This is what idolatry looks like

Australia has its own permutations of this, but sometimes it can help to see just how ugly greed can be in a context a little distant from ours in order to help us to see our own context with fresh eyes.

The day after they've given thanks for all they have, people are trampling and even killing each other to grab more (largely unnecessary) stuff. I have thought for some time that the main antidote to the idolatry of consumerist greed is thankfulness, but reflecting on this juxtaposition in the US cultural calendar makes me question that assumption. While I have been thinking and teaching for many years that thankfulness is the path to contentment, perhaps I should be concentrating more on the cultivation of trust in God's future goodness as a more important source of satisfaction. Giving thanks may briefly shift my gaze from the next purchase to what is already in my hand, but if this is to be more than a momentary distraction from the insatiable hunger for more, we need a healing of the heart: a cleaning, filling and binding of the gaping wound that our purchases briefly and ineffectually seek to soothe. Indeed, sometimes what looks like thankfulness can merely be "entitlement in thankfulness clothing",* as our thanksgiving can serve to baptise our current level of affluence, neutralising any critical reflection on the purposes and consequences of that affluence. Perhaps this particular demon requires not just prayers of thanksgiving, but also fasting.
*A phrase from my friend Claire Johnston, who helped me rethink my understanding in a recent Facebook discussion of this video.

At a practical level, minimising exposure to advertising is critically important, since though we all deny being influenced by silly ads, corporations know that we're fooling ourselves and so willingly spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year on an industry designed to erode our contentment and corrupt our desires. But it is not just avoiding the negative messages; we need to soak in the message of divine truth, grace and delight. The healing of desire is a slow process and there are no shortcuts.

One final unrelated thought: there are omnipresent riot police for every peaceful demonstration, but where are the shields and paddy wagons for these mobs? Just to be clear: I am staunchly opposed to heavy-handed policing and think that the criminalisation of dissent is a grievous injury to any claim to democratic society. I'm simply noting an irony that the surveillance and security state manages to coordinate a massive police presence at any event that might threaten the culture of endless corporate profits, but seem largely absent at these far more violent spectacles dedicated to the pursuit of that end.

Five soundings in national energy policies

China announces peak coal usage. This is fascinating. It may be an ambition that fails by a wide margin, but it is nonetheless a very interesting development, not least for Australia, which is still planning to double coal exports in the next decade.

Spain announces that wind produced more electricity over the last three months than any other source (a first).

The US has been reducing carbon emissions by some surprising amounts, for a variety of reasons (not all of them straightforwardly good).

Meanwhile, UK plans for nuclear renaissance seem to getting further bogged.

"By leaves we live"

Ice sheets: A new study confirms with greater accuracy than ever before that world's major ice sheets are melting at an accelerating rate. This is why sea level rise is happening 60% faster than was expected in the most recent IPCC report.

Coal boom: 1200 new coal plants planned. Three quarters of the new plants are to be located in China and India. A breakdown of the countries is available here. Though India's expansion plans need to be taken with a grain or two of salt.

Extinction is forever: Tim Flannery reflects on the challenges facing Australian biodiversity and suggests that the current approach isn't working. With a reply from David Bowman. Perhaps how do we triage conservation priorities?

Coal seam gas: Recent measurements (yet to be peer reviewed) suggest coal seam gas production may have significant "fugitive emissions" of methane that render the claims of the gas industry to be somewhat less bad for the climate questionable. Some have suggested that natural gas is methadone to coal's heroin.

Fracking: Stories from the front line in the US. In the UK, academics have just advised the government that it is "categorically clear" that pursuing a shale gas dominated energy strategy is incompatible with legislated UK climate targets. But it looks like they are going to do it anyway.

Big cats, small space: Only 25% of the original African savannah remains undeveloped, leaving less and less room for the iconic megafauna that call it home. Lion numbers are plummeting and they may soon be listed as endangered.

IPCC: The IPCC has been repeatedly wrong on climate change, frequently underestimating the rate and impacts of change.
Note that the first link makes an embarrassingly obvious mistake in its opening claim, confusing carbon with carbon dioxide and so getting the numbers hopelessly muddled.

Trees: All around the world, ancient trees are dying at an alarming rate.

There are no merely local famines

In a globalised society, there are no merely local famines, or revolutions, or failed states.

Many of our most severe ecological threats converge on the stability of the global food supply. The most explosive consequences of food shortages are not population decline from starvation, but civil unrest and conflict (as well as increasing vulnerability to disease/pandemic). During the 2008 food price spikes, there were riots in sixteen countries. And the most visible political consequence of the 2010 food price spike was the Arab Spring (though again there were protests and riots in many other countries). Yes, of course there are other underlying factors in every country affected, but the spike in the price of bread was the initial spark in nearly every country that saw significant instances of civil unrest in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The protests that ultimately brought down governments in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt (and possibly Syria) all had the price of bread as their trigger (as did those in Bahrain and elsewhere). And why were prices so high in 2010? Again, all kinds of systematic reasons (biofuels taking an increasing share, changing diets, speculation, government hoarding in response to an initial rise), but the short term trigger was almost simultaneous crop losses from extreme weather events in Argentina, Australia, Pakistan and Russia (which famously stopped exporting wheat after its six sigma heatwave). Food price spikes are inconvenient in the west, where we spend less than 15% of our income on food, but disastrous in the many places with otherwise somewhat stable governments where large parts of the population spend more like 75%+ of their income on food.

The consequences of political unrest are not confined to the poor country. To pick one consequence: our taxes here in the UK recently went towards funding war in Libya, despite an austerity programme of slashing government services in response to the worst recession since the Great Depression. Refugee flows from all the various places involved have also increased. Major protests in the US and elsewhere this time last year questioned the direction of the present economic order. These explicitly drew both inspiration and organisational links from elements of the Arab Spring before being brutally suppressed - perhaps not as brutally as in Syria, but if you had your eyes open last autumn there was plenty of state-sponsored violence happening against protesters in free(r) countries, much of which was never acknowledged or addressed by the justice system.

This is not at all to claim that climate change "caused" the Occupy movement in any straightforward way, simply to chase one strand of causal links as an illustration of the global implications of crises in a single region.

Failed states have all kinds of knock-on effects on their neighbours and the rest of the world. Think about the extra costs to global shipping due to Somalian piracy (leading to many shipping companies eagerly awaiting the further opening up of Arctic shipping lanes to avoid the area entirely), about the seedbed of terrorism that Afghanistan has represented since the US turbo-charged the factions against Soviet invasion, about the effect on global oil prices (and hence the global economy) of war in Libya (or Iran...), about the ongoing repercussions of the Arab/Israeli conflict partially driven by the planned failure/sabotage of the Palestinian state. And so on. The global system can handle a few failed states, but since it does so by distributing the costs across the whole system (UK taxpayers paying for wars in Libya), it does so by increasing the stress on the system as a whole. Electricity grids are a good analogy here, actually - grids can handle the sudden failure of a certain number of elements in the grid, but do so at the cost of placing the entire grid at greater risk of collapse. Globalisation is a super-grid for economic and political stability: failure in one part can be accommodated by increasing stress across the board. But only to a point.

This is why Joseph Tainter says in the final chapter of his intriguing and seminal book, The Collapse of Complex Societies that there can be no local collapses in a global system. The term "catabolic collapse" is sometimes used, which refers to a collapse in one part of a system becomes self-reinforcing and ends up taking down the whole show (see here for a much more detailed and insightful discussion of this concept by John Michael Greer).

So when you read about the coming food price spike of late 2012 as the effects of the US drought kick in, don't just think about poor Indians struggling to put food on the table, but also think about the $700b-odd the US spends on its military (over $1t on "national security" as a whole), about the possible break-up of the EU (troubles in Greece are complex, but one of the causes/manifestations/worsening of their crisis is the fact that they receive per capita more refugees and undocumented immigrants fleeing struggling MENA countries than almost anywhere else in the EU and it has seen a big jump in recent years), about deforestation in Indonesia and elsewhere (which is linked, in complex ways, to food prices), and so on.

Global crises require global (as well as local, provincial, national, regional) responses. We can't simply pull up the drawbridge and hope to weather the storm.

Does nature have a price? and other stories

Pricing nature: George Monbiot highlights the myopia of attempting to include "ecosystem services" within mainstream neoliberal economic thought. The initial government report noted that some of the services provided by natural ecosystems "may in fact be infinite in value". You don't say.

Ten Billion: A "play", reviewed here and here, in which noted Cambridge scientist Stephen Emmott plays noted Cambridge scientist Stephen Emmott. The only set is a recreation of his messy Cambridge office and the drama is Emmott delivering a lecture on our current predicament. describes himself as a "rational pessimist" and lays out the daunting, perhaps impossible, task before us in the coming decades where we face multiple converging crises. He concludes that the only rational way forward is radical cultural change with widespread embrace of lower consumption and fewer children (this is pretty close to what I think, with nuances regarding children), but thinks it is not going to happen (this is also basically what I think, though with all kinds of reasons why it is still worth trying). Given that those who will hear this are those willing to pay through the nose for a night of "theatre" more disturbingly horrifying than any fictional film, it's probably better to avoid reading too much into fact that all performances are sold out. Attempts such as this to piece together the various disparate pieces of information that float around the internet and scientific journals are to be valued. That people come away terrified ought to be entirely unsurprising. What is needed is a moral vision capable of surveying such a situation and finding reasons to throw ourselves "once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more".

Australian coal: A victory as one proposed coal plant is shelved.

Hunger games: Coming soon to a future near you. Future heat, drought, food costs and global unrest. I have long been saying that such secondary and tertiary effects of climate change are at least as dangerous as any direct physical effects, though they may not generate headlines that mention climate.

Planetary boundaries: "Approaching a state shift in Earth's biosphere", a recent paper in Nature includes this in its abstract: "Localized ecological systems are known to shift abruptly and irreversibly from one state to another when they are forced across critical thresholds. Here we review evidence that the global ecosystem as a whole can react in the same way and is approaching a planetary-scale critical transition as a result of human influence."

Solastalgia: The word is a neologism coined by psychologist Glenn Albrecht in 2003 and is gaining some recognition. It refers to nostalgia one feels for a place being lost even while you're still there, a homesickness while you're still at home, but home is becoming less hospitable. In Albrecht's own words, it is "emplaced or existential melancholia experienced with the negative transformation (desolation) of a loved home environment". I think it is a useful concept, even if I'm not convinced by the etymology.

Extreme weather: Extreme heat events experienced in many places in recent years are very, very unlikely to be unrelated to climate change. A new study by James Hansen on the attribution of extreme weather events does not use models, but is a statistical study based on observed changes that argues that the increase in what used to be extreme events (three standard deviations above the 1950-80 average) to now cover something like 10% of the globe's surface at any given time (rather than about 0.1% during 1950-80), is strong evidence that such events are vanishingly unlikely to not be related to climate change.

Overheated economy: Temperature rises correlate with declines in economic indicators and political stability, at least in developing nations. Good thing we're not expecting any discernable pattern in global temperatures over the next few decades and centuries then.

The West in Flames: The US West and Southwest is projected by most climate models to get hotter and drier. This has all kinds of implications, but this article by the author of A Great Aridness summarises the implications for trees and wildfire. It's not pretty.

400ppm CO2: Last time CO2 levels were this high. A study investigating conditions 15 million years ago found that "The last time carbon dioxide levels were apparently as high as they are today — and were sustained at those levels — global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit (2.8-5.6ºC) higher than they are today, the sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet (22.9-36.6m) higher than today, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland".

Obama is a moderate Republican, and other stories

Obama and the polarisation of US politics: According to Dave Roberts, the left's gone left but the right's gone nuts. US politics has become more polarised, but not equally so. By the standards of just a decade or two ago, Obama truly is a moderate Republican. As one illustration of Obama's centre-right approach, consider the fact that his recent attacks on Romney over rapacious capitalism are quite hypocritical from a President who has done very little other than to encourage such behaviour. Some may be interested in a comparison of Obama vs. Romney on environmental policy. Of course, Romney and Obama are not the only candidates.

Who drinks the most soft drink? The answer may surprise you. OK, maybe not.

Assessing Australian climate action: David Spratt offers a sober assessment of our situation. This is the first in a series: part two and three. I have a lot of sympathy for most of his account.

What's in a name? We should stop calling them "mobile phones" and start calling them "trackers", according to this piece. The little electronic devices in our pockets reveal much about our behaviour to all kind of people you probably didn't realise.

Food in Australia: The draft National Food Plan, set up at the urging of corporate interests and tailored to their perspective assumes business as usual is a smart idea for Australia's food production. Instead, the goal is not simply more food at whatever cost.

The End Game: Raoul Pal offers some tips for traders wishing to maximise their profits during these last few months before catastrophic global economic collapse. Cheery stuff: make sure you get yours before we all what's coming to us. That kind of thing.

A history of democracy: Noam Chomsky takes us on a whirlwind tour from the signing of Magna Carta through the US Constitution, Civil War and into drones, rendition of terror suspects and climate change. Compulsory reading for US exceptionalists.

Our climate challenge in three numbers

"When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic. But to grasp the seriousness of our predicament, you just need to do a little math. For the past year, an easy and powerful bit of arithmetical analysis first published by financial analysts in the U.K. has been making the rounds of environmental conferences and journals, but it hasn't yet broken through to the larger public. This analysis upends most of the conventional political thinking about climate change. And it allows us to understand our precarious – our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless – position with three simple numbers."

- Bill McKibben, Global Warming's Terrifying New Math.

Apart from missing "s" in the title and a dodgy stat in the opening paragraph, McKibben's compelling 5-page piece is a good summary of some important elements of the challenge we face. The bottom line of his three numbers is that, according to our best understanding, if we want at least an 80% chance of staying under the internationally agreed (but still very dangerous) 2ºC limit we can only burn about 20% of our current fossil fuel reserves (not resources, but reserves, i.e. what is known and could be profitably brought to market under present conditions). This is the kind of statistic that can really serve to focus the attention. We need to leave four out of every five known and already profitable barrels of oil, tonnes of coal, cubic metres of natural gas underground.

Of course, the great difficulty is that no one country wants to do anything other than burn every last molecule of fossil hydrocarbon that can be brought to the surface unless all other countries agree to limit themselves also. And when some countries have far larger reserves (and so far more at stake economically in leaving 80% of them in the ground), then reaching such an agreement is basically impossible under present political assumptions. If you look at where the blockages in international negotiations are coming from, then it's no great surprise that these are also the countries with the largest reserves of fossil hydrocarbons: China, USA, Russia, Australia, Canada, various middle eastern states. Countries with tiny (or largely depleted) reserves are the ones at the forefront: small island nations, non-oil-based African nations and the EU (esp UK and Germany, which have historically had huge fossil carbon deposits, but have already burned most of their easily accessible stuff).

And so we are left with an international multi-player game of chicken, with no country wanting to blink first and lose market advantage, ensuring that all countries suffer horrendously as a result. The fact that those with least to contribute to the problem generally have greater vulnerability only serves to entrench both the injustice and the intractability of the issue.

The slim silver lining in recent extreme weather in the US is that it might bring home to US voters and policymakers that there are no winners in a game of chicken. Even if others are going to suffer more and sooner, the US is far from immune, especially to precisely these kinds of threats (droughts, wildfires, heatwaves, water stress). Russia is facing its own wildfires and floods. China has had large areas in drought almost constantly for the last five years and a flood this week has a death toll that could pass 100. Canada has simultaneously faced deadly floods and serious drought in the last couple of months. Middle Eastern petro-states are all too aware of their dire water situation as they rapidly go from grain exporters to zero wheat production within a decade (Saudi Arabia) after basically exhausting their fossil water. And Australia has all too quickly forgotten its own droughts, bushfires and floods just a couple of years ago.

Further complicating the picture is that it is not simply countries that are making these decisions. Apart from some nationalised oil companies, most of these reserves are held by for profit corporations with very, very deep pockets and who are generally not shy at throwing their weight around, spending up big on lobbying, misinformation and propaganda at every level in order to convince us all that without them we'd be living in caves and that they are struggling to get by in tough conditions.

Yet according to the most recent data, fifteen out of the thirty most profitable companies in the world are directly fossil fuel related (many of the remaining fifteen also have significant, if slightly less direct, links).

1. Gazprom: US$44.5b
2. Exxon Mobil: $41.1b
4. Royal Dutch Shell $30.9b
5. Chevron: $26.9b
8. BP: $25.7b
11. Vale: $22.9b
12. Petronas: $21.9b
13. VW: $21.4b
14. Ford: $20.2b
15. Petrobras: $20.1b
22. China National Petroleum: $16.3b
26. GE: $14.2b
27. Statoil: $14.1
29. Rosneft Oil: $12.5b
30. ConocoPhillips: $12.4b

The bottom line is that until a very wide audience grasps just how dire our situation is and starts to demand something different from our corporate and political leaders, then none of key climate numbers are likely to improve.

For me, the most telling number in McKibben's piece is the one that he doesn't mention. McKibben is an author with a string of respected publications about environmental and economic issues. He was the first popular writer to publish a book on climate change back in the 80s. Yet in the last three or four years he has re-invented himself as an activist after becoming convinced that writing alone is too slow to effect the changes that need to happen. He has built and become the public face of the world's largest climate movement, a movement named after and dedicated to a number: 350. His organisation, 350.org, refers to the highest concentration of CO₂ in parts per million considered "safe" by some of the world's leading climate scientists. We are currently over 390 ppm and rising rapidly. For most commentators, 350 ppm is seen as a pipe dream, an impossibility, well outside the realm of the thinkable, let alone the achievable. International negotiations talk about 550 and occasionally 450, but many commentators think we'll be lucky to stay below 650 and our current path is heading for 750 or significantly higher. In this context, McKibben and 350.org have served as a witness to how far from a just and sustainable world we are currently travelling. And yet here, in one of his highest profile pieces to date, he doesn't mention the number to which he has dedicated the last few years of his life and of which he is a relentless promoter. Is this because he has been so successful in publicising 350 ppm that he felt he could move on? Or because he decided that this idea is now so detached from reality that he needed to lower his sights?
Image by ALS.

Religious illiteracy

How much do you know about Christianity and other world religions? Test yourself on the questions below.

I've recently come across this 2010 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which surveyed 3,412 people, asking them 32 questions (most multiple choice) about some fairly basic pieces of religious knowledge. These were not difficult questions. Although they did not ask "Is the Pope Catholic?", they came pretty close.

Incredibly, the average score was 16 out of 32, with self-identified Christians scoring notably worse than atheists and agnostics. Only 8 people (0.002%) got all 32 questions correct. Since most of the questions were multiple choice, even guessing every answer would lead to an average score of 9.05 correct, yet one in seven did not even rise this high.

Now, it might be easy (particularly if we happen to have studied in this area for some time) to do the quiz and feel pretty smug about our general knowledge of basic religious concepts and figures. Or to laugh at the failure of most Christians in the US to be able to answer even basic questions about Christianity, being soundly beaten by atheists. But the point is that this survey actually has significant implications for how the church thinks about its mission. Yes, it was done in the US (and there were four questions specific to the US context asking about the the Constitution and Supreme Court rulings), but I'm unsure that Australians (for instance) would necessarily score much higher.

We're not (on the whole) surrounded by people who have tried Christianity and found it wanting, but by people who simply don't know what it is, apart perhaps from a few media-derived stereotypes. And this probably includes many of the people in the pews next to us.

Here are the questions, arranged under various themes and slightly abbreviated. Precise wording is available here. The ordering of the multiple choice answers varied.

Bible
1. What is the first book of the Bible? (Open-ended)
   
2. What are the names of the first four books of the New Testament, that is, the four Gospels? (Open-ended)
   
3. Where, according to the Bible, was Jesus born? Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Nazareth or Jericho?
   
4. Which of these is NOT in the Ten Commandments? Do unto others…, no adultery, no stealing, keep Sabbath?
   
5. Which figure is associated with remaining obedient to God despite suffering? Job, Elijah, Moses or Abraham?
   
6. Which figure is associated with leading the exodus from Egypt? Moses, Job, Elijah or Abraham?
   
7. Which figure is associated with willingness to sacrifice his son for God? Abraham, Job, Moses or Elijah?
   
   Elements of Christianity
   
8. What is Catholic teaching about bread and wine in Communion? They become body and blood, or are symbols?
   
9. Which group traditionally teaches that salvation is through faith alone? Protestants, Catholics, both or neither?
   
10. Was Mother Teresa Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu or Mormon?
    
11. What is the name of the person whose writings and actions inspired the Reformation? Luther, Aquinas or Wesley?
    
12. Who was a preacher during the First Great Awakening? Jonathan Edwards, Charles Finney or Billy Graham?
    
    Elements of Judaism
    
13. When does the Jewish Sabbath begin? Friday, Saturday or Sunday?
    
14. Was Maimonides Jewish, Catholic, Buddhist, Hindu or Mormon?
    
    Elements of Mormonism
    
15. When was the Mormon religion founded? After 1800, between 1200 and 1800, or before 1200 A.D.?
    
16. The Book of Mormon tells of Jesus appearing to people in what area? The Americas, Middle East or Asia?
    
17. Was Joseph Smith Mormon, Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist or Hindu?
    
    
    
    World Religions
    
18. Is Ramadan the Islamic holy month, the Hindu festival of lights or a Jewish day of atonement?
    
19. Do you happen to know the name of the holy book of Islam? (Open-ended)
    
20. Which religion aims at nirvana, the state of being free from suffering? Buddhism, Hinduism or Islam?
    
21. Is the Dalai Lama Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Catholic or Mormon?
    
22. In which religion are Vishnu and Shiva central figures? Hinduism, Islam or Taoism?
    
23. What is the religion of most people in India? Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim or Christian?
    
24. What is the religion of most people in Pakistan? Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or Christian?
    
25. What is the religion of most people in Indonesia? Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or Christian?
    
26. Who is the king of Gods in Greek mythology? Zeus, Mars or Apollo?
    
    Atheism and Agnosticism
    
27. Is an atheist someone who does NOT believe in God, believes in God, or is unsure whether God exists?
    
28. Is an agnostic someone who is unsure whether God exists, does NOT believe in God, or believes in God?
    
    Religion in Public Life
    
29. What does Constitution say about religion? Separation of church and state, emphasize Christianity, or nothing?
    
30. According to the Supreme Court, can a public school teacher lead a class in prayer?
    
31. According to the Supreme Court, can a public school teacher read from the Bible as an example of literature?
    
32. According to the Supreme Court, can a public school teacher offer a class comparing the world’s religions?

The hardest question was #14, which only 8% got correct. If everyone had guessed, you'd expect at least 20% would have got it. The easiest was #30, which admittedly only had two options, yet 89% were able to answer correctly.

The problem with Rowan Williams, and other links

Ben Myers: The problem with Rowan Williams. And some opposing thoughts from Michael Bird.

AlterNet: A history of the 40 hour working week. Why less is often more. Some evidence to back up the call to spend less, earn less, work less.

The Conversation: Oh the morality - Why ethics matters in economics. "An economic system that rewards amoral self-interest creates economic instability, fractures economic insecurity, fosters concentrations of economic power, exacerbates economic inequality and violates ecological sustainability."

The Inquisitr: Corruption in the USA. Eight states given an "F" and zero receive an "A".

Chomsky: Losing the World: American Decline - Part One and Part Two - The Imperial Way: American Decline in Perspective.

Liz Jakimow: What does table fellowship have to do with global justice? Quite a lot.

BGS: Kony 1984. There have been plenty of things written about the Kony 2012 viral video. I thought this was one of the more interesting ones, highlighting the way the film relies on the pursuit of peace through war, just like in 1984.

Reuters: Reports of smoking's demise are greatly exaggerated. Reports of smokers' demise are not. While rates of smoking (and associated mortality) in the developed world are in decine, they continue to grow rapidly in the developing world: "if current trends continue, a billion people will die from tobacco use and exposure this century - one person every six seconds."

The (en)rich list. One hundred inspirational people "whose contributions enrich paths to sustainable futures". Their "net worth" is measured in Google hits, which is perhaps just as arbitrary as counting dollars.
H/T Jeremy.

BWAA: The end of greed. A resource for a five week sermon series and/or Bible study that reflects on "consuming as if God, people and the planet matter". I haven't looked in detail at the contents, but I like the outline.

1. Consuming as if God matters: Rejecting consumerism, embracing the kingdom
2. Consuming as if People matter: Rejecting greed, embracing generosity
3. Consuming as if People matter: Rejecting exploitation, embracing justice
4. Consuming as if the Planet matters: Rejecting destruction, embracing care
5. Consuming as if Animals matter: Rejecting cruelty, embracing kindness

H/T Liz.

Good news, bad news

SMH: The good news is that the US National Intelligence Council thinks "a water-related, state-on-state conflict is unlikely during the next 10 years". The bad news is that after ten years, all bets are off: "as water shortages become more acute beyond the next 10 years, water in shared basi[n?]s will increasingly be used as leverage [...] The use of water as a weapon or to further terrorist objectives also will become more likely beyond 10 years". Full report here.

CP: March Madness. The recent North American heatwave is breaking a record-breaking number of records. Between the 9th and 19th of March more than 4,000 US heat records were broken, and only something like 113 cold records, a ratio of about 35 to 1 (the average ratio since 2000 in the US is 2.04:1). Some places set March records higher than April records, some had daily low temperatures that broke previous daily highs, and some had old records broken by as much as 17ºC.

HuffPo: 21stC oil will break the bank and the planet.

Asian Development Bank Says Climate Migration Poses Growing Threat: "In a new report, the bank says more than 42 million people in the region were displaced by environmental disasters over the past two years alone. In 2010, it said, more than 30 million people were displaced, some permanently, primarily by devastating floods in Pakistan and China."

NYT: OECD warns of ever-higher greenhouse gases. This is what we're headed towards without a significant change of direction.

CP: Do trees have rights? Revisiting The Lorax.. In a certain sense, they already do, at least under US law.

SEI: Valuing the oceans: "climate change alone could reduce the economic value of key ocean services by up to 2 trillion USD a year by 2100". I'm more than a little sceptical about such attempts to place an economic value on ecological realities, since they obscure the fact that the economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment. The damage we are doing to the oceans is not simply to be measured in missing dollars, but in broken lives, lost species, a weeping Creator.

Wit's End: Tropospheric ozone - blighted trees, breathing difficulties and pernicious corruption of science. The atmospheric pollution you probably haven't heard much about. This is not the "ozone layer" (stratospheric ozone), in which ozone molecules are precious and save our bacon from frying, but surface level ozone, which is an altogether different and nastier beast: "health costs due to global ozone pollution above pre-industrial levels by 2050 will be US$580 billion (year 2000$) and that mortalities from acute exposure will exceed 2 million."

Bradley Manning's abuse by US military

Whatever the outcome of his trial, whatever the ethics of his actions, the treatment of Bradley Manning in custody has been "cruel, inhuman and degrading", according to the UN special rapporteur on torture. A new report argues that, by keeping Private Manning in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day over an 11 month period, the US military may have breached the UN convention against torture: "imposing seriously punitive conditions of detention on someone who has not been found guilty of any crime is a violation of his right to physical and psychological integrity as well as of his presumption of innocence".

This follows a letter signed by 250 US law professors that called his treatment illegal, unconstitutional and possibly torture.

I have written in the past about WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, though Manning is also a fascinating figure in his own right. His alleged actions, whatever else we may wish to say about them, helped precipitate the Arab Spring, the US withdrawal from Iraq and the ending of that war - amongst many other things. Yet despite the hysteria at the time of their release, the US government admits it still can not point to a single informant who has been harmed by the leaks. Furthermore, various subesequent leaks of information likely subject to higher levels of classification have not been punished.

Urban Farming

Some intriguing and inspiring footage from a group of twenty or so families deliberately moving to an area of social deprivation in order to rebuild community, dignity and hope. It also happens to be not far from where some our extended family live. You can find out more about their activities here or on Facebook.

One thought we had about considering such a model in, say, Sydney or Edinburgh, is that since property prices have not crashed in the same way (yet?), then finding a suitable package of affordable land might be considerably more difficult. This hasn't stopped one group trying to do something somewhat similar in the Sydney CBD.
H/T John.

Loving the Least of These: Addressing a Changing Environment

"Love does no harm to a neighbour; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law."

- Romans 13.10.

Last year, the US National Association of Evangelicals published a conversation piece called Loving the Least of These: Addressing a Changing Environment. It is another attempt to articulate an evangelical approach to thinking about climate change, especially as it relates to the global poor. Loving the Least of These highlights three theological reasons to care about a changing climate: (a) Love God, Care for Creation; (b) Love God, Love Your Neighbour; (c) Love God, Witness to the World. Each standing alone would be sufficient to motivate Christian response, but together they provide compelling reasons to care deeply about the effects of a changing climate.

Interspersed with vignettes from a pastor, a scientist and a development worker, the publication speaks into a social context in the USA where many evangelicals are deeply suspicious of climate science and/or of the most commonly proposed policy responses to it (it is worth carefully distinguishing these, as they are very different issues, far too often conflated). As such, it is somewhat minimal in its goals, simply speaking to those who might accept that humans play some role in the climatic changes we have already witnessed and so bear some kind of responsibility for trying to minimise the ill-effects of these on those who bear least responsibility and yet are most vulnerable to them. Similarly, the impacts focus on the bottom end of the projected range of changes (i.e. the most optimistic scenarios combining the rosiest outlooks on both emissions reduction and climate sensitivity). Higher possibilities are acknowledged, but the effects are not mentioned. This has the result of keeping the focus on the global poor, since the report explicitly assumes that rich nations will have the means to adapt successfully to the coming changes. The problem with this approach is that it invites the response: "if we can adapt because we're rich, oughtn't the focus be on adaptation rather than mitigation, and on growing the economies of the two-thirds world so that they can afford adaptation too?" Without some sense of the impossibilities of adapting to the changes that are possible, even likely, on our present trajectory, then the immediacy of the ethical response is dulled.

Let us be clear: taking into account presently agreed and aspirational emissions targets, we are still most likely on track for a four degrees plus world within the expected lifetime of my daughter. That is, a world that is on average at least four degrees Celsius warmer than it was in pre-industrial times. Over land, that means far more than four degrees (since land warms faster than oceans). The ecological, economic, social and political changes likely to be associated with such a pace and scale of climatic alteration "would, in the long term, be likely to exceed the capacity of natural, managed and human systems to adapt" (IPCC, AR4, WG2 TS 5.2). That's putting it mildly.

Unless we acknowledge the full scale of the threats we face, we will continue to live in a fantasy - one with dire consequences for God's creation, our neighbours and the church's witness.

Two horizons of hope: justice vs economic growth I

Guest series by Matheson Russell

This is the first in a three-part series offering theological reflections on some issues raised by the Occupy movement. The second can be found here and the third here.

Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream” speech begins, oddly enough, with a banking metaphor. From the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that day in 1963 King thundered:

In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

Perhaps the Occupy Wall Street protesters could have used that.

In any case, I’m struck by the way King’s rhetoric has dated. It still moves me deeply, but I just cannot imagine a public figure today getting away with such bold and unqualified demands. We have come to expect a measure of realism, a curbed enthusiasm, a toned-down rhetoric from our political leaders. To our contemporary ears King’s words sound somewhat naïve, and his idealism might even evoke in us a hint of wariness.

Am I right? Why do you think that is? Can it be put down merely to changes in rhetorical style? What should we make of King’s demands for justice?

King returns in his speech to the theme of justice in the famous line: “we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until ‘justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream’.”

The quotation comes from the biblical prophet Amos. And, as Oliver O’Donovan explains, the prophet’s poetic metaphors express the longing for there to begin “a flood of judicial activity” in a society in which judicial activity has dried up: “Courts are to be held every day ‘in the gate’, appellants are to be heard quickly and without the need for bribes, verdicts are to be clear-sighted and decisive, and enforced” (The Ways of Judgment, 6).

This petition for renewed judicial activity is not unique to Amos. In fact, it’s a desire that is expressed repeatedly throughout the Old Testament. The moral imagination of Israel is marked by this posture of deep yearning for proper judicial oversight. The poor, the vulnerable and the exploited should have their cases heard; and those who have wronged them should be publicly exposed and held responsible for their misdeeds. Similarly, in the Hebrew scriptures the qualities most venerated in kings and rulers are not military prowess, rhetorical skill or political cunning but the readiness to execute justice and the determination to see that peace and righteousness are established and maintained. The Old Testament people of God were clearly convinced that nothing could be a greater blessing to a nation than to have a just and wise ruler, and nothing worse than to be subject to a corrupt or foolish ruler who has no concern for justice.

This guiding conviction is picked up again in the New Testament. In continuity with the message of the ancient prophets, both John the Baptist and Jesus come preaching against the rulers of Israel whose failings were precisely failures to exercise their authority with the appropriate justice and mercy; rather than teaching and applying the law of God without hypocrisy and without favour, they were exploiting and neglecting the people under their care and serving their own interests.

By contrast, Jesus is studiously portrayed in the gospels as one who demonstrates all the qualities of a just king or ruler and who will at last fulfill the oracle of Isaiah 9:

He will reign on David’s throne
    and over his kingdom,
establishing and upholding it
    with justice and righteousness
    from that time on and forever.

Throughout the Bible, then, it is axiomatic that the primary purpose of government is to establish and to uphold justice; and that without institutions of justice a society simply cannot enjoy peace and lasting happiness. Whether they are politically naïve or not, King’s focus on justice places him squarely in the biblical tradition.
Dr Matheson Russell is lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Auckland.

Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary

Warren Buffett, the 3rd richest man in the world, asks legislators to stop coddling the super-rich in this New York Times op-ed where he welcomes higher taxes.

Twenty seven planet Earths by 2050

AlterNet: Do we need a militant movement to save the planet (and ourselves)? Three writers say yes. By this, they mean a committed small minority willing to go beyond even civil disobedience to direct destructive action against key industrial infrastructure. While such ideas remain on the fringe today, I suspect that the coming decades may well see debates shift from "do we have a problem?" to "just how radically and rapidly do we need to change?".

IPS: Growing Water Deficit Threatening Grain Harvests. This isn't a problem confined to one area. Water stress is already affecting agriculture in parts of the USA, China, India, Middle East, Mexico, Pakistan and large areas of Africa.

Mongabay: Protected areas not enough to save biodiversity (a.k.a. life on earth): "Humans now impact over 80 percent of the world's land and 100 percent of the oceans. Around 40 percent of the Earth's surface has been 'strongly affected' by our consumption. [...] According to recent estimates, about 1.2 Earths would be required to support the different demands of the 5.9 billion people living on the planet in 1999 [...] if global society continues down the road we are on, we will need 27 planet Earths to sustain our consumption by 2050. [...] We're talking about losing 50 percent of species in the next half century—that's faster than any previous mass extinction event—and anybody who thinks we can go through a mass extinction and be perfectly fine is just deluding themselves." This is perhaps the most seriously dark paper I have come across in some time. And that is saying something.

Scientific American: Will 10 billion people use up the planet's resources? "The human enterprise now consumes nearly 60 billion metric tons of minerals, ores, fossil fuels and plant materials, such as crop plants and trees for timber or paper. [...] Hundreds of millions of people in Europe, North America and Asia live a modern life, which largely means consuming more than 16 metric tons of such natural resources—or more—per person per year. If the billions of poor people living today or born tomorrow consume anything approaching this figure, the world will have to find more than 140 billion metric tons of such materials each year by mid-century. [...] Between 1980 and 2002, the resources required to produce $1,000 worth of consumer goods fell from 2.1 metric tons to just 1.6 metric tons and global per capita income has increased seven-fold. The bad news is that trend will not necessarily continue and—in absolute terms—resource consumption has increased 10-fold since 1900 [...] already it takes three times as much total mining material to produce the same amount of ore as 100 years ago [...] Nor is it clear that "decoupling"—rising economic growth paired with reductions in resource consumption—actually is now taking place; most gains to date, such as those in Germany or Japan, may simply have been achieved by outsourcing resource-intensive manufacturing and the like abroad to countries like China."

NYT: Profile of a (very rich) Cassandra: "The prices of all important commodities except oil declined for 100 years until 2002, by an average of 70 percent. From 2002 until now, this entire decline was erased by a bigger price surge than occurred during World War II. Statistically, most commodities are now so far away from their former downward trend that it makes it very probable that the old trend has changed — that there is in fact a Paradigm Shift — perhaps the most important economic event since the Industrial Revolution.”

MWH: Ten things you didn't know you owned.

DD: Unemployment in the USA. A scary graph.

Mongabay: The glass is half-full: conservation has made a difference.

This is what hope looks like

Read this moving final statement from environmental activist Tim DeChristopher to the court before he was sentenced to two years in prison for a creative protest he made in 2008 against the illegal sale of federal US land to fossil fuel interests. Rousing stuff. If you read to the end, you'll find why I thought of Archbishop Tutu.

If you're not familiar with DeChristopher's story, then you can get a summary here or much more detail here.

Take the mic away from the speakers...

Here's another climate feedback: More frequent and severe heat waves, such as the one breaking all kinds of records in the US at the moment, are one of the most likely effects of continued climate change. More severe/frequent heat waves mean higher peak electricity demand, which means more power stations being built, which means more capacity in the system, which means more impetus to use it, which means (barring widespread and rapid implementation of cleaner energy) more greenhouse gas emissions, which means - well, you get it by now.

Can Christians ignore climate change?

"It is well past time for those of us still at the carnival of climate denial to exit the gates and allow the love of God to help us see and face the truth about climate change or global warming and the need to act. Once we do, we will discover that overcoming global warming presents us with tremendous opportunities to love God back and create a better world. Let me clarify things right up front: climate inaction is no longer an option for those who have the love of God in their hearts."

- Rev Jim Ball, Leaving the Carnival of Climate Change Denial
to Join the Next Great Cause of Freedom.
H/T Liz.

Inaction on climate change is no longer an option for faithful Christians. So says Jim Ball in this brief and polemic piece addressing various barriers to action that rich Christians may face. While somewhat simplified (it is only a short piece), identifying such barriers is a good exercise. Where are you stuck at?

Perhaps we could even suggest a few more: ignorance of what actions to take; distraction by other good things; despair over the inadequacy of our possible actions. Indeed, back here I considered nine such barriers and suggested ways in which faith in God, love for Jesus and hope from the Holy Spirit open new paths for us through them.

It is encouraging to see a Christian leader in the US publish such an article in a widely-read forum. Ball has also written a book that I haven't got to yet, called Global Warming and the Risen LORD: Christian discipleship and climate change. He is not a lonely voice; an increasing number of books have come out in the last couple of years offering Christian accounts of ecological responsibility. Yet there are still plenty of Christian leaders all too willing to speak up on behalf of the fossil fuel companies, and too many followers of Jesus who haven't yet heard the good news of Jesus applied to an increasingly damaged world.

What's that got to do with the price of bread?

The warmest UK spring for 350 years and the second driest for 100 has left the southeastern UK in drought. Water restrictions are in place in much of France and the government has set aside €700 million to support struggling farmers, while crop losses will be widespread in Germany too. Indeed, low water levels in major rivers could shut down French nuclear plants as the heat in 2003 did. The southern US has its own problems, with an estimated US$4 billion in losses due to drought already this year, despite the recent heavy flooding on the Mississippi nearby. Drought in China had left shipping on the Yangtze stranded and four million with trouble finding water until recent downpours now threaten floods in some areas. And this follows within twelve months of the Russian heatwave that was six standard deviations above the average and led to wheat exports being cancelled until recently, floods in Pakistan that displaced around twenty million people and decimated crops, while those in Queensland caused billions of dollars in lost crops.

These disasters combined with high oil prices (and no likelihood of them falling significantly barring a further worsening of global economy), an increasing share of fertile land being diverted into growing largely pointless biofuels, declining water tables (more than half the world's people live in countries where water tables are falling), a growing demand for land and water intensive western-style diets in the rising Asian middle class, soil degradation removing an area the size of Greece each year from the world's arable land, declining improvements in yields from agronomy (where something of a plateau seems to have been reached in many places as farmers catch up with scientists), and a volatile commodities market with cash looking for the next quick profit and we have a perfect recipe for the very kind of event that climate scientists, ecologists and economists have been warning about for some time: food price spikes. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has calculated a Food Price Index since 1990 and the last six months have seen figures rise to their highest since tracking began.

It might be frustrating for us in the UK if the price of bread goes up and we can't afford our holiday to Northern Africa (not that we're going this year; drought-stricken France it is then), but it is a bit more than an inconvenience or a disappointment in places where up to 80% of income is spent on food. It is a recipe for hunger, disease and social unrest. The last dramatic spike in 2008 led to riots in thirty countries and the government of Haiti being overthrown. The spike that has continued since early this year has already played a part in the Arab Spring and is pushing tens of millions back into malnutrition.

This is what climate change looks like (at least for now - remember we are only 0.8 degrees into what may well be a 4 degrees plus experience). Not that every hot day or drought or flood or snow storm can be blamed on us, but that our actions have affected the system to a degree that overall productivity of our agricultural system is made less reliable (one recent study claimed that our changing climate has already put a 5.5% dent in wheat yields), threatening in turn the political system. Climate change is not the only pressure on the food system, but it is the wild-card in the pack of predicaments. Another disturbing development is that projections for expected food production may need to be downgraded in light of another recent study that found that higher carbon dioxide levels contribute less benefit to crops than previously thought.

Rising population and dietary changes mean that food requirements are projected to double by 2050. There are bright spots of opportunity, but the target is looking increasingly out of reach.

A recent report released by Oxfam predicted a doubling of food prices by 2030, which has led to a flurry of media analysis (I found this case study to be particularly illuminating of the systemic problems in how we currently do things).

What are we to do in light of this? All kinds of things. But we can begin by taking a closer look at the food on our plate and becoming interested in where it has come from, what it cost (socially and ecologically) to get it there and what alternatives are already available to us. If we pray "give us this day our daily bread", we cannot take food for granted.