Time Immortal

Not that the good Reader needs to be informed of this fact, but there it is: the Church is not . The Church is the Bride of Christ, not some emporium wherein you can pick and choose what you want to believe this week. Father Philip Neri Powell provides a handy list of reasons why this is.

Best, and most relevant (to my circumstances, at any rate — YMMV, good Reader) excerpt from Fr. Philip’s article? There are two:

6). Leaving the Catholic Church because a priest was mean to you, or because sister whacked you with a ruler, or because the church secretary looked at you funny is as stupid as giving up on the truths of math because you hate your high school algebra teacher. Why would anyone let a crazy priest or a cranky nun or anyone else for the matter drive you out of the faith you believe is true? My only conclusion: you never thought it was true to begin with; or, you have a favorite sin the Church teaches against and crazy priests and cranky nuns is as good an excuse as any to leave and pursue your sin all the while feeling justified b/c Father and/or Sister are such jerks.

And:

9). The Catholic Church owes no one a revision of her doctrine or dogma. She didn’t change to save most of Europe from becoming Protestant, why would you imagine that she would change just to get you in one of her parishes?

It’s this last point, I think, that I find most resonates with me. In theological debates with family and friends, one sub-current that always pervades the discussion is this sense of raw entitlement, the sense that somehow the Church owes it to people to “catch up with the times,” or whatever. Simply put: it owes no such thing to any person or persons.

And if, good Reader, you’re one of those folks who has opted to make your participation in the Mass contingent on the Church adapting a particular point of doctrine to a whim of yours, do refer back to point #6 above — is it perhaps relevant?

greg writes in with a few comments concerning my review of Pixar’s latest hit, Wall-E.

Thanks for your hard work on this, Kenneth. We’re using Wall*E as one of our “God on Film” movies at Jacob’s Well in Minneapolis. Your thoughts are helpful.

One thing that our creative team picked out was how similar the people in their hover chairs watching their holographic screens beside each other was to us sitting in our reclining, overstuffed movie seats in the theatre. Is Pixar saying, This is you! Be careful, even this great movie can be part of the problem if you don’t reach over and touch the hand of the person next to you, or talk about this afterward.

I also think the concept of responsibility is even bigger than you touch on in your commentary. The problem arose not only because of greed and laziness, but because of a lack of responsibility represented in their leaving the planet and having someone (thing) else take care of the problem for them. The problem was resolved not by having earth cleaned up, but by humanity returning to face the mess they’d made.

Thanks again!

I’ve heard the criticism/comment made in a few different quarters regarding the portrayal of humans in Wall-E, and have heard more than a few people attempt to classify it as a kind of cheap-shot, on Pixar’s part, against the audience. Barb Nicolosi felt that way about the movie. Personally, I don’t buy it for a moment, and I find that I can’t top Rod Dreher’s response to those who raise this issue: “It will be a good day when it becomes possible to criticize the excesses of American consumerism without being pilloried from the Right for being some kind of America-hating lib symp. Why on earth is it considered “liberal” to point out that gluttony is sinful, and that evil lurks in the hearts of men? Is the Bible liberal? Come on!”

No, Wall-E isn’t an attempt to insult or criticize the audience…but neither does it shy away from an important discussion: that of consequences. The generation is speeding itself toward just such an end. A recent article I read mentioned that upwards of 65% of Americans can now classified as being “overweight” or “obese” — a consequence of laziness (whether the laziness of a sedentary lifestyle or the laziness of never bothering to cook something fresh for oneself and one’s family). Wall-E is about taking responsibility, and about consequences of actions. As surely as Wall-E’s (here talking about the robot “him”self) experiments with a fire extinguisher in zero-gee are a handy illustration of action and reaction, the movie as a whole deals with actions and the outcomes thereof.

It’s not a cheap shot at the audience, in other words, although it is a caution sign. I do agree, however, that Wall-E is the sort of movie which could, and perhaps should, be followed up with some discussion; as can be seen, its messages are often subtle, and easily misunderstood.

Interesting commentary from the Anchoress:

…thanks to the noble environmentalists, we’re not allowed to drill for the huge beds of oil we own; because we’re not allowed to drill and refine our own resources, our heating and fuel bills are skyrocketing, our grocery bills are rising and - most troublingly - we may be facing Food shortages…and still mucking up Gaia, to boot.

Doesn’t sound so noble to me. And so much for our “oilman” president freeing us from dependence on other countries. He did that about as well as Bill Clinton before him.

…

Yeah, it’s bad policy. But I’m wondering if it is also immoral?

I’m sure that sounds extreme, and I don’t mean to. It also sounds very Roman Catholic, but I can’t help that; it seems to me that there is a morality question here — is it ever right to burn food for energy when people are hungry?

Taking a line through the idea of things being used for the purposes intended, one might call burning for food both “disordered” and (when doing so threatens humanity) “intrinsically evil.”

It’s certainly not news anymore to observe that food costs world-wide are rising. Even Wal-Mart is beginning to ration sales of rice (although their per-customer limit is still an indefensible 200 pounds!). Now, the world food market will respond in the way it always does — it will find new food production options, such as utilizing both GMO and organic options. Farmers will not leave as much of their land fallow in a year. Perhaps governments will step in, in some cases, to prevent urban growth from consuming areas of arable land. There are numerous corrective pressures, in other words, that will exert themselves. And were the only issue that of balancing food production against population growth, those pressures would be sufficient.

But now we add in the craze over biofuels, and suddenly one is left to wonder. If so much corn and rice is being used up to produce an alternative fuel source for Westerners — and then at the expense of the well-being and lives of people in the Third World (who cannot absorb the rising cost of food at all, unlike most people in North America and Europe) — can the use of biofuels be called moral? One tends not to think so. Indeed, when one factors in the observation that biofuels, in addition to causing massive shortages in stocks of staple foods (grains, specifically), are also more polluting to refine than is crude oil, the use of ethanol and other “bio” alternatives at the pump becomes almost indefensible.

John C. Wright has further commentary on the issue, and he doesn’t mince words — in his view, current biofuel schemes are staggeringly immoral, and can only be ruinous.

Possibly the most interesting graphic I’ve seen so far this year:

Someone is going to have to open a Starbucks franchise inside a Wal-Mart and really mess this trend up.

That’s right — HD-DVD is the new Betamax. Not that this comes as any kind of surprise; apparently made the decision recently to only carry Blu-Ray content…and once that happened, it was pretty much over. But, for what it’s worth, Toshiba (the last HD-DVD manufacturer) won’t be continuing those product lines.

Interesting article from John Robson, which gives some context and meat to observations I’ve made before in various comment-level discussions here on the site. Namely, he points out that when governments tend to fail in their efforts to promote “environmentally friendly” initiatives, private enterprise usually succeeds.

It will upset others that companies are succeeding where governments often fail. The European Union’s environment commissioner just admitted that biofuels promote rainforest destruction. Legally mandated efficient light bulbs may give some people skin problems. The failure of governments to build nuclear plants has contributed massively to greenhouse-gas production. But over there in the private sector, it’s just progress progress progress. Wretched, isn’t it?

The progress is enormous. That digital dictaphones use less power not only means fewer dead batteries full of weird metals chucked into landfills, it also means fewer new batteries manufactured then schlepped about using fossil fuels. Thes we store s on require far fewer resources to manufacture, and generate far less trash when they’re history, than LPs, spools or the aforementioned three drawers’ worth of microcassettes. (And just wait until I discover external hard drives.) Fourth, a subtle refinement, early digital dictaphones required proprietary software CDs and connection cables that also had to be manufactured, transported and, one day, discarded; newer ones send standard files through standard USB ports or wireless. Fifth, we e-mail, FTP and stream this stuff instead of couriering or mailing physical copies.

If you’ve ever been in a darkroom while “film” was being “developed” (Google it, kids) the stench of sodium thiosulphate tells you instantly that digital photos convey at least equal benefits. (And how, incidentally, do you dispose of old photos you no longer want? Landfill? Burn? Yuck. Whereas now it’s right-click, delete, empty recycle bin, goodbye ex-mother-in-law.)

Some greens advocate going back to a time when the human “footprint” on the environment was smaller. But we actually have to go forward, technologically speaking. The “footprint” of a portable cassette device was far larger than that of a digital player, while a medieval monk would have had to lug some nit with a lute on his back to enjoy Greensleeves while he jogged, to say nothing of plucking geese, skinning sheep and mixing who knows what gunk to write down the sheet music.

If you think about it, this makes a good deal of sense. Progress and technical innovation, especially in the field of consumable products of almost every variety, are inherently driven toward greater efficiency. That’s the nature of the give and take of supply and demand — consumers want devices that perform a wider variety of roles, and different companies will race to meet that demand. The companies that will thrive, and the products that will survive, are the ones that offer the best balance between price and capability — this is why the iPod dominates the digital music market despite the fact that there are dozens of brands of mp3 players out there.

But the principle is applicable in a broader sense as well. Obviously, not everyone buys like this, but the average comsumer looking for a new vehicle will tend to want (especially given fuel prices these days) to buy a vehicle that gets better gas mileage. That means that the pressure is put, because of consumer demand, to develop more efficient automobile engines that burn fuel at a more efficient rate. That also (surprise, surprise!) has the effect of reducing emissions.

It’s no coincidence that the Western nation with one of the best environmental track records in terms of emissions controls in the last decade is also the nation that has been enjoying, for most of said decade, a major economic boom: the United States of America. Almost as a matter of course, greater efficiency of products and diminished levels of environmental impact necessarily follow prosperity.

Of course, this effect can go too far as well, and I have in the past been highly critical of the situation that megachains like have created by reducing price points to so low a level that it is easier and cheper to throw away a defective electronic device and buy a replacement for it than it is to have said device repaired. I think that’s a case of the pendulum swinging too far in the opposite direction, crossing the like from progress and efficiency into wasteful decadence.

But on the flip side, I can’t deny that private industry seems to be getting things right where most governments are getting things wrong, in terms of driving us all toward the use of products and methods which, as a side benefit of their profitability, are more efficient and environmentally friendly.

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: SDA)

Disaster averted, for now.

The federal government rejected an advisory panel’s recommendation to implement a carbon tax on Monday while opposition parties opened the door to the idea in response to advice that the levy could lead the way to deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

The , a panel of Canadians from environmental groups and the business world, suggested that Canada could achieve a 65-per-cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 by acting as soon as possible with measures that would put a price on activities that result in the release of the gases in the atmosphere.

The panel suggested the government could set this price either by slapping a carbon tax on emissions or by setting a cap on the level of industrial emissions and forcing companies that exceed their limit to buy credits from other companies in a cap-and-trade system.

All this worry about CO2 strikes me as meaningless. As I wrote in a recent discussion with Erf: here�s a bit more on AGW and global CO2 production:

Ok, now let�s consider the case of atmospheric CO2 vapor. Humans produce about 50 giga-tonnes of atmospheric CO2 vapour per year. Be vewy afwaid!

But how big is 50 giga-tonnes of atmospheric CO2 vapour in the green house gas global warming context? Well, the portion of atmospheric CO2 vapor that is produced by humans is about 3% or 0.03. The portion of green-house gasses that is CO2 is about 1% or 0.01. Thus, the portion of green-house gasses that is human produced CO2 is about 0.03% or 0.0003. The heat-trapping effectiveness of CO2 compared to the average of green-house gasses is about 10% or 0.10. Thus, the portion of the green-house gas global warming caused by human CO2 is about 0.003% or 0.00003 or 30 millionths. Even if we stop producing any CO2 at all, 99.997% of green-house gas global warming will still happen (even if we ignore the Borrello Limit and the saturation effect).

Or, how about this?

Q: Could you rank the things that have the most significant impact and where would you put carbon dioxide on the list?

A: Well let me give you one fact first. In the first 30 feet of the atmosphere, on the average, outward radiation from the Earth, which is what CO2 is supposed to affect, how much [of the reflected energy] is absorbed by water vapor? In the first 30 feet, 80 percent, okay?

Q: Eighty percent of the heat radiated back from the surface is absorbed in the first 30 feet by water vapor�

A: And how much is absorbed by carbon dioxide? Eight hundredths of one percent. One one-thousandth as important as water vapor. You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide.

CO2 is a bogeyman, plain and simple. So it’s good that the Harper government can see past the B.S. and realize that a carbon tax is just a fancy name for a government money-grab which would ultimately do absolutely nothing about climate change. Now, if we can turn the discussion to some of the other stuff that industrial processes produce, and if we start talking about regulating emissions of actual pollutants (more so than we already do), I might just be inclined to listen. If someone wants to talk about how discount superstores like Wal Mart are creating the most wasteful generation in history purely because their philosophy in the market has created a “why get it fixed when it’s cheaper to buy a new one?” attitude in the general populace, I’ll be there like shareware (with apologies to Teen Girl Squad). But CO2? Actually, greenhouse gases in general? Thanks, but I’ll pass on the bandwagon.