The White House and Climate Change: in my old Catholic terms, this is mortal sin
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Posted on December 13, 2007
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological hope, Earth spirituality
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
In that old religion in which I was raised, we were taught that the difference between venial (lesser) sin and mortal sin (grave and deserving of eternal damnation) included two things: that the sin be grievous in nature, and that the sinner knows it is but commits the sin anyway.
Okay, it was silly when eating meat on Friday or missing Sunday Mass was included on the list, but then there’s this — knowingly consigning the world to a future of devastation and suffering of almost unimaginable scope, and doing that purely for self-interest, whether that interest be personal, financial, political or ‘patriotic.’ That, of course, would be sin on an appropriate scale for the designation ‘mortal.’
Oh, good friends, the news is just so grim. This will be a longish post, so bear with me. Because along with the grim news is an ever-increasing awareness of the depth of the moral and ethical void of the Bush administration, and many in Congress, as the world tries valiantly to address what global climate change is doing to our planet.
I spend my mornings reading newspapers, doing a quick check of cable news, and part of that is seeking the latest on these issues we care about. The headline that jumped off page 3 (why was this not the screaming front page headline!?!?) of the Milwaukee paper was an AP article with this headline, “‘The Arctic is screaming.’”. Here’s a link to it on the Wash. Post website.
We have reported this repeatedly — climate scientists are alarmed that everything computer models predict is happening much more quickly than the predictions. 
New NASA satellite images reveal that the arctic ice is melting so quickly it could be gone by — okay, two years ago they said by 2040 — now? BY 2012, JUST FIVE YEARS FROM NOW!! The fear — among so many — is that this could indicate that we have crossed a tipping point of runaway global warming.
The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming. Now as a sign of climate warming, the canary has died. It is time to start getting out of the coal mines.
So said a NASA climate scientist, Jay Zwally, who worked as a kid in coal mines.
Problem is, folks, this coal mine we need to get out of is the planet Earth, our home, the only home we have.
Here is what President Gayoom of the Maldives said to the UN’s General Assembly on October 19, 1987, as quoted by Rajendra Pachauri as he received the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:
As for my own country, the Maldives, a mean sea level rise of 2 metres would suffice to virtually submerge the entire country of 1,190 small islands, most of which barely rise 2 meters above mean sea level. That would be the death of a nation. With a mere 1 metre rise also, a storm surge would be catastrophic, and possibly fatal to the nation.
Okay, that’s one result — and this plea was made 20 years ago!
You see what I mean by grievous fault.
We could go on like this around the globe. And if we insist in caring only about our own, as if none of this has moral or human impact on us, well, I give you New Orleans, Florida, the Georgia drought, the Southwest drought, the wildfires in the west, the floods in the northwest, the severity of storm after storm in this country wreaking havoc everywhere — just as the computer models predict.
Grievous, grievous fault — with knowledge.
You know what they’re talking about on CNN this morning, over and over again? Steroids in baseball!
Oh yes, despair can be tempting, despair for my people.
The glaciers of Glacier National Park will be gone in our lifetimes.
This from an article today from Reuters, Climate change drying up mountains in Western US. While folks are gathered at the UN climate conference in Bali, 15,000 scientists are in San Francisco under the auspices of the American Geophysical Union looking at all sorts of Earth things, earthquakes, water, etc., but obsessed as most scientists these days with climate change.
About 50 percent of the fresh water consumed by people worldwide comes from mountains, so the rate at which snowpack is disappearing is worrying, said Daniel Fagre, an ecologist who works for the US Geological Survey in Glacier National Park in Montana.
You see the problem. Our carbon emissions are jeopardizing the fresh water source for half of our world’s population. And we know it. Mortal sin. Grievous, grievous fault.
So let’s put the moral issue in focus. Yesterday’s headline (on page A12) of the NY Times, US stand on quotas deadlocks climate talks. The roadblock that US negotiator Harlan Watson said the US would not be is the principle roadblock to an international consensus on mandatory cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon:
The situation is so desperately serious that any delay could push us past the tipping point, beyond which the ecological, financial, and human costs would increase dramatically.
He said the world must choose between a comprehensive agreement, or ‘oblivion.’
The Bush administration chooses oblivion.
So now our guy, Al Gore, scurried over from Oslo, Norway, where he received the Nobel Peace Prize along with the IPCC, to Bali, Indonesia, to lay down the moral gauntlet, to put blame where blame is truly due.
My country’s been responsible for obstructing the process here in Bali, we know that.
Doesn’t it feel good to hear such simple truth in such a vital international forum? He urged negotiators to persist in efforts to get binding agreements despite the enormous obstacle posed by the US, to “negotiate around this enormous obstacle, this elephant in the room.” (See the Washington Post: Gore: US obstructing climate talks; and the NY Times: Bitter divisions exposed at climate talks).
The world is wising up. We blogged back in September about how this administration was trying to ambush the UN’s process by setting up its own parallel process with the world’s biggest carbon emitters. It is useless and wasted energy, but 14 nations participated in an attempt to use any avenue to try to push the US forward. Now they realize they are being played. As Watson insists that the US will agree to nothing until the next round of these self-interested talks, European nations are saying they will not participate given the US stance in Bali.
Bush and his people can talk to themselves about why fossil fuel industry and US corporate profits trump the lives and well-being of more than half the planet’s human beings, along with millions of threatened species all along the web of life.
Grievous. Grievous indeed. Mortal, literally, in its consequences.
How bad is it? You know that energy bill passed by the House and now before the Senate with those new vehicle fuel standards — inadequate, but at least something — requiring automotive companies to achieve an ‘average’ 35 miles to the gallon for the entire fleet by 2020? The White House thinks it may veto it. Shoot, man, the car companies and fuel companies don’t like it. They especially don’t like being told what to do. Could set a precedent.
Their own behavior begs the need for laws, mandatory standards, with tough, tough penalties for violations. If we can’t get modest measures like these through the law-making process, we are truly doomed.
Gore says to the world, this will change. Hang in there. Do what you need to do. We will soon show this administration the door. Yes. That is the first thing. Get these people out of office. But I am not exactly overwhelmed yet by the candidates running for office. I am not yet impressed that any of them fully grasp the urgency — or else they are too timid to be forthright and honest about it. But any of the Democrats, and perhaps McCain on the Republican side, will do better than this!
Which is why Gore’s voice is so important. Rail on, Al! Some want you to run for president. I want you where you are. And then I want a new administration to make you head of the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA), make that a cabinet position, then send you off to negotiate the deal with the rest of the world, a world that would heave a collective sigh of relief as you walked through the door.
Technorati Tags: Bali climate change conference, bush administration obstructs climate talks, Al Gore, Rajendra Pachauri, intergovernmental panel on climate change, moral challenge of climate change
Photo/graphic credit: Earth observatory, NASA
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5 Responses to “The White House and Climate Change: in my old Catholic terms, this is mortal sin”
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There is no old or new religion. Only whether one believes it or not, that too the customs and traditions. Just like earth is same but people are of dofferent origins on this earth related to the earths retations and the beliefes are so many. Its only man made attrocities to conquere the world through shear money and build power through un ethical methods, which have spoiled the environment. It is unfoetunate that some of the curches and like religious centers are playing behind such power mongers. God is same for everybody. God has in his own ways of saving his kith and kin, those who believe in him. Just wait and see.
A TRAIN AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL?
Does how “I feel” about the predicament regarding the human-induced global challenges that are already visible on the far horizon have any meaning at all or value? So what?
There is a light at the end of a tunnel covering the “primrose path” we have set out for our children to march along to reach their future. I think magically and also remain somehow wishful for the children’s long-term wellbeing, for environmental protection and preserving Earth’s body; however, please understand that deep within me is a keen sense of foreboding for the children because the light at the end of the tunnel appears, at this very moment, to be moving toward all of us.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/
OUR contrived logic, linear thinking, material obsessiveness and mechanistic world view, that we see pervading the predominant culture on Earth in OUR time, could result in the children following OUR EXAMPLE and recklessly charging down a “primrose path” to be confronted by a colossal ecologic or economic wreckage, the likes of which only Ozymandias has seen.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/
Humanity is in danger of losing the exquisite value in one of God’s great gifts: the carefully and skillfully developed science on climate change and global warming.
Is it possible that the standard for determining what is real and true in our culture today is this: whatsoever is widely shared, consensually validated and judged to be ecomonically expedient, politically convenient, socially agreeable and religiously tolerated is true and real?
At least to me, it seems that good science is being ignored, distractions presented ubiquitously, controversy literally manufactured, or else silence allowed to prevail when reasonable and sensible scientific evidence comes into conflict with what culture prescribes as real and true. Perhaps science does present culture with evidence of inconvenient truths.
Despite our best efforts, could it be that my not-so-great generation of elders is communicating with one another and our children as if we are living in a modern day Tower of Babel? Is our noticeable failure to communicate reasonably and sensibly about whatsoever is somehow real, and to widely share adequate understandings regarding both how the family of humanity “fits” within the natural order of living things and what are the limitations of the planet we inhabit, in evidence here and now?
It appears that the human community is indeed in a serious multifaceted predicament, but only in part because of the objective biological and physical circumstances defining our distinctly human-driven predicament. The global challenges in the offing are further complicated by our failure to communicate effectively about the potentially pernicious results that could be derived from having recklessly grown a soon to become patently unsustainable, colossal global economy, one which we have artificially designed, conveniently constructed, and relentlessly expanded without enough conscious, intelligent regard for the practical requirements of biophysical reality.
Could it be that the current gigantic scale and unchecked growth rate of the global economy is unsustainably driving increases both in adamant per human over-consumption and skyrocketing human population numbers toward the point in human history when the willful, rampant, unregulated growth of consumption, production and propagation activities of the human species precipitates the collapse of Earth’s ecology, even in these early years of Century XXI?
Your consideration is appreciated; your comments are welcome.
An Abysmal Absence of Leadership at every level of governance in countries within the over-developed world?
If people are consuming resources unsustainably, perhaps doing less consuming will help. Voila!
Now, I ask you, where can we find leaders for these times, ones willing to speak out clearly, loudly and openly about the challenges posed to humanity by rapacious human over-consumption of the limited resources of Earth…. and then act accordingly?
Sincerely,
Steve
Steve Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population