Environment

The False Promise of Green Energy [VIDEO]


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Economist Andrew Morris on Patriarch Bartholomew’s ideas on sustainable energy: “[H]e’s asking the wrong questions.”

Source: Acton Institute Power Blog | HT: Koinonia

For PowerBlog readers, we’re posting the video from Andrew Morriss’ April 26 Acton Lecture Series talk in Grand Rapids, Mich., on “The False Promise of Green Energy.” Here’s the lecture description: “Green energy advocates claim that transforming America to an economy based on wind, solar, and biofuels will produce jobs for Americans, benefits for the environment, and restore American industry. Prof. Andrew Morriss, co-author of The False Promise of Green Energy (Cato, 2011), shows that these claims are based on unrealistic assumptions, poorly thought out models, and bad data. Rather than leading us to an eco-utopia, he argues that current green energy programs are crony capitalism that impoverishes American consumers and destroys American jobs.”

Morriss, an Orthodox Christian, begins with a quote from Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople, the Istanbul, Turkey-based hierarch. Bartholomew said this in response to the March 2011 tsunami in Japan and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster that followed:

Our Creators granted us the gifts of the sun, wind, water and ocean, all of which may safely and sufficiently provide energy. Ecologically-friendly science and technology has discovered ways and means of producing sustainable forms of energy for our ecosystem. Therefore, we ask: Why do we persist in adopting such dangerous sources of energy?

“The Ecumenical Patriarch and I don’t see eye to eye on this,” Morriss said. “I think he’s asking the wrong questions.”

Also see the PowerBlog post “Green Patriarch: No Nukes.”

In his book, Morriss and his co-authors warn that “the concrete results of following [green energy] policies will be a decline in living standards around the globe, including for the world’s poorest; changes in lifestyle that Americans do not want; and a weakening of the technological progress that market forces have delivered, preventing us from finding real solutions to the real problems we face.” Many of those lifestyle changes will come from suddenly spending far more on energy than we’d like. Green technologies mean diverting production from cheap sources, such as coal and oil, to more expensive, highly subsidized ones, like wind and solar. These price spikes won’t be limited to our electricity bills either, the authors argue. “Anything that increases the price of energy will also increase the price of goods that use energy indirectly.”

The better solution to improving America’s energy economy, the book shows, is to let the market work by putting power in the hands of consumers. But “many environmental pressure groups don’t want to leave conservation to individuals, preferring government mandates to change energy use.” In other words, green-job proponents know they’re pushing a bad product. Rather than allow the market to expose the bad economics of green energy, they’d use the power of government to force expensive and unnecessary transformation.

Morriss is also an editor of the forthcoming Silent Spring at 50: The False Crises of Rachel Carson (Cato, September 2012) with Roger Meiners and Pierre Desroches. The blurb for the Carson book notes that she got a lot wrong:

Widely credited with launching the modern environmental movement when published 50 years ago, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had a profound impact on our society. As an iconic work, the book has often been shielded from critical inquiry, but this landmark anniversary provides an excellent opportunity to reassess its legacy and influence. In Silent Spring at 50: The False Crises of Rachel Carson a team of national experts explores the book’s historical context, the science it was built on, and the policy consequences of its core ideas. The conclusion makes it abundantly clear that the legacy of Silent Spring is highly problematic. While the book provided some clear benefits, a number of Carson’s major arguments rested on what can only be described as deliberate ignorance. Despite her reputation as a careful writer widely praised for building her arguments on science and facts, Carson’s best-seller contained significant errors and sins of omission. Much of what was presented as certainty then was slanted, and today we know much of it is simply wrong.

Morriss is the D. Paul Jones, Jr. & Charlene Angelich Jones Chairholder of Law at the University of Alabama School of Law. He is the author or coauthor of more than 60 book chapters, scholarly articles, and books. He is affiliated with a number of think tanks doing public policy work, including the Property & Environment Research Center in Bozeman, Montana, the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University, the Institute for Energy Research, and the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. In addition, he is a Research Fellow at the New York University Center for Labor and Employment Law. He is chair of the editorial board of the Cayman Financial Review. His scholarship focuses on regulatory issues involving environmental, energy, and offshore financial centers. Over the past ten years he has regularly taught and lectured in China, Greece, Guatemala, Hong Kong, and Nepal.

Morriss earned an A.B. from Princeton University and a J.D., as well as an M.A. in Public Affairs, from the University of Texas at Austin. He received a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After law school, Morriss clerked for U.S. District Judge Barefoot Sanders in the Northern District of Texas and worked for two years at Texas Rural Legal Aid in Hereford and Plainview, Texas.

He was formerly the H. Ross and Helen Workman Professor of Law & Professor of Business at the University of Illinois College of Law and the Galen J. Roush Profesor of Business Law & Regulation at Case Western Reserve University School of Law.

Fr. Michael Butler: Orthodoxy and Environmentalism [AUDIO]


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As a companion to the text of His Beatitude Metropolitan Jonah’s address (“Ascestism and the Consumer Society“) at Acton University published here, we’re posting the audio from a lecture by the Very Rev. Michael Butler on Orthodoxy and Environmentalism. We’re grateful to the Acton Institute for making this lecture available to AOI. To purchase a copy of Fr. Butler’s lecture, or other talks from AU 2011, please visit the organization’s Digital Downloads store (files are $2.99 each).

Fr. Butler, pastor of St. Innocent the Apostle to America Church in Olmsted Falls, Ohio, is also working on an Acton scholarly monograph on Orthodoxy and Environmentalism with Professor Andrew Morriss of the University of Alabama. Prof. Morriss is the D. Paul Jones, Jr. & Charlene Angelich Jones Chairholder of Law.

Fr. Butler’s course description:

Orthodoxy and Environmentalism

Apart from statements by Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople (the “Green Patriarch”), the Orthodox Church has not been widely known for its teaching on environmental issues. This course will present some themes from Orthodox theology, e.g., creation through the Logos, creation as an Icon of God, and the role of mankind in perfecting the world, as an offering to the wider discussion of environmentalism in Christian circles.

Listen here:

Bartholomew I: “Peace is a Matter of Choice”


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This is sure to warm the heart of religious liberals who are always on prowl looking for new ways to establish their righteousness. Global warming is disintegrating like the Death Star penetrated by Luke Skywalker’s missile and another cause has to be found quick. Maybe they can dust off the ‘peacemaker’ jargon. It has a relatively short shelf-life (except when conservatives are in power) but the recycling potential is tremendous.

I mean no disrespect to the WCC, but hearing the same old cant from the same old boomers is like listening to a car alarm that won’t shut off. Why is the Ecumenical Patriarch buying into it? It carries no moral weight or real cultural import. No one is for war. But it is foolish to think that the WCC will have any bearing on war or peace whatsoever. No one apart from their fellow-travelers takes them seriously. And why should they? Nothing about them ever changes.

In an encyclical letter intended to be read in congregations of the Church of Constantinople around the world on Sunday 22 May, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew I welcomes “with great joy” the initiative of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in convening the International Ecumenical Peace Convocation (IEPC) in Kingston, Jamaica from 17 through 25 May 2011.

Source: Overcoming Violence: Churches Seeking Reconciliation and Peace (WCC)

To the Plenitude of the Church:

Grace, Mercy and Peace From our Savior the Lord of Peace

Sunday, May 22, 2011

Beloved brothers and children in Christ,

At the celebration of each Divine Liturgy, after glorifying the divine name and blessing the heavenly kingdom, we offer three petitions “to the Lord” “for peace,” “for the peace from above,” and “for the peace of the whole world.” It is our passionate yearning that our world may reflect the kingdom of God, that the God’s love may reign “on earth as it is in heaven.”

Nevertheless, while such peace is foremost in our prayer, it is not always central in our practice. As faithful disciples of the Lord of peace, we must constantly pursue and persistently proclaim alternative ways that reject violence and war. Human conflict may well be inevitable in our world; but war and violence are certainly not. If this century will be remembered at all, it may be for “the pursuit of what makes for peace.” (Rom. 14.19)

The pursuit of peace has always proved challenging. Yet, our present situation is in at least two ways quite unprecedented. First, never before has it been possible for one group of human beings to eradicate as many people simultaneously; second, never before has humanity been in a position to destroy so much of the planet environmentally. We are faced with radically new circumstances, which demand of us an equally radical commitment to peace.

This is why we welcome with great joy the WCC/International Ecumenical Peace Convocation to be held on May 17-25, 2011, in Kingston, Jamaica, as a fitting conclusion and continuation of the World Council of Churches decade to overcome violence, a global inter-church.initiative to strengthen existing efforts and networks for preventing violence and to inspire the creation of new ones.

Now, the pursuit of peace calls for a radical reversal of what has become the normative way of survival in our world. Peace requires a sense of conversion or metanoia; it requires commitment and courage. Moreover, peacemaking is a matter of individual and institutional choice. We have it in our power either to increase the hurt inflicted on our world or to contribute toward its healing. Once again, it is a matter of choice.

Justice and peace are central themes in Scripture. However, as Orthodox Christians, we also recall the profound tradition of the Philokalia, which emphasizes that peace always – and ultimately – starts in the heart. In the words of St. Isaac the Syrian in the 7th century, “if you make peace with yourself, then heaven and earth will make peace with you.”

Nonetheless, this inner peace must be manifest in every aspect of our life and world. This is what the Jamaica Convocation underlines with its four sub-themes: peace in the community, with the earth, in the marketplace, and among peoples.

In an increasingly complex and violent world, Christian churches have come to recognize that working for peace constitutes a primary expression of their responsibility for the life of the world. They are challenged to move beyond mere rhetorical denunciations of violence, oppression and injustice, and incarnate their ethical judgments into actions that contribute to a culture of peace. This responsibility is grounded on the essential goodness of all human beings by virtue of being in God’s image and the goodness of all that God has created.

Peace is inextricably related to the notion of justice and freedom that God has granted to all human beings through Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit as a gift and vocation. It constitutes a pattern of life that reflects human participation in God’s love for the world. The dynamic nature of peace as gift and vocation does not deny the existence of tensions, which form an intrinsic element of human relationships, but can alleviate their destructive force by bringing justice and reconciliation.

The Church understands peace and peacemaking as an indispensable aspect of its life and mission to the world. It grounds this faith conviction upon the wholeness of the Biblical tradition as it is properly interpreted through the Church’s liturgical experience and practice. The Eucharist provides the space in which one discerns and experiences the fullness of the Christian faith in the history of God’s revelation. It reflects the image of God’s Trinitarian life in human beings and relates in love with the totality of the created world.

This eschatological experience of being in communion with God and participating in God’s love for the created world provides the hermeneutical key by which the community existentially interprets the fullness of Christian tradition, including Scripture, and structures the Church’s life and mission to the world. Love is the core of God’s revelation as it is revealed in Jesus Christ. Thus, in the Patristic tradition the violent texts of Scripture were understood to refer to the spiritual struggle of the believer against the devil, evil and sin. This interpretation implies that in their view the God of Jesus Christ and the Christian faith cannot be identified with violence.

Paradoxically, however, we can only become aware of the impact of our attitudes and actions on other people and on the natural environment, when we are prepared sacrifice some of the things we have learned to hold most dear. Many of our efforts for peace are futile because we are unwilling to forgo established ways of wasting and wanting. We refuse to relinquish wasteful consumerism and prideful nationalism. In peacemaking, then, it is critical that we perceive the impact of our practices on other people (especially the poor) as well as on the environment. This is precisely why there cannot be peace without justice.

“Blessed, then, are the peacemakers; for they shall be called children of God” (Matt. 5.9). To become and be called children of God is to move away from what we want to what God wants, and from what serves our own interests to what respects the rights of others. We must recognize that all human beings, and not only the few, deserve to share the resources of this world.

This is the peace that our Risen Lord offered to His disciples and the hope of our Lord for all of His children. It is also this same peace, which “surpasses all understanding” (Phil. 4.7) that, from the martyred Throne and Mother Church of Constantinople, we invoke upon all of you.

Your fervent supplicant before God,

+BARTHOLOMEW

Archbishop of Constantinople-

New Rome and Ecumenical Patriarch

Humility, Prudence, and Earth Day


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Source: Acton Institute | John Couretas

At a World Council of Churches conference last year on the French-Swiss border, much was made of the “likelihood of mass population displacement” driven by climate change and the mass migration of people fleeing zones inundated by rising seas. While the WCC acknowledged that “there are no solid estimates” about the likely numbers of what it called climate refugees, that didn’t stop assembled experts from throwing out some guesses: 20 million, hundreds of millions, or 1 billion people.

The WCC bemoaned the fact that international bodies looking at the impending climate refugee crisis were not taking it seriously and, despite its own admission that the numbers of refugees were impossible to predict, called on these same international bodies to “put forward a credible alternative.”

The WCC did a thought experiment on the problem:

What kind of adaptation is relevant to migration? Sea walls? Cities on stilts? New canal systems? We need to start now to construct this future world. But we also need to imagine what it will mean if we fail. Indeed, it seems increasingly short-sighted to assume we will avoid sea-level rise or manage adaptive measures, given the tortuously slow progress of negotiations to date. We need to imagine that millions will, one day not too far away, be on the move, and we need to start thinking now about the appropriate way to manage this eventuality.

The main problem with this sort of thinking from religious groups on climate issues is not the lack of scientific credibility, which is bad enough, but their own credulousness. They have been all too willing to embrace any and all dire forecasts of environmental destruction, so long as it fits into their apocalyptic narrative. Maybe it’s their taste for catastrophe of biblical proportions.

Remember when, in 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) declared that 50 million people could become environmental refugees by 2010, as they fled the effects of climate change? They’d rather you didn’t. It turns out that the climate refugee problem is only the latest disaster-movie myth to be shattered. AsianCorrespondent.com reported earlier this month that “a very cursory look at the first available evidence seems to show that the places identified by the UNEP as most at risk of having climate refugees are not only not losing people, they are actually among the fastest growing regions in the world.”

The fraudulent scare based on nonexistent climate refugees has no bearing whatsoever on the question of whether the Earth’s atmosphere is warming, what may cause the warming, or what we should do about it. It speaks rather to too many religious groups’ gullibility for theories that line up with their anti-market economics, which undergird their blind faith in environmental doom. This is the “eco-justice” school of thought, which sees the market as “asserting the supremacy of economy over nature.” When people are factored in to this ideology, they are always helpless victims, not creators of economic wealth that has the potential of wide benefits.

Because of these shrill and unfounded warnings of ecological collapse, religious leaders and those who look to them for guidance are increasingly tuning out on the climate change scare. A new survey of Protestant pastors shows that 60 percent disagree with the statement that global warming is real and man-made, up from 48 percent two years ago. These results are in line with an October 2010 Pew Research Center poll which showed that belief in human-caused global warming had declined to 59 percent, down from 79 percent in 2006. Cry wolf often enough and you’ll find yourself alone at the next climate refugee conference.

Religious leaders should celebrate Earth Day 2011 by showing more humility in the face of the exceedingly complex scientific, public policy, and political questions bound up in environmental stewardship. A good start would be to drop any attempt at interpreting deep climatological data, which like complex policy or economic questions, is outside the usual competency of seminary training. Instead, religious leaders should focus on advancing an understanding of environmental stewardship that has a place both for productive economic activity and the beauty of God’s creation — without the Manichean split.

The virtue of prudence should lead us all to do more to reduce destructive man-made effects on the environment, with an eye toward improving the overall health of the air, water, and land that sustains us. De-carbonizing the economy, over time and in an orderly fashion, without wrecking economic life that likewise sustains us, is the reasonable way to do that. A strong market economy that creates the sort of wealth that can lead to practicable and affordable energy alternatives, free of the waste, abuse and cronyism that accompany government subsidies, will get us to a cleaner future faster than more “expert” management from Washington, the UN, or the WCC.

So let’s drop the nonsense about building cities on stilts to house a billion climate refugees. No more scare tactics, please. Environmental stewardship is too important to leave it to those who would drive more of the faithful into apathy and disinterest with their rash and incredible predictions of ecological doom.

How Do We Comprehend Natural Disasters Like Earthquakes and Tsunamis?


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This essay below that Fr. David Hudson sent along is timely. I have a small parish now which means that after the Divine Liturgy we always have a discussion about any topic that people want to talk about. Today we had the question: How do we make sense of the tsunami in Japan? It wasn’t the sermon and after the necessary caveats (“I am a priest, not a theologian,” “this is my opinion” and so forth) I laid out how I saw it.

I began with St. Paul in Romans,

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now.

If the creation that is subject to bondage, that is, if the entire creation experiences the corruption that entered the world when Adam fell, and awaits a freedom that will occur when mankind returns to God, then isn’t the opposite true as well? Won’t mankind’s descent from God subject the creation to greater corruption and disorder? There is a relationship between man and the rest of creation, some mysterious (hard to know) interrelationship woven into the very fabric of God’s creation where mankind’s faithfulness or unfaithfulness to God affects everything.

I used AID’s as an example. Is AID’s a punishment from God? No, I don’t think it is. Is there a relationship between AID’s and behavior? Does creation itself contain a mechanism of sorts where moral probity and sobriety have a salutary effect on even the materiality of our bodies, or dissipation a destructive effect? Is virtue and vice related to the harmony and disharmony of nature? Yes, I think it is. The scriptures certainly indicate such, particularly the Proverbs.

If correct, you could say that these events may indeed be a judgment from God but that is a conclusion I am reluctant to draw because most people don’t see any relationship at all between virtue and creation. Or, if they do, they see it in juridical terms, that is, the tsunamis and so forth are sign of God’s unquenchable wrath. We sin, Zeus sends down lightening. The nature of the creation in other words, particularly it’s relationship to man and God, doesn’t factor into the reasoning at all. God isn’t Poseidon churning up the oceans because He is angry, but if we are not careful that is exactly how many people (including many Orthodox given their inculcation of the precepts of popular Christianity) will perceive these words to mean.

One further point although one I did not make this morning: This is a far cry from the nature as goddess ideology that informs (and organizes) much of the thinking of the environmental movement. There the creation is a kind of mysterious force, irrational, something be feared, perhaps even worshiped. When you see nature personified, when the impersonal forces are personalized, when the destructive forces of nature are posited as the Judge, when nature rather than God is revered, watch out. That approach lingers at the edges of neo-paganism.

The essay follows.

Metropolitan Teofan of Moldova and Bucovina

The earth is broken up, the earth is split asunder, the earth is violently shaken (Is 24:19).

The earth has been shaken again to its core in the Land of the Rising Sun, and has behaved violently, resulting in despair for humanity. Millions of victims of the earthquakes and overflowing waters in Asia, of the hurricanes in America, of the spread of AIDS in Africa, the floods in Romania and all Europe in recent years, and now of the merciless earthquake in Japan forces us to reflect on the causes of these disasters. What has happened, really, in the depths of the earth, on the earth, in the waters and in the atmosphere? Who is responsible for all these things?

We believe and we declare that man, assigned by God to be “priest” and servant of creation, is responsible, through his deeds, for everything that happens in nature.

Nature is the friend of man, not his enemy. However, when he seeks only his own interests, man upsets the balance established by the Creator in the environment. The consequence of this attitude lacking in peaceful and respectful communication with nature is its transformation from friend and ally to enemy. “Here in the Balkans,” said St. Nikolai Velirimovich, “something of the ancient respect for nature is still preserved. We still see the custom where the peasant makes the sign of the Cross and says ‘Lord, forgive’ when he wants to chop down a tree, mow hay, or slaughter an animal. The peoples who have declared war on nature… have brought numberless evils on themselves. The person who severs friendly relations with nature, severs them at the same time with God.”

The exploitation of nature by modern technological society is, in general, recognized as responsible for some natural disasters. What is not realized sufficiently, however, is the truth that everything which takes place in nature is an extension of what is happening in the heart of man. An attentive and responsible analysis of the history of mankind reveals the fact that holiness or sin in man affects the entire creation, influencing it for good or evil.

When man lives a clean lifestyle it brings joy and pours out blessings on the universe. When man fills his life with God, the creation in its totality is enlightened and serves man without any reservations. This is the explanation of the fact that the tree branches bend toward a saint when he passes by, and why poisons become harmless for a person with a holy life (Luke 10:19), and why animals cease to be wild in the presence of a person who has achieved inner peace. This truth, transposed to the level of an entire people or of human society in general, directly results in nature manifesting itself in a peaceful way, without convulsions.

In contrast, when sinfulness becomes widespread it extends evil into the heart of creation and this comes back on mankind, in consequence, in the form of earthquakes, floods, diseases, drought, etc. Just as nature is receptive to goodness, modesty, faithfulness and spiritual beauty in man, it is also not impassive in the face of the evil, vanity, and the luciferic claims of superiority manifested by human beings. Neither storms nor deadly lightening, nor clouds of locusts, nor merciless floods take place randomly. They are the extension of the storms, the agitation, the spiritual drought, the unbelief, and the earthquakes which take place in the souls of people and among and between people. “The earth dries up and withers,” the Prophet Isaiah warns the sinful people [of Israel], “the world languishes and withers… the earth is defiled by its people; they have disobeyed the laws, violated the statutes and broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore a curse consumes the earth; its people must bear their guilt” (Is 24:4-6). “The earth is broken up, the earth is split asunder, the earth is violently shaken… so heavy upon it is the guilt of its rebellion…” (Is. 24:19-20). Living in the spirit of this biblical conception, the peasants of the Romanian village of yesteryear used to seek to discover what great sin had been committed among themselves when some plague or other came upon their fields, their animals, or themselves.

Are not the disasters which have so powerfully shaken up our human life really a reflection, a reverberation in nature of the devastating evil within us? As a reaction to everything that has happened in the wake of the floods [in Europe], the decision has been made to construct higher and stronger walls and dams, to stop, in the future, the fury of the waters. These actions are welcome and absolutely necessary. Yet are they enough? Aren’t we really applying the same logic as the people after Noah’s floods? They decided to build the Tower of Babel. In our days, just as then, no one is talking about the need to raise inner walls to stave off the fury of hatred, of division, of the disintegration of the family, and implicitly of the nation. There is no talk, or maybe a little feeble talk—as though we are ashamed—about the raising up of educational and legislative walls to protect us from the soul-destroying and body-destroying fury of sins against nature, of abortion, of pornography.

The earthquake in Japan and other disasters caused by the elements of nature are also a warning to humanity to turn their faces back to God.

Through the Church, the world is offered the possibility of inner renewal through faith in the Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection of Christ. The earth, the waters, the atmosphere, wait “in eager anticipation”, in the words of St. Paul the Apostle, to be “liberated from [their] bondage to decay” and to our sins (Rom. 8:19-21).

We must receive Christ God into our souls, so that He might be born in us and save us. Otherwise, who knows what disasters we will suffer in the future?

Every tender smile directed to the stricken of this world, every attitude of forgiveness for the one who has wronged us, every comfort for a ravaged elderly person, every newborn child, every prayer for “those who love us and for those who hate us,” every experience of God’s presence in our lives is transformed into blessing for us, for others, and for the entire creation.


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