I can tell, the long-term impacts of using up any ‘renewable’ resource is rarely if ever positive for the poor peoples, especially for them that live in the now depleted areas. This seems to be the case for loads of things, including water, wood, soil fertility, etc.
What I can’t see is why we must ‘use up’ renewable resources at all. I’m not against using them, but ‘using them up’ seems a dash irresponsible strategy, laying the burden on our decendents to fix it back to how it was themselves. It’s a parasitic way of interracting with the earth. God didn’t put us here to be parasites, but to be in a mutually beneficial relationship – we nurture the earth the earth nurtures us.
I have an interesting book on nomadic peoples all around the world, from the San in Southern Africa to Bedouin in the Middle East to the Inuit in North America. Their way of life, seems to me the ultimate in sustainability.
However I’d be reluctant to follow that way of life completely. I think there is a difficult balance to strike between development and security in dealing with our ecosystem. Within a religious framework, excessive confidence in our human abilities (in, for example the faith we show in technology to solve any and all problems which may arise) results in destruction. And since the dawn of the industrial age, we have deliberately ignored the welfare of our wider ecology and the animals that share it with us. However we should develop our environment (yes, I heark back to the much abused creation mandate), but it needs to be done responsibly.
In some cases, technology allows us to ‘get around’ a problem, in other cases it causes more problems. This is particulalry so if it is trusted to supply solutions to problems outside its purview.
I believe that all sorts of bad things have happened in our world which I am concerned about. For instance, unnecessary depletion of rainforests, inadequate research on CFCs, greenhouse gases, pesticides, fertilisers, significant loss of biodioversity across many different species of fish, and other animals. The list could go on and on and then on some more. But at present, I am reluctant to add human-caused global warming to that list for the following reasons:
(a) a lot of key spokespeople are politically motivated, and enormous simplifications are made to suit peoples agendas. In particular I strongly distrust the IPCC statements.
(b) The world, at the end of the day I do not consider to be rational or suitable to rational analysis. Present ecological models have very basic flaws and have very little predictive ability over very short periods.
(c) The ability of science to diagnose and allow us to make correct choices with regard to ‘global’ issues like climate change is very limited in my opinion (and in fact trust in it to answer questions like these is part of the cause of these problems).
(d) People I know personally appear to be unwilling to discuss or debate this issue in the detail. Instead, it is taking as a watershed, where those who “really care” believe in man-made climate change, and all others essentially are defending the status quo and are simply ignored.
(e) The present lack of clear scientific agreement as to the impact of human activities on the ecology. The data is very very tentative.
(f) The lack of knowledge on how the earth’s environment functions in response to temperature changes. There seems to be some evidence that temperatures have been significantly higher in the past (ice cores). Somehow we got from there to here without (it seems?) major damage.
(g) The lack of ambiguity in presentation of evidence. Frequently evidence is taken to be clearly pointing either to or away from global warming as though it’s clear cut. It’s anything but that.
(h) The lack of clear mechanisms to deal with carbon trading. If carbon trading was implemented in NZ tomorrow the price of electricity would increase dramatically and the hydro generation owners would make massive profits – an unintended consequence I’m sure, but it highlights the need to have a robust system in place to deal with carbon credits etc.
The idea of the Kyoto protocol it seems to me is misguided in all sorts of ways. For instance, it would penalize NZ who has developed fairly environmentally friendly energy resources just as much as heavy polluters like the United States or Australia.
It would make sense for there to be taxes and penalties on poisoning of the environment based on local conditions (and monitored locally) or for extreme toxins global conditions (one example is Sulfur Hexafluoride which is extremely damaging to the upper atmosphere and is commonly used in electrical switchgear). The evidence for damage to an ecosystem at a local level is much more convincing to me than evidence of human caused global warming at levels of concern.
However I don’t mind paying a few extra dollars for my power my water, my clothes and so on, because I think they’ve been artificially low for too many years caused by a culpable lack of concern for the environment by greedy irreligious capitalist bastards.
I would be interested in someone with more knowledge than I responding to my point (d) above by presenting an examination of some of the statements in the article below.
http://www.climatechangeissues.com/files/science/defreitas.pdf
Perhaps someone like Matthew Baird (re: 14,15 – good) could give an opinion… Its presentation lacks some niceties (and it looks like it was published in a petroleum geology journal) but for all that, I found it interesting.
Is it really a problem that we use up non-renewable resources, if a satisfactory alternative can be found?
I know this is a crude example, but given advances in technology, alternative fuels and electricity look set to power vehicles more and more so into the future. So if we use up all the oil, we’ll still be just fine when it comes to transport. Like I said, this isn’t the best example, since oil is used for other things besides fuel, but you get what I mean.
Dear Uncle Dennis, we have a small yet thriving garden this year. We have a few of everthing it seems; Carrots, peas, beetroot, silverbeet, tomatos, capsicums, baby lettuce, courgettes, cauliflower, brocalli, a range of herbs, strawberries, potatos… all fuelled by food scraps that have fed our worm bin. Since we have had a worm bin, our rubbish bag output has halved. It does take effort. A good portion of our labour monday was spent in the garden, getting a trailor load of compost and planting. Still, I think it’s effort that is well placed. I could have spent the day in front of the pc playing games (which I was tempted to do), but I think that would have been a waste on that occasion.
you’re a chip off the old block young Dave (your mother’s)
I’m telling Mrs Holtslag you said she was an old block
There are at least three ways to do anything: the right way, the wrong way, and the way that just works. The Way That Just Works (TWTJ) has been popular since the Industrial Revolution: it involves massive returns at a cost that is universally underestimated. It is not the best way, but it gets the job done. Using two thousand pounds of steel to move two hundred pounds of person from home to work, for instance, is certainly not the best mode of transportation, but it works. Almost all of our current industries function in this non-ideal state (manufacturing, trade, transport, agriculture, mass-media…).
There is a price to pay for doing things in a way that just works, but isn’t the best. At this time in history, we are awakening to the possibility of some of these consequences: anthropogenic climate change; extinction of species; polluted air and water and the pollution of the mental environment; catastrophic weather events; energy crises; violent societal unrest intra- and inter-nationally; the list goes on… In short: our actions are creating a toxic mental, social, and natural culture.
Doing things in a way that is less than ideal has gotten us a vast amount of progress in a short space of time; we should embrace that progress and see it as a stepping-stone towards developing better ways of doing things, e.g..
[p.s. for those of you playing at home: you might see a correlation between ‘doing things in a non-ideal way’ and ‘sin’; you might also see a correlation between ‘toxic culture’ and ‘the wages of sin’. If you did, give yourself 15 points…]
To add a tangent that I’ve thought of while reading through the last few days posts,
Instead of looking for alternaltive oil/petrol substitutes shouldn’t we also be questioning/looking at the reasons why we need them – living far away from our place of work, driving to take part in a community/church/friends that are far away, eating foods from the other side of the world etc.
I realise that at different times our situations may deem it necessary to live further away etc, (for me to see family I have to drive at least 8hrs – although I could bus….)
What are we gaining from having this spacial disjointedness in our lives?
What are we loosing from having this spacial disjointedness in our lives?
Martin
(Hello Matthew)
http://www.leithart.com/archives/000045.php
Yes, it is difficult (the project of dedicated generations) to learn how to live well here.
For a sceptical look at GW