Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Protect God’s creation: Vatican issues new green message for world’s Catholics
John Vidal and Tom Kington, The Guardian
The Vatican yesterday added its voice to a rising chorus of warnings from churches around the world that climate change and abuse of the environment is against God’s will, and that the one billion-strong Catholic church must become far greener.
At a Vatican conference on climate change, Pope Benedict urged bishops, scientists and politicians – including UK environment secretary David Miliband – to “respect creation” while “focusing on the needs of sustainable development”.
The Pope’s message follows a series of increasingly strong statements about climate change and the environment, including a warning earlier this year that “disregard for the environment always harms human coexistence, and vice versa”.
Observers said yesterday that the Catholic church is no longer split between those who advocate development and those who say the environment is the priority. Cardinal Renato Raffaele Martino, head of the Pontifical Council of Justice and Peace, said: “For environment … read Creation. The mastery of man over Creation must not be despotic or senseless. Man must cultivate and safeguard God’s Creation.”
(27 April 2007)
Related:
Pope should talk climate change with Bush: cardinal (Reuters)
Vatican cardinal says tackling climate change should not be left to scientists (AP)
Miliband calls for worldwide ‘ecological conversion’ (Guardian)
Timeline: The Frightening Future of Earth
Andrea Thompson and Ker Than, LiveScience
…While putting specific dates on these traumatic potential events is challenging, this timeline paints the big picture and details Earth’s future based on several recent studies and the longer scientific version of the IPCC report, which was made available to LiveScience.
2007
More of the world’s population now lives in cities than in rural areas, changing patterns of land use. The world population surpasses 6.6 billion. (Peter Crane, Royal Botanic Gardens, UK, Science; UN World Urbanization Prospectus: The 2003 Revision; U.S. Census Bureau)
2008
Global oil production peaks sometime between 2008 and 2018, according to a model by one Swedish physicist. Others say this turning point, known as “Hubbert’s Peak,” won’t occur until after 2020. Once Hubbert’s Peak is reached, global oil production will begin an irreversible decline, possibly triggering a global recession, food shortages and conflict between nations over dwindling oil supplies. (doctoral dissertation of Frederik Robelius, University of Uppsala, Sweden; report by Robert Hirsch of the Science Applications International Corporation)
2020
Flash floods will very likely increase across all parts of Europe. (IPCC)
Less rainfall could reduce agriculture yields by up to 50 percent in some parts of the world. (IPCC)
World population will reach 7.6 billion people. (U.S. Census Bureau)
(19 April 2007)
Note that Peak Oil is slated to occur between 2008 and 2010.
Acting now to save life on Earth
E.O. Wilson, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Except for giant meteorite strikes or other such catastrophes, Earth has never experienced anything like the contemporary human juggernaut. We are in a bottleneck of overpopulation and wasteful consumption that could push half of Earth’s species to extinction in this century.
…The bottleneck of overpopulation can open out by the end of the century, when the global population is expected to peak at around 9 billion — 50 percent more than what it was in 2000 — then commence to recede.
During the remainder of the bottleneck period, per capita consumption will also rise, increasing pressure on the environment. But it too can be brought under control, in large part by already existing technology that raises production while recycling materials and converts to alternative energy sources.
This shift seems inevitable anyway because of a corporate-level Darwinism: Those corporations and nations committed to further improvement and application of the technology will be the economic leaders of the future.
If we wish, a greater part of the ecosystems and species that still survive can be brought through the bottleneck. The methods to save them exist. They are being applied at local and national levels around the world, albeit sporadically. The ongoing effort is still far from enough to save the bulk of critically endangered species. But it is a beginning.
The choice now is simple: Save biodiversity during the next half century or lose a quarter or more of the species. Realization that this Armageddon can be quickly won, or lost, is based on knowledge of the geography of life, a key principle of which is that species do not occur evenly over the land and sea, but in concentrations called hot spots.
The hottest of the hot spots, those in most critical need of immediate attention, are scattered around the world. A large majority of the species classified in the Red List of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature as “endangered” or “critically endangered” live within the 34 hottest spots.
E.O. Wilson, world-renowned biologist and Harvard University professor, is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning books “On Human Nature” and “The Ants.” This essay was adapted from his new book “The Creation,” published by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
(20 April 2007)
Also at Common Dreams.
The Limits to Lakoff
Matthew Miller, CounterPunch
…This cognitive model has its correlated political principle. The Personal Convenience is Non-negotiable Principle summarizes this model as political ideal. No politician could run on a platform that sought to implement real changes in the American way of life; the way of life involving electric everything, fast-food, constant driving, air-conditioning, commuter airlines, and minimal physical exertion (all components of profligate energy consumption). It interprets well-being as the continual extension of the technological atmosphere in which we live and breathe.
External innovation implies a “moral progress is technological complexity” cognitive model. This model predisposes us to the idea that high-tech is always better than low- tech and the attendant belief that our basic environmental and resource problems have or will have, sometime in the techno-glitz future, technological solutions.
As a political dogma it might be described as The Technology Will Save Us Principle. It affirms that systemic dependencies and interdependencies (e.g. globalization, industrial agriculture, Wal-Mart) and an ever increasing degree of abstract productivity (e.g. hedge funds and derivative markets) are desirable goals for America. This political principle is what has made outsourcing and the service economy such an easy political sell. This principle explains American enthusiasm for science fiction; hydrogen cars, nuclear fusion and nano-mythology.
Technological progress implies the necessary and complete subordination and exploitation of the natural world. Modern technology is not a thing or an instrument but a system of inter-linked methods and procedures that augments and extends itself to every corner of the life-world we inhabit. Progress as technological advance is progress as domination- domination of nature by man and man by man. Don’t think of a Chain-gang.
Well-being is the basis of morality and it requires more stuff for its realization. Some of the core values of the progressive vision, e.g. opportunity, personal fulfillment, prosperity, and protection depend directly on increases in natural resources available for human use and further they entail the creation of more people. This brings us to the question of the actual material basis for progressive political change and the deep challenges to the contemporary manifestations of progressive politics.
In 1972 a group of scientists working with a think-tank called the Club of Rome published a demographic analysis examining several interrelated factors; world population growth, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion. They argued for Limits to Growth. Economists scoffed since infinite growth is a basic assumption of classical economics and more importantly of our fractional-reserve banking system. However, the thirty-year update to their original study published in 2004 confirms many of the trends they observed and dire projections they made way back in 1972.
While their research describes ten different response scenarios to these problems, America and the world are now following out what the Club of Rome described as the “business as usual” scenario. This scenario assumes no fundamental change from policies pursued throughout the 20th century.
…The utopianism of progressive politics, in its current form, in addition to being an idealism of social form also requires a cornucopian mindset in regard to resources. Progressive politics undertaken from within the “business as usual” paradigm commits us to collapse. Progressives must reclaim their morality from the system and reframe that morality as against the system. We must ask ourselves the big questions about life-style and resources that remain hidden from view in our political discourse.
…Wendell Berry has suggested that our energy crisis, and yes “energy crisis” is the most truthful frame here, is really a crisis of character. A conflict between what we are and what should be. Maybe he is right. Old Woody read the tea leaves true when he opined “Every year we waste enough to feed the ones who starve; we build our civilization up then we shoot it down with wars.” The beauty of progressivism is that change is at its very core. Morality is not necessarily about what we are but about what we ought to be. Can we imagine America differently? Really differently?
What would Jesus do about peak-oil? What is the proper moral response? It will have to be more than reframing die-off as down-sizing. Telling the truth about the difficulties our world will face in the coming decade is the place Jesus would start! He’d call on the people of salt and light to prepare a new kingdom. He’d reprogram the 300 million American consumption-bots.
Matthew Miller is a Lecturer in the Department of Humanities and Philosophy
at the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond.
(26 April 2007)
Quite a riff on progressive theorist George Lakoff, consumerism, and peak oil. Much more at the original. Some editing would sharpen it. -BA
