We can talk climate change when you drop the condom.
Over at Mirror of Justice, Rick Garnett isn’t too taken with Eduardo’s post on the Vatican and climate change.
Eduardo writes, with respect to the news that the Holy See is sending a delegation to the climate-change conference in Bali:
Let’s hope this signals the beginning of a shift away from the Church’s neglect of this important moral and political issue. One would hope that it could speak with at least half the urgency that it has endlessly heaped on such issues as gay marriage and contraception.Why, exactly, should we hope this? As it happens, I hear (much) more about environmental issues in my own Catholic community than I do about “gay marriage and contraception”. In any event, on these latter questions, which involve the morality of particular activities or the nature of marriage, it seems that the Church has (for better or worse, one might think) a fairly clear and discrete teaching to articulate. What, exactly, would the analogous clear teaching be in the context of climate change?
Not that Eduardo can’t defend himself–UPDATE: just saw that he has responded at MoJ–but isn’t it obvious that he was simply asking for the church to speak with increased urgency about climate change? Too much? Why should we hope for this? Pollution bad–and not just for the environment, doubters. Lagging fuel-emissions standards bad. Dumping oil-processing waste into Great Lakes bad. Inattention to wastefulness–which certainly harms the poor–bad. Why shouldn’t we hope for this new urgency? Well, by holding up Al Gore as a model, according to one of Rick’s interlocutors, Eduardo has fallen into the well-known fallacy of believing you have something worthwhile to say even though you disagree with the church’s teaching against contraception.
Rick writes:
One might go further, and ask whether, in fact, the failure of people like Al Gore to embrace the Church’s on matters of sexual morality and fertility calls into question their own “Green” credentials. As a friend of mine suggested to me in correspondence:
Who is more “Green”–the couple who recognizes the givenness of fertility, understands its times and seasons, and tries to build virtues of both activity and restraint in the exercise of the powers that they experience as given, or the couple that looks to a chemical or pharmaceutical company for a quick fix to a burdensome physical condition, namely, fertility? Which attitude is more in line with the idea of stewardship of a given world that presumably is behind “being Green?”
That doesn’t parse–and not only because this isn’t a contest to decide who among us is the greenest. (Or even the most Catholic: apparently the fact that Gore isn’t Catholic doesn’t impinge on this analysis.) Eduardo was endorsing the fairly recent phenomenon of Vatican officials–like the pope–increasingly mentioning environmental issues such as stewardship of the earth. Is Rick arguing that the curia should pipe down? Or should they simply avoid getting their hands dirty with troublesome “specific policy proposals”?
Wouldn’t it be great if the “shift” for which Eduardo hopes was, in an integrated and thorough way, distinctively Catholic, and involved talking about stewardship, solidarity, sustainable development, *and* the importance of valuing the truly human over chemically facilitated individualism? Surely the Church has more to add than “me, too!”
Sure it would, and no one suggested otherwise. But hooking the climate-change conversation to the contraception cart isn’t the only way to do it–or even a very good one.
Based on the words that Rick wrote, I’d suggest that he was arguing the latter. Here’s what Rick said:
For what it’s worth, I find it interesting that the head of the CalTech Division of Engineering and Applied Science has written that the IPCC’s models predict drastic climate change only by assuming that humanity is going to burn off fossil fuels equivalent to 11-15 trillion barrels of oil over the next 100 years, which is three or four times as much fossil fuel as is actually estimated to exist.
Is that guy wrong? I haven’t been able to find anything online that even tries to refute his analysis. What if he’s right? What if it turns out that Peak Oil and Peak Coal scenarios are basically right? What if we’re about to see such drastic price increases in fossil fuel prices that a carbon tax is superfluous? In that event, “inaction” (as Eduardo is using the term) wouldn’t be a “sin,” it seems. It might be better to expend resources to help people prepare for the coming financial disasters and dislocations. (By the way, I enjoyed Kunstler’s “The Long Emergency,” if “enjoy” is the right word for being frightened.)
I’m NOT saying that I think this is the way things will happen; maybe this guy is off-base as to how many coal reserves exist, or how much they would contribute to global warming; or any number of other things. I am saying that the Bishops — who are certainly not experts here — would be wise to avoid getting tied down too closely to any one policy approach. Indeed, if you believe William Nordhaus — a Yale professor who knows these issues much more intimately than does anyone around here, including me — Al Gore’s proposal (which Eduardo seems to recommend as the Catholic model) would cost about $20 trillion dollars more than the benefits (see Table V-3 here).
By the way, that’s not to say that Nordhaus is right, or that I am even qualified to tell whether he’s right. The point is that highly qualified and respected experts do disagree as to the appropriate policy approach.
The funny thing, Stuart, is that preparations for peak oil and responses to climate change are roughly the same — start weaning ourselves from fossil fuel immediately. Peak oil theorists (especially Kunstler) are not arguing that we should do nothing and let the price system take care of things. They say that rapid declines in oil supplies due to the peaking of production will cause their own catastrophic (economic) consequences if countries do not prepare for them decades in advance. In fact, my sense is that Kunstler thinks we’re already too late.
Few would disagree that potentially dire climate changes present serious moral issues on which the Vation should take a position. But what relevance does the gratuitous swipe at the Vatican for its position on gay marriage and contraception have to this topic? It seems more a reflect action on the part of many contributors and respondents on this blog on almost any issue.
I don’t know about Eduardo, but it seems to me that much of the Catholic blogosphere and hierarchy has become preoccupied with defending the Church’s teachings on homosexuality, marriage, birth control and abortion, and in so doing has emphasized “rules” about personal sexual behavior to the exclusion of other teachings.
This can be annoying if you believe other pressing social justice issues are being ignored. Sometimes it’s difficult not to take a swipe at that preoccupation. I do it all the time, shame on me.
Once the swipe is made, the issue in question can no longer be discussed sanely, because there is a rush to defend the Church’s sexuality and openness to life teachings, and the original topic gets lost in the shuffle.
Worse, what often happens is that if you criticize the preoccupation with sexual mores, you’re seen as being critical or questioning of those mores. And if you can’t agree with or grasp those basic tenets, how can anything else you say be taken seriously.
I also see a tendency to subordinate all other social justice issues to homosexuality, marriage, birth control and abortion. The thinking seems to run along the notion that people are out there killing babies and engaging in behaviors that erode our social fabric. So what’s the point of addressing global warming until we can make a world worth preserving? And who even knows if the scientists are right?
In truth, I think “real” Catholics are as opposed to environmental and political abuses as they are to sexual evils. But in the public discourse, these things have somehow taken and either/or direction.
Probably doesn’t shed a lot of light on this particular situation, but I do think it offers a glimpse at what’s wrong with dialogue among Catholics of different stripes these days.
Eduardo — you say that peak oil theorists don’t think the “price system” will “take care of things.” In a broad sense that’s true, but how so here? It seems to me that the one thing that Peak Oil theorists are saying is that we’re running out of oil and that oil prices are about to increase so dramatically that everything about our civilization (including the feeding of city dwellers) is going to be imperiled. That’s very different — opposite, even — from the notion that oil is so plentiful and cheap that consumption is going to rise and rise and rise for the indefinite future.
Presidents going back at least as far as the early 1970s have been talking about “energy independence” and the danger of relying on “foreign oil.” Isn’t this the time to kill several birds with one stone? How many reasons do we need to do something about dependence on fossil fuels?
I don’t agree with your interpretation of peak oil theory on two fronts. First, the argument is that production is declining, not that we’re running out of oil. Still half the oil left to consume.
Second, prices may go up, but in the absence of advance planning, no viable substitutes exist, so we’ll just pay through the nose (to block others from using our oil) and continue to burn fossil fuels.
Precisely — if Peak Oil is right, we’re already going to “pay through the nose.” So, for the third time, doesn’t that affect the policy analysis as to whether we would need a carbon tax? It seems fairly obvious that if oil is going to be cheap and effectively infinite for as far as the eye can see, the case for a carbon tax is much stronger than if oil is going to keep skyrocketing in price anyway. You seem to keep resisting this point for some reason.
In any event, the point I made — which you have not addressed — was that according to the head of the CalTech Division of Engineering and Applied Science, catastrophic global warming predictions are based on the (wrong) assumption that we are going to burn off several times more fossil fuel than the Earth actually contains. Do you know of any refutation of this finding? Even if you do, how do you expect Catholic Bishops, of all people, to have any idea how to make sense of various policy proposals?
Stuart — According to peak oil theorists, the prices post-peak will be so high as to seriously erode our quality of life and responding by shifting our infrastructure away from fossil fuels will take decades. So you really think peak oil theorists believe we should just wait for that to happen? FOr the third time, do you disagree that peak oil theorists say we should be acting now (before prices reach $300 per barrel) to find alternatives to fossil fuels? And don’t carbon taxes, etc. have a role to play in moving that process along? As I said, the suggested policy responses to both problems are largely the same. And the consequences of waiting too long to address both problems are equally potentially dire.
And I never called for bishops to weigh policy proposals. Nice straw man.
No, I agree that peak oil theorists think we should be moving to alternatives to fossil fuels.
By your refusal to answer, however, it’s clear that you are aware of nothing that refutes Rutledge’s analysis.
Consider another one of Rutledge’s findings — he ran the usual climate model but with more accurate inputs as to the amount of fossil fuel that actually exists:
If you find Rutledge’s written analysis too complex to follow in full (as did I), here is a video of Rutledge giving a speech on the same topic. He begins with an interesting point — a lot of the IPCC’s climate predictions assume that oil production is going to be higher in 2100 than it is today — that oil won’t even have peaked by then. He then points out that oil already seems to have peaked in 2005 — that prices rose and production went down both in 2006 and 2007. He says that while it’s not clear yet that oil has already peaked, everyone who studies that issue thinks it will peak in the next decade, and no one thinks that oil production will actually be higher in 2100 (as the IPCC often assumes).
Here’s another European science professor — and the head of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil — making a similar point:
Of course, if global warming fears are exaggerated and the reason is that we’re going to run out of energy too quickly, that’s just exchanging one disaster for another. But it does suggest, to my mind, that staking too much reputational capital on pushing for a carbon tax as the “Catholic” position might not be prudent.
As I said, the suggested policy responses to both problems are largely the same.
It’s mostly a matter of focus. If you think oil consumption is the big problem, then you might use up all of your political capital pushing for higher gas taxes. But if you believe this analysis, for example, it’s a distraction to worry about SUVs and oil consumption; instead, we should be concentrating on finding better ways to sequester carbon emissions from coal (which implies policies targeted at electricity and coal, rather than taking political heat for raising gas prices).
Alternatively, what if you think that Peak Energy is the real concern, and that prices are going to keep rising to the point that a carbon tax would be superfluous, and that we’ll never be able to come up with realistic alternatives in time? Then you might think that the best thing to do is start on the herculean task of moving people out of urban areas and into smaller towns and rural areas that can produce more of their own food (rather than having it trucked in from elsewhere), etc.
I know that Nordhuas was a critic of the discounting assumptions underpinning the Stern report. The latter simply is the best and most thorough analysis to date of the economics of climate change (see here: http://vox-nova.com/2007/06/08/on-the-economics-of-global-warming/). It shows that not acting will cost 5 percent of global GDP a year, and that goes up to 20 percent assuming a broader array of risks. Meanwhile, the cost of measures to combaty climate change amounts to only 1 percent of GDP a year. Moreover, if we don’t act, it is precisely the poorest countries that will face the brunt of the fallout from global warming.
Stern’s numbers come out of his discounting assumptions. On ethical grounds, Stern refuses to disocunt the future simply because it is the future, in other words, to rank the welfare of the present generation ahead of the future. If you want to use a much bigger discount rate, you wil get different numbers, but remember what you are doing: telling future generations that they matter less than we do. Then again, isn’t the whole basis of global warming denial that we dare not sacrifice our sacred western consumerist lifestyle?
MM — what qualifies you to make that judgment about the Stern report?
More importantly, do you know whether Stern’s catastrophic conclusions are based on the assumption that we’re going to burn through fossil fuel that doesn’t actually exist in the first place? And if you don’t know that, on what ground could you really know (as opposed to thinking so because it confirms your priors) that it’s the “best” analysis to date?
I have no idea how to set up links in these comment boxes, but folks reading this might be interested in the perspective of David Gushee, a highly respected evangelical religious ethics scholar at Mercer University. He wants to know why Christians are ignoring climate change, something he calls “the ultimate moral values question.” His essay can be found here:
http://www.abpnews.com/2908.article
Again, my apologies for no knowing how to turn this link “on”
Hey, it turned on all by itself!
Here’s a partial reply (not really a reply, since it wasn’t created in response, although it addresses the same question reaching a different conclusion) from the UK’s chief science adviser. The answer seems to lie in a disagreement about how much coal is left in the earth:
Q108 Colin Challen: The Energy White Paper was silent on the question of peak oil, the prospects of peak oil and, indeed, the timing. What is your take on the subject of peak oil? Do you think it might be a fortuitous ally in our battle against climate change?
Professor Sir David King: The planet is finite and the amount of oil on it is, therefore, a finite amount. We are probably approaching having used about half of it. The implication of that is that there must be a peak in oil production at some point. The economics means that the oil price will go up as demand exceeds supply and at that point we will turn to less likely sources of oil, such as the tar sands, but eventually we will reach a point where converting coal to the usual oil products, such as chemicals and gasoline, will be a more economically viable route. We are pretty close to that right now. What I am referring to is the process that was developed in South Africa, the so-called Sasol process, for taking coal and converting it into perfectly useable, very good petrol product. That product becomes economically viable at an oil price that is not far beyond where we have reached in the recent past. The problem is that we have got enough coal to burn for several hundred years, even with a growing world population with higher aspirations, and if we convert all of that coal, and therefore burn it, without capturing the carbon dioxide we would probably be able to raise the carbon dioxide level ultimately to around 1,500 parts per million. The classic warm period level is 270 parts per million, so we would be returning the planet to the state it was in 50 million years ago when there was no more ice left. It is not much of an ally, we still need to focus heavily on not burning all that carbon that had become naturally sequestered under the planet’s surface.
Grant: For what it’s worth, the view of mine that (I think) runs through the back-and-forth between Eduardo and me is not that the “curia should pipe down” about important questions of environmental stewardship, resource use, development, etc. It is that, in speaking to these important questions, the Church (and Catholics in general) should be careful not to suggest, or to appear to suggest, that the costs and benefits of policies put forward as responses to, or prevention of, climate change are not crucially relevant to the task of deciding what should, may, or must be done. I do not think anything I wrote would justify the conclusion that I “doubt[]” that “pollution [is] bad, and not just for the environment.”
I do not think it is true that one cannot have “something worthwhile to say” if one “disagree[s] the church’s teaching against contraception.” Of course one can. I probably should have been more clear about this, or expressed myself better, but I was trying to suggest — and I think my correspondent was trying to suggest — that, wholly and apart from the “should the Church be more involved in speaking about environmental issues” question, that perhaps a *truly* “Green” worldview would be one that takes on board the moral critique of contemporary thinking about sex, fertility, reproduction, etc.
Rick: I don’t get it: How is a condom not “green”?
And how is tying one’s tubes, or a vasectomy, not “green”? Or coitus interruptus? Furthermore, contrary to popular belief, the basis of the Church’s opposition isn’t to “unnatural” methods of contraception. John Noonan’s book on Contraception details all sorts of perfectly organic methods of interfering with conception that were around before the invention of the pill.
Hi Cathy: I know, of course, Judge Noonan’s book, and understand that the basis of Catholic teaching re: contraception is not the “unnatural-ness” of particular methods of contraception. The suggestion, above, was not — or, at least, was not intended to be — “a real environmentalist will never use latex products or undergo surgery, because these are, in some sense, unnatural.” The suggestion, instead, was that “perhaps a *truly* ‘Green’ worldview would be one that takes on board the moral critique of contemporary thinking about sex, fertility, reproduction, etc.” You know the content of this critique as well, probably better, than I do, and I’m sure could think of interesting ways in which this critique could enrich and shape a “Green” (by which I mean a thoughtful, integrated, humanistic environmentalism) worldview.
Eduardo — yes, it would seem to depend rather strongly on how much coal you think is left. I don’t think either one of us has any expertise whatsoever on that question (correct me if I’m wrong). So what to do? All I can do is note that Rutledge provided a very lengthy written analysis as to how much coal is left, citing numerous sources and charts on the subject. Thus, as a prima facie matter, his analysis seems more credible to me than the offhand comment that you quoted.
Rick, my question has to do with the fact that your sentence –in quotation marks– seemed to suggest that the Church objected to birth control because it is not “green”, or at least that the Church’s arguments about birth control are arguments which are track, to some degree, arguments on behalf of green living.
I’ve never seen it.
I can’t see how the traditional natural law moral view of sex (the moral manuals, even as updated by Grisez, on the one hand, or Ford/Kelly on the other) supports your argument.
Furthermore, I can’t see how a theology of the body position supports the argument. The only “ecosystem” that matters is the ecosystem of the couple having sex. There is no suggestion that “grave reason” for a decision not to have kids should consider the impact on the environment. Furthermore, even then, TB arguments in hard cases, revert to natural law arguments –so contraception in favor of the well-being of the couple isn’t an option. (Couples are still expected to refrain, permanently from sex, if they need to be 100% certain of not getting pregnant–say a woman’s heart couldn’t bear the strain of an additional pregnancy).
There are secular arguments against hormonal birth control–but they don’t apply, as far as I’m aware, to condoms or barrier methods or CI –which are likely more objectionable to the church than the pill (you don’t have a completed sex act–so you have an unnatural act–if you use a condom). CI, well, see the traditional interpretations of Onan’s unnatural vice (heavily critiqued by biblical scholars).
So when you say I would know “the moral critique” ==well, I am afraid I don’t know what you mean at all. Do you have a particular book in mind? Could you spell out what a “green” argument would look like from that point of view?
“Rutledge provided a very lengthy written analysis as to how much coal is left, citing numerous sources and charts on the subject.” Numerous sources and charts? I don’t know. I’d go with the science adviser to the UK over an engineering prof. at CalTech with no specific expertise in fossil fuels. But doing some quick poking around on the net last night, I found several other rejections of the idea that we’re anywhere near as close to peak coal as we are to peak oil. I won’t post the links here because, well, I have other things to do at the moment. But if you google peak coal, you’ll come up with several discussions (you get even more stuff by googling “peak oil and climate change”). I also saw several explanations of the IPCC’s consideration of this question (it would have seemed too stupid for them not to even consider it), and the peak coal position seems to be an outlier (the data on coal extraction has been distorted by the rise of the petroleum economy, since for the last 80 years or so, oil has just been a far more attractive source of energy). Of course, the fact that they are presently in the minority doesn’t mean the peak coal folks are wrong (see peak oil), but it also leaves a lot of room for uncertainty and, given the dire consequences of getting this one wrong, doesn’t seem to me to be a very strong argument for failing to take action now to stem the use of fossil fuels, action that would be beneficial for other reasons even if the peak coal folks are right.
I don’t know. I’d go with the guy who supports his arguments with facts and citations.
This seems to be an example of confirmation bias. The science adviser you quoted doesn’t seem to have any training or expertise in fossil fuels either, so that’s not a sincere reason to prefer him over Rutledge.
And as I said, the science adviser was making an offhand and unsupported comment in an interview, whereas Rutledge most certainly did cite numerous sources and charts (there’s not really any room for doubt on that point). If you look at the link I provided, Rutledge cites, among other things:
1) Dr. Werner Zittel and Jorg Schindler, “Coal: Resources and Future Production.”
2) “Techniques of Prediction as Applied to the Production of Oil and Gas,” in Saul I. Gass, ed., Oil and Gas Supply Modeling, pp. 16-141. National Bureau of Standards special publication 631. Washington: National Bureau of Standards, 1982.
3) William Stanley Jevons, The Coal Question; An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of our Coal-Mines.
4) The World Energy Council series of reports on coal production (he links to this).
5) “Production data . . . from an outstanding USGS collection developed by Robert Milici, which gives production data by state back to 1800.” Another link here.
6) As to Chinese production, “we used the reserves from the Chinese Ministry of Land and Resources by way of Sandro Schmidt, and South Africa, which has been reassessed recently.”
Rutledge also creates 12 charts from the above sources.
You might think that the science adviser is prima facie more reliable, but you haven’t given any objective reason for anyone else to think so.
One bit was unclear: I said, “This seems to be an example of confirmation bias.” I meant to refer to Eduardo’s suggestion that the British science adviser’s unsupported comment is somehow more trustworthy.
The first several links that pop up on Google seem to suggest that peak coal is fairly near. This guy predicts 2025. This guy links to and summarizes several reports indicating that we’re running out of coal much more quickly than was thought — such as a National Academy of Sciences report stating that “Recent programs to assess coal recoverability in limited areas using updated methods indicate that only a small fraction of previously estimated reserves are actually recoverable.” Here’s an article called “Peak Coal: Sooner Than You Think. Here’s a story from Grist on peak coal by 2025.
In any event, the policies that one would recommend here are not necessarily the same. If you really think that energy is going to be cheap and effectively infinite for the next 100 years, it’s a much more pressing concern to push down energy usage now and by any means possible. But if you think that energy is going to run out and/or become vastly more expensive on its own in fairly short time, then why waste political energy and political capital trying to ramp up gas taxes (and possible get thrown out of office by short-sighted voters)? In that event, you might want to focus on some other set of policies. (I’m not sure what those policies would be; even just the task of converting America’s trucking system — on which so many people depend for food every day — into a fossil-fuel-free system seems depressingly overwhelming.)