AAAS conference: 50 million environmental refugees by 2020. This is a connection that we've been seeing in the Middle East and North Africa and is only likely to continue to grow in importance. Climate and ecological damage combine with political and economic conditions to cause food insecurity, leading in turn to political instability in nations closer to the edge and these problems are then exported through migration. Such migrants won't always be labelled ecological or climate refugees, since the proximate causes will include political and economic factors, often focalised or triggered through food issues.
Coral reefs are the canaries in the global coal mine. It is likely most won't survive above 350 ppm CO2 for more than a few decades. We're at 390 and rising.
Guardian: Wasting water in a throwaway society. In the UK, "we throw away, on average, twice as much water per year in the form of uneaten food as we use for washing and drinking."
The Australia Institute: Hiding the unemployed (and underemployed), or why the official unemployment rate is the tip of the iceberg.
Shell says we are entering a zone of uncertainty over oil supply. A clever ploy to keep the prices high or a frank admission that the future of oil is declining global production?
The first comment points out the fatal flaw. Such a move is basically impossible for a public company, who have as their primary legal obligation the requirement to make profit for their shareholders. Of course, it is quite possible to have capitalism without this requirement (as was the case for much of the early life of corporations), but unless this issue is addressed, then all the good intentions of CEOs and consumers will be thwarted.
And that law is unlikely to change anytime soon while corporations are themselves able to throw around so much political weight. Democracy only works when people are in charge - and corporations are not persons.
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Half the world's poker machines are located in Australia, and they rake in AUD$12 billion each year (that's not how much is gambled, but how much is lost by gamblers). Problem gamblers can throw away $1,000 per hour. GetUp are working together with Independent MP Andrew Wilkie to push for reform. The goal: mandatory pre-commitment, which simply means that players, before they start gambling, must set their own daily limit on how much they are willing to lose for the day. This isn't a massive change. Nonetheless, Clubs Australia are preparing to spend $20 million to fight the move and protect their bloated profits. You can sign a petition here (and another here)* to offer your support.
"I asked a group of 11- to 14-year-olds the other day: 'Do you believe humanity will end soon?' And they nearly all said, 'Yes I do believe it.' Our children think our world will end. It's a tragic thing. Adults don't think that. They don't see that we are eating the planet. But we are. If you take all the biomass of vertebrates on the planet, 98% are men and their domestic animals. All the wild animals in the world make up only 2%."
This quote is from the director of Home, an inspiring piece of aerial cinematography available for free online that I mentioned back here.
Different generations perceive ecological threats differently. At least, that's my impression from numerous conversations and reading. In a mixed discussion group recently, I found that all those over forty primarily felt sad about ecological degradation, but were puzzled when I asked if they had any fear associated with that experience. All those under forty were losing sleep in their anxieties about what we are doing to our planet. Of course, the attitudes of this one group doesn't prove anything, but it illustrates the sense I've been getting of a generational difference in how the issue is perceived. Does this match your experience?
I like a good analogy. When well designed, they can convey the unfamiliar through the familiar. Of course, they can also mislead if we don't pay attention to the differences as well as the similarities. Here are two I've come across recently. First, one from Australian Sustainable Energy by the Numbers, a useful report from the University of Melbourne into the possibility of getting Australia to 90% renewables (or low carbon) in a short time frame at a decent cost with (hopefully) some more realistic assumptions than this report.
"Our cruise ship is leaking badly. The captain is advised by the engineer to start the bilge pumps but the accountant says this will be too expensive and would cut into profits. The captain makes a tough decision; the passengers will have to bale. An argument breaks out between the staff and the passengers about whether to bale with spoons or glasses. The passengers argue for glasses but the staff for spoons because of the likely breakage of glasses. The hospitality manager comes up with a brilliant solution. The passengers should drink more beer and champagne and pee over the side."
And I couldn't go past this recent letter to the editor in the SMH.
"And what about this great big garbage tax? Why do I have to pay to have my garbage collected when I can dump it in the bush for nothing? My little bit doesn't make any difference to world garbage levels, and when it rolls to the bottom of the gully I can't even see it. Call me a garbage sceptic, but show me the science. If garbage is bad why do we produce so much?
"When I went overseas there was garbage lying everywhere. Other countries don't have great big garbage taxes. They make cheap stuff and we can't compete. Until every country in the world adopts a garbage price, our great big garbage tax is economic suicide. Garbage is crap."
- David Hale Gordon, SMH letters to the editor, 25th March 2011.
A while back I suggested that many nursery rhymes could be read as coded eco-parables, offering a reading of Sing a Song of Sixpence and sketching out a few more. As father to a toddler, these keep jumping out at me in all kinds of places. Does anyone else see the award-winning children's book Where is the Green Sheep? by Mem Fox and Judy Horacek as a lament for the relative absence of an effective green social movement? Starting with the obvious presence of the red and blue sheep (the traditional colours of the mainstream parties in many nations), and all kinds of other sheep (the car sheep has broken down while the train sheep travels happily, even sun, rain, wind and wave sheep have showed up - renewable energy sources), finally the green sheep is discovered to be sleeping under a bush.
A final reminder that if any other UK residents would like to save £50 off their next electricity bill, then let me know before the end of Sunday so I can send you an invite. You will then have until the end of April to make a decision about whether to switch to 100% renewable Good Energy. Full details can be found in my Tuesday post.
New South Wales Labor is toast. Everyone knows it, but that doesn't make the election a dead rubber. As mentioned in the previous post, the upper house (Legislative Council) is uncertain and many seats are marginal. Moreover, election funding is associated with number of primary votes, so your first preference still gives a few dollars to the party you select.
Although it is late in the day to be offering it, Steve over at the Box Pop has been writing a five-part series on the election. The first post highlights just how narrow and misleading some of the groups claiming to give a "Christian" assessment of the parties are. The second explains the relevant differences between state and federal elections. The final three posts each offer one issue worth paying attention to and one that is a red herring. First, public education is worth preserving, but ethics classes are now a done deal. Second, ecological responsibility can't be sidelined by claiming that Christians disagree (since that applies pretty much everywhere),* whereas foreign policy has little to do with state government. The final post is yet to be published, but I'm hoping it will be about sustainable infrastructure planning that is not in bed with developers (to my mind, this has been one of the biggest failures of NSW Labor over the last sixteen years).** Hints in the first post suggest otherwise, but I can dream on for another couple of hours until it goes up.
H/T Andrew Cameron.
*For example, it's worth remembering that Newcastle is already the world's biggest coal export port and is currently dramatically increasingly its capacity. Once completed, the expanded facility will be able to handle a volume of coal so large that the resulting emissions will be greater than all of Australia's other emissions combined. We cannot pretend that we in NSW are not a serious part of the problem.
**Did you know that only one party refuses to accept donations from either unions or corporations? Can you guess which one?
UPDATE: Steve's final post is now up. It is not on infrastructure, but on something else also very important.
A short and fun little video reminding us of the differences between state and federal elections. Key message: if you vote above the line in the upper house, don't stop with a "1", or your vote may well expire (even if you vote for a major party and they don't need your vote due to the complex mathematics of the Single Transferrable Vote method), allowing extreme candidates such a Pauline Hanson or the Shooters Party to be elected (and possibly gain the balance of power), even if they only gain 1-2% of the vote. The lower house result may be the most obvious in the history of Australian elections (bookies are offering odds of 1:1.01 for a Coalition victory: for every dollar you bet, if the Coalition wins, they'll give you a whole cent!), but the upper house is wide open. Vote wisely and don't waste your vote.
Simple ideas with intuitive pass-it-on appeal are rare. This is one of them.
I have huge respect for paramedics, ambulance officers or whatever they are called in your region (in Oz, they are often affectionately known as "ambos"). They save lives more or less on a daily basis and are frequently first on the scene of dangerous and sad situations. I have personally benefitted three times from their care (once I got to travel in an ambulance with sirens blaring, but since I lived about 400 metres from a major hospital my excitement was short-lived) and can't count the times I've seen them help those around me. Anything that makes their job easier is worth consideration.
So the idea is to store an emergency contact number on your mobile under "ICE" (In Case of Emergency). That way, first responders (which could include police or firefighters) know who to call if, God forbid, you are dead, unconscious or otherwise unable to indicate an appropriate contact. This helps you to be identified, allows quick access to critical medical information and gives your loved ones peace of mind. This idea has only been around for a couple of years, but is catching on quickly.
If you have more than one contact, use ICE1, ICE2, ICE3 and so on. If your phone is locked and requires a pass phrase to access, see here. There is an alternative language independent version of the same idea here.
Hope is a key theme of this blog: how it is possible to have Christian hope amidst a world groaning all the more under novel levels of ecological degradation and what difference such hope makes in our Christian discipleship. My longest series (summarised in this recent post) was an extended reflection upon hope and last year when I tried to re-frame the purpose of this blog, hope featured prominently.
So I was very interested when asked recently by the Centre for Public Christianity (CPX) to review a book by Tim Flannery with the title Here on Earth: An Argument for Hope. Flannery is well-known in Australia as a public science communicator and has written a range of books and other pieces on biodiversity, sustainability and climate change (The Weather Makers is one of his best known books). For his work, he was named Australian of the Year in 2007. Flannery is not a Christian, so I was very interested to see what kind of account of hope he would offer in the face of our dire situation.
For UK residents: an advertisement/endorsement
I very rarely advertise or endorse products or companies. I have a deliberate policy of not accepting Google ads on my site, even though I could be earning hundreds (or, if the marketing is to be believed, thousands) of pounds a year. I think that the vast majority of advertising that swamps our attention is a net deficit to social health through creating artificial dissatisfaction (the basis of most marketing), that is, through the corruption of desire, which, in theological terms, is a cause and symptom of sin. However, there are exceptions.
And I am going to make one in this case. Sometimes, I am quite happy to recommend a product and believe that doing so is not promoting destructive cravings or artificial needs.
How to save £50 and slash your carbon footprint
I agree with Žižek that ethical consumption is insufficient to meet the scale and breadth of problems we face. Yet almost everyone uses electricity, and very few are able to generate their own. This means that the vast majority of us pay an energy company for our power generation.
The selection of a power company is an ethical choice when there are genuine differences between them and between the results of various ways of producing electricity. Sources of power that require the combustion of finite fossil fuels and the emission of significant volumes of greenhouse gases contribute to the dangerous pace of climate change we are beginning to experience and leave a legacy for countless future generations. They also continue the process of ocean acidification and are generally associated with a wide range of other ecological and social ills. Therefore, reducing one's power consumption and switching to cleaner sources is an expression of love for God's good creation in its biodiversity, for one's neighbours who rely on a stable climate for food and for future generations whose societies will be shaped by the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans that we leave behind.
In the UK, renewable energy has the potential to supply most or all of the nation's energy requirements. It is not perfect, but it is vastly superior to the alternatives when all ethical factors are considered. While many energy companies offer "green" packages, many of these only include small fractions of generation from renewable sources. As far as I am aware (feel free to correct me) only two companies currently offer 100% renewable energy to households in the UK: Ecotricity and Good Energy. Having looked into both of them, we chose Good Energy, which is the only energy company to receive the highest rating from Ethical Consumer on their Ethical Company Index.
Ten reasons to consider switching to Good Energy
1. Carbon free. All Good Energy generation is from renewable sources (no fossil fuels or nuclear) with zero carbon emissions.* Switching from a standard energy package to 100% renewable will reduce most people's carbon footprint by up to a third. For many people, this will be more than selling the car, giving up flying or becoming vegetarian. This difference is independently certified under the Green Energy Supply Certification Scheme.
*Yes, there are still emissions associated with the construction and materials, but these are relatively small compared to alternatives. For those with gas as well as electricity, Good Energy also offer gas, which obviously does have emissions, but they put the profits back into supporting renewable generation. Switching electricity (but not gas) to renewable generation will still reduce most people's carbon footprint by about 1.5 tonnes per annum.
2. Easy. This is probably the single largest reduction to most people's carbon emissions that can be made as a once off action in a matter of minutes without any further thought or change in lifestyle. Although many of the steps I think we all need to consider taking are difficult (and I'm suspicious of lists that claim "ten easy steps to save the planet"); this one really is very easy.
3. Not too expensive. When fossil fuels are subsidised to the tune of over £300 billion per year globally (more than ten times the amount received by renewables), it is no wonder that we consider them cheap energy. But good energy doesn't need to cost the earth. Switching to Good Energy, the average household will pay the grand sum of approximately £1 more per week - though that is before we get to #10 (see below).
4. Human scale. You are supporting a small, accountable and responsive company, rather than filling the coffers of a huge multinational. I think that size does matter. There are better and worse companies at all sizes, but my impression is that human-scale operations are less likely to be truly evil and that few giants are truly benign.
5. Local. As a UK-based company, it is subject to UK laws and taxes and so isn't trying to avoid its social responsibilities through tax avoidance. It works with thousands of small-scale energy suppliers and so is like buying from a farmers market rather than a supermarket. You can read more here.
6. Resilient. Once constructed, renewables have the advantage of much shorter supply chains and are less vulnerable to geopolitical disruptions than fuels that must be imported from elsewhere. This makes them (and the communities they power) more resilient during bumpy times.
6. It's the future. In this interview, a discussion of trends in new energy production might surprise some in how far renewables have come.
"For the past two years 40 per cent of all new electricity generating capacity in Europe came from wind turbines. (Add solar and other renewables and that rises to 63 per cent.) From Spain to Sweden so many new turbines are being erected that Europe is on target to produce 15 per cent of its electricity from wind by 2020 and 50 per cent by 2050."
7. You're not alone. Public attitudes towards wind power in particular are overwhelmingly positive. I don't deny that there are downsides, but it is the best option available, especially in Scotland where it is coupled with hydro power for both storage of excess production (extra wind energy can pump water back uphill for later hydro use) and for immediate demand when wind drops.
8. Accessible. At Good Energy, a real person will answer your calls and emails. I actually called yesterday, didn't wait in line, didn't face fifty sub-menus on an automated system and got a direct and helpful answer to a query I had about our energy use. We've been with them for over six months now and every interaction has been positive. I was going to post about them earlier, but decided to wait and see if it turned out to be too good to be true. It hasn't. So it's no surprise to us that Good Energy recently came top in a Which? survey of customer satisfaction with utilities.
9. Visible. Most energy production today happens out of sight and so stays out of mind. Being more mindful of where our energy comes from means taking greater responsibility for the energy choices we make in both production and consumption.
10. Special offer. Good Energy have a standing offer to encourage customers to spread the word. If you quote my name and customer reference number (003060766), then both you and I receive £25 credit on our accounts with Good Energy. Yes, I am in effect being paid a commission for this ad, but I am happy to do this as this product is not based on the creation of artificial "needs" or the corrupting of desire. Most of us also have plenty of room to reduce our energy consumption through all kinds of measures (better insulation, behavioural change, energy-efficient appliances, reduced consumption of other goods and so on), but few will end up using no electricity at all, so I am not helping to create an artificial desire. If you let me know before the end of the week,* then as a special offer for Climate Week, Good Energy are doubling the usual reward, i.e. £50 credit for each of us. Once you join, you too can tell others and cut both your bills and those of your friends and family. Recruit enough people and your energy is not just carbon free - it's free.
*You can email me via my profile.
If you would like to compare different companies and what they offer, try Ethical Consumer or Green Electricity, which both offer side-by-side comparisons of the options from independent third parties. Please take a moment this week to consider your energy supplier and contact me if you're curious or keen. Even if you're not sure, let me know and I can register your interest before the end of the week and then you'll have until the end of April to sign up and still get the £50 credit.
Here ends the advertisement. Your regular programming will resume shortly.
Perceptions of material wealth and poverty are so often relative. We compare ourselves to our neighbours to decide whether we are well-off or struggling. And my tendency is usually to look up the food chain rather than down. If someone along the street has twice as much as I do, then I must be poor. Bill Gates could look at Hosni Mubarak and consider himself a little cash-strapped.
What does Jesus think? If I have a fixed abode,* a change of clothes** and know where my next meal is coming from,*** then I'm rich.
Are you rich?
It is not wrong to be rich, but it does mean those of us who are so abundantly wealthy as to have weeks of food stored up (and more easily obtainable nearby for a tiny fraction of our income), cupboards full of clothes and multiple secure rooms for our personal use need to think of ourselves as such and so take heed of the instructions in holy scripture addressed to those who are rich. We need to get some perspective and learn how to be rich.
*Luke 9.58. Fixed abode doesn't mean you have to own your house, just that you have a place to live.
**Luke 3.11. I realise these words are actually said by John, but Jesus also assumes that his disciples will only have one cloak (Luke 22.36).
***Luke 12.13-34.
The image is of Judas kissing Christ, a statue flanking the Scala Sancta in Rome. Judas was the disciples' treasurer, and would enrich himself at the expense of the common good (John 12.5-6).
For those who are struggling with the video posted yesterday, it is important to note that Žižek is addressing an audience that he assumes will be familiar with may of the ideas he is discussing and so he doesn't always explain everything. He's quite content to say "And so on" rather than join all the dots. This means that if this is your first introduction to Žižek, it may not be the most accessible piece of communication.
The bottom line of what he's trying to say is that the system is so broken that tinkering around the edges is a distraction from the more radical task at hand. Light green consumerism is still consumerism, ethical consumerism is still consumerism. As such, they are largely a waste of time, since they make us feel like we're doing something while we're still mainly on the problem side of the equation.
Does he have an alternative? Yes, though he doesn't really discuss it in this video. It is hinted at where he says, "It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property." That is, the problem is much deeper than one or two bad apples in the barrel, a few CEOs being too greedy or some missing government regulation. It is knottier than any given new piece of technology, no matter how shiny, can untie. The problem for Žižek is with our economic system as a whole. Does this make him a dangerous radical, a subversive Marxist with an anti-capitalist agenda for world government? Yes, actually it does. And he has no problem with that (having called himself "a communist in a qualified sense").
Lockheed Martin won the tender for the 2011 UK census and will be collecting 32 pages of information from every household in the UK, except for those willing to risk a £1,000 fine and a criminal record.
I don't identify as a pacifist, though I have deep misgivings about the influence and scale of multinationals who trade in military hardware. Lockheed Martin built the UK's Trident nuclear system, continue to make banned cluster bombs and have supplied much of the equipment being used to suppress dissent in the Middle East, including the most recent violence in Bahrain.
I understand that government is an exercise in compromise, of doing the best that is actually possible, but some compromises are more important than others. Count me out are running a campaign highlighting the problematic nature of this particular government contract.
Automated sock puppets are now (likely) in use by the US military, using software developed to enable a single person to maintain multiple credible and untraceable online personae. I spoke about this technology back here. The Pentagon claims it is being used for "counter-propaganda" purposes, noting that it would be illegal for them to use it on US citizens. It is clear that the military are not the only ones using it. Is it illegal for major corporations to do so?
I thought it might be worth correcting a potential misunderstanding of one of my earlier posts on a Lenten reading of the sermon on the mount in Matthew's Gospel. When I spoke of the reward of fasting being the healing of desire, I did not intend to imply that there is no future aspect to this as though those who perform disciplines of piety privately have also already received their reward in full. The beatitudes that form the heart of the sermon are focused primarily on the future; it is those who are dissatisfied with the present who are blessed, because of God's coming future.
So the reward is both now and not yet. Now the "reward" is a certain kind of dissatisfaction, a yearning desire for right things. This means that at present, fasting and the other disciplines mentioned by Christ are not only uncomfortable and costly, but they make us less happy (in one sense). We fast in order that we begin to hunger for the right things, that is, to hunger and thirst for justice, as the beatitudes put it. The not-yet aspect of the reward is the satisfying of those healed desires. Today's desires look forward to tomorrow's feast, a feast that begins at Easter.
A friend was recently informed by her boss that unless she makes herself available for exotic overseas postings at fairly short notice that could last a minimum of three months or could end up being substantially longer than that, she will be on a blacklist when the next round of redundancies are made as a result of being deemed "inflexible". The fact that this would mean leaving her husband at short notice for an extended period of time is not taken into consideration.
And so I praise inefficiency, or rather, those bold enough to take a stand against the idol of efficiency. Efficiency is undoubtedly a good thing, but like all good things, it is a relative good and when it is treated as an absolute, when elevated to a primary and overriding consideration, it becomes a menacing false god, demanding human sacrifice. Idolatry is cruel and the god of efficiency grinds human lives in its well-oiled cogs.
Full series links can be found here.
"Ash Wednesday, then, should be seen as standing guard over Lent, reminding us at its start of the core truth of Christianity: we must give up. We must give up not this or that habit or food or particular sin, but the entire project of self-justification, of making God’s love contingent on our own achievements. And the liturgy of this day goes right to the ultimate reality we struggle against, which is death itself. We are reminded, both by the words we say and the burned palms imposed on our foreheads, that we will die. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Give up! Give up, for you will not escape death. The entire logic of the theology of glory, of all our Pelagian impulses, of all human attempts at mastery and control, are searched out and stripped away on Ash Wednesday. We are seen for what we are – frail mortals. All power, all money, all self-control, all striving, all efforts at reform cannot permanently forestall our death. Our return to dust is the looming fact of our existence that, in our resistance to it, provides a template of sorts for all the more petty efforts we make to gain control of our lives. [...]
"Ash Wednesday is a day for the hopeless and suffering, who are affirmed in their hopelessness and suffering rather than commanded to take up the task of self-improvement. When we give up hope, hope in our own abilities and efforts and doing, then the reality of God’s grace truly can become manifest. It is the occasion for an affirmation of who we are, not, ultimately, a plea to transcend our mortal condition. We can live in our bodies, in this world, seeing ourselves more compassionately and thereby are moved to perform works of love, without conditions or demands, for our fellow-sufferers. The first day of Lent is an occasion not for a form of world-denial, but loving acceptance of flawed reality, of imperfection. It is a rebuke to all separatism, escapism, and self-hatred. And of course, as it points us to the Christ-event, Lent ends, as it beings, with an affirmation of our creaturely existence: as Christ rose from the dead, so will our bodies, to live in a New Jerusalem – not an ethereal 'heaven'."
This is a beautiful, moving, personal and very insightful piece on the importance of Ash Wednesday in the tradition of Lent, and on the importance of the body and its death in the fullness of life. It is worth reading in full. My own journey out of a dualistic desire for escape from bodily life was also something of a via negativathrough the prophet Nietzsche.
H/T Jason.
My wife and I saw Lars von Trier's Dogville recently. Our opinions of the controversial Danish director had been diametrically opposed. I loved both Dancer in the Dark and Breaking the Waves. Jess had heard their plots and refused to see them because they sounded awful. So convincing her to watch Dogville was a bit of a coup, helped by a friendly neighbour who dropped in the DVD without our requesting it and my pointing out that it would be rude to return it unwatched.
We loved it. The minimalist set creatively captured the panopticon experience of small town life. The acting was strong. But the most interesting thing was that Dogville is a very insightful picture of what so many people (including more Christians than we might realise) think the Christian message says. Without mentioning God (the town has no church and the mission house perpetually lacks a preacher), the film is deeply theological. Life is a test: will we accept Grace into our lives freely and discover a gift we didn't seek and didn't deserve? Or will we try to pay for Grace, or worse, constrain and even coerce Grace? And if we fail the test, then comes merciless judgement... but I don't want to give away the ending.
Highly recommended. Distressing scenes, but then you already knew that because it's Lars von Trier.
Byron is a husband, and father of two small children. He keeps worms, bees and a compost pile, with a small garden to justify them.
In his spare time, he is an ecological ethicist, author, activist, speaker, assistant minister and postgraduate student.
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