Nope, I disagree. You need to explain why then like in old England people and the government decided to spend a lot to clean the Thames, that was not saving 10-15%. (but the savings were seen later, as Richard Alley explained roughly 1% of the GDP is used in England and many other countries to get us clean water and effective sewage nowadays) Besides getting clean water and almost no cholera and other diseases that killed many every year back then a lot of new jobs came up of that effort, then we got many people that instead of just moving refuse around became plumbers. And so it is with the changes proposed to how we deal with CO2 and other emissions.
We got people like Joe the plumber then and now we will get Joe the solar panel installer. Consumers just have to have other targets and need to prefer products that are less polluting and that is not impossible. BTW the politics of the ones working for change can still be as conservative as the famous plumber, the only thing that we have to understand is that we should realize that it is bananas to inject politics into the issue as people who are out of ideas do when they point at Gore.
Me, I’m fascinated by how one Pope was a Great World Leader when he put forth a platform of militant anticommunism, but another Pope “risks being too ideological” when he puts forth a platform of environmental stewardship and the social responsibility of capital.
Saying what the Church’s position is on issues that a lot of people would rather it stayed quiet about, is in a modern Pope’s job description
I think you’re missing the point. It’s not a matter of removing some products (everything oil-based or carbon-producing, say) from the economy and then having to find something else (solar panels in designer colors) to replace them.
The root cause of most of our global problems, climate change chief among them, is rampant fostered consumption. Blunt the consumption levels through reasonable practices, beginning with individual choices to put things other than ‘things’ first in our lives, and an awful lot of the problems either vanish or become manageable. In the longest run, there is no other solution to global climate change, so we may as well work backwards through the list to see how many others - economic instability, income and wealth inequality, education and employment crises, more - we can fix along the way.
Scampering madly around to find new industries with a zero carbon footprint is utterly unproductive, like putting a second transfusion bag on someone bleeding out all over the ground.
Being against “unbridled capitalism” has been a part of Catholic doctrine for decades. This isn’t something Francis came up with on a whim. John Paul II spoke out forcefully against it (Centesimus Annus) as well. The Catholic Church is a very different animal politically than US political parties - its economically left-leaning and socially right-leaning, and really always has been. And yes, religious faith is political in nature - maybe only except to those evangelicals who believe its only a personal faith journey thing.
Certainly, and the encyclical has no small measure of Catholic aims and values embedded in it. At its root, Francis wants us to do all of these things because what we’re doing is contrary to church teachings (including taking attention away from its place in dictating our lives).
But the enemy of my enemy is my friend - and as we all should be enemies of the forces that are driving us to destruction and disaster on a global scale, that makes the man in the funny hat with the very tall soapbox our friend. Just nod and smile when he talks about the crackers.
To repeat what I said often when John Paul II and Benedict XVI were in power:
A Pope, any Pope, has extremely limited power and influence. I have often repeated a line I heard decades ago (I forget where I’m stealing it from): a Pope is like a grandfather or a favorite uncle. Everybody loves him, everybody’s happy to see him when he comes to visit… but nobody has the slightest intention of doing anything he tells them or following any of his advice.
No conservative Pope could persuade liberal Catholics to oppose birth control or abortion. Francis will have no greater success in convincing conservative Catholics to give up their guns or to fight global warming.
Again it is you who is missing the point, in the past with the sewage example the consumption was with perfumes (to deal with the ugly smells), windows, quack medicines to counter cholera, cleaning after taking a dip in the Thames. Etc. After the change the consumption did go to toilets, plumbing, etc. That allowed the economy to continue. A very similar thing is bound to be seen when we set the systems to clean the atmosphere and that will limit our emissions.
Just because perfumes will not be consumed as before it should not be a reason to support the livelihood of the perfume maker by not changing, the fact is that problems that are caused by our technology can also be solved by technology too and that we can indeed decouple progress from the need to dump the emissions into the atmosphere.
Well, the Dalai Lama got his influence from a group of Buddhist monks proclaiming that a two-year old was an enlightened being. Hehas issued something like 20 statements on the environment. He’s also stuck his nose into the reltationship between China and Tibet, even to the point of lobbying Congress. He also called on the U.S. to avoid a military response after 9/11.
The Dalai Lama won the Nobel Peace Prize. How does everyone feel about that?
There is much to like in this Pope. He seems to grasp the idea of what his office can and should be and to use his particular type of influence in an even-handed and intelligent way.
If he did indeed say that unbridled capitalism is destroying the environment, I am sure he said it in the general rather than the specific. And I’m equally sure he didn’t mean that capitalism, the political ideology, is destroying the environment, but rather that industrialism and modern business are the culprits. Capitalism may be intimately associated with industrialism, but no one doubts that Communists, Democratic Socialists, and other political parties have and use industrial capabilities, too.
I’d be more likely to think it was an unfortunate use of the term capitalism more than an indictment of one particular political party.
As far as the Pope using his notoriety and influence to advance his own agendas, it IS part of the reason for his existence. When he advocates for the environment, for world peace, or the abolishment of world hunger, he is doing what is expected. We are expecting him to take a stand on moral and ethical issues and to articulate the concerns of world Catholicism. It would be impossible for him not to have a personal agenda of some type, but I don’t see him as a politicized figure.
We are not talking about a localized issue of power production, waste management, workforce, resources etc. that can be fixed by moving the pieces around. Thats the kind of terribly faulty thinking most people are still leaning on - that if they drive a Prius instead of an Escalade, it will save the world. Use cloth shopping bags, save an ecosystem. Buy different products, save consumerism.
We are talking about a global rate of consumption that is causing many if not most of our collateral problems - pollution, ecological damage, economic instability, income and wealth inequality, quite a few social/civic issues… and global climate change. Switching to renewable energy and low-VOC ingredients and so forth is not going to fix the problem, because the problem is grossly excessive consumption, and most of it is to no point except to support an economic system that depends on maximized consumption.
Can’t fix that with a few price cuts, industry efficiency improvements and new ingredients.
I have no idea what proponents of change are demanding. I don’t read anything in the AGW marketing wars, on either side.
But I can tell you that if we level off at 9 or 10 billion people or so, and we get them living reasonably well, AGW will be be the least of our dilemmas in preventing the earth (and oceans) from being consumed.
Somewhere between an undiscovered tribesman and Al Gore is the happy level at which most people–given the option–will not feel like they need to live any more richly.
That point is much closer to Mr Gore’s lifestyle than it is the tribesman’s lifestyle, and the earth can’t do 9 billion times that, new energy grid or not, without breaking in hundreds of ways beyond rinsing Miami.
It is highly unlikely (oh, OK; it ain’t gonna happen) that the poor will put the tragedy of commons high enough on their concern list to just remain poor. It is even more unlikely the wealthy will return to being poor.
Nothing wrong with joining the charge against Climate Change, as long as you don’t mind riding next to Mr Quixote. What you think is the giant of AGW is, in fact, the windmill of man’s invasiveness. Even if you fixed AGW (and best to you), the curtain has fallen across the environmental stage. The earth show is over. The best we can hope for is a well-run theme park for 9 billion humans–not an environmentally undestroyed earth.
The Pope isn’t in a position to set international climate policy. He is doing exactly what’s in his job description: to inform and inspire. And when far too many people are careless and unheeding of the environment, and even hostile to the idea that we’re negatively affecting the climate, his eloquent message is welcome and valuable.
The reason that is all so wrong is that it makes the grievously false assumption that environmental damage is some kind of per-capita constant amplified by wealth: take a person’s net worth, multiply it by the Magic Constant, and presto-bango, the formula spits out exactly how much carbon, pollutants, and garbage that person will produce every year!
The reality is that in an advanced technological society, per-capita environmental impact spans an extremely wide range and where we fall on that scale depends on many things within our control. It depends, for one thing, on the choices we make – not a choice to live like paupers, or necessarily even to consume less, but the choice to consume more intelligently and sustainably. More importantly, it depends on the availability of the appropriate clean, non-damaging, sustainable technologies and energy sources, and our willingness to develop them.
That there is some level of “n” billion population at which we’ll be in trouble no matter what we do is not in dispute. Conversely, we could have one-tenth the present world population and still be in trouble if we were stupid enough – not some theoretical level of crazy stupid, but only about as stupid as we were just decades ago when no one had ever heard of recycling, when we were still dumping massive quantities of tetraethyl lead into the air, soil, and water, mercury and other heavy metals into everything, sulfur dioxides and other toxins into the air, so that we were simultaneously killing our lungs and deluging ourselves with acid rain, etc. The key is to stop muddying the waters with the population issue and treat it as a separate, orthogonal problem, and focus the technology issue on minimizing the per-capita environmental impact of such population as we do have at any given point in time.
Who said otherwise? Besides those who are basically condemning him because his ur-blog has more followers than theirs?
I really enjoy such displays of double standard: if it’s said by someone of enormous power and visibility, it’s to be despised, but if it’s said by some hipster on a Dark Web blog, it’s gospel and an absolute crime that Thuh Man won’t let him be heard.
You are still missing a lot, and it is not really what I’m talking about. What I have said in the past is clear, it is thanks to regulations and efforts by government and industry that the main part of the change will consist of.
In the example of the sewage and clean water case what you are pounding about is the almost red herring of pointing at members of the British parliament as not doing enough individually, indeed what individual citizens did was only partially effective, it was only when they began to fund the building of big sewers and set proper plumbing that then individuals could think about installing a toilet in their homes.
What you miss is precisely what I reported before, once new systems are in place and regulations most of industry and government also changes what we consume because many solutions open other avenues of consumption, some of it I must say will not be something that we will like as when we have to pay the plumber, but assuming that all consumption can not be changed to solutions to the issue or to make people more willing to seek sustainable products after a big change is really thinking small IMHO.
Um, GIGObuster, there’s something really incoherent about your last post and I am having trouble following what you’re trying to say. Let me just throw out a couple of things that seem to address your points.
I don’t believe legislation can fix consumption/consumerism issues. At all.
I don’t believe “different consumption” is any path to an overall solution.
The only long-term solution to our global problems - the key to all other solutions - is considerably lowered consumption, which I believe is attainable by individual action and without any significant “lower standard of living” or “shared poverty” or anything of the kind.
Clarity and comments solicited. But it might be well to wait until you’re not driving… or something.
The two major proposals to fix AGW are a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system (both linked to tariff changes). There are ancillary proposals to improve efficiency and the like, but neither of the major proposals has to make anyone poor (or what I should say is lower our standards of living appreciably). The theory behind these proposals would certainly incentivize people to make different choices. I suppose for some individuals, certain changes are annoying to them (like the recent changes in light bulb efficiency), but (for example) if you can get the same amount of light with less carbon waste, then I don’t view that as an appreciable change in living standards.
In the US, it looks like cap-and-trade would be the fix, if anything ever passes.
