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They're After Our TV's!

Environmentalism impacts our lives in many ways - sometimes unexpected. We many of us recycle - some more than others, with it being understood that different communities can hinder or advance efforts at recycling. It can be particularly difficult in apartment buildings, as I've discovered. Where I am now, recycling reduces my garbage output by a good 33%. It makes a noticeable dent in what I throw out, even being limited to type 1 and 2 plastics.

We're also all familiar with the need to not leave all our lights on, and vampire-energy and so forth, and the evils of big SUV's and other gas-guzzlers.

But now they're after our TVs. I just read on Saturday that "California assails TV power usage" and that a "one-third cut" has been mandated by 2011.

The problem is that the big new flat-panel TVs, though lighter and easier on my back, suck up more power than the old fashioned cathode-ray tubes of yesteryear. TV's account, they say, for 10% of household electrical use if you include "related devices" like digital recorders and game consoles.

Egads, they'll be after our games next, and my gods' given right to record programming for later viewing. The Consumer Electronics Association, as might be expected as an outfit representing manufacturers, disagrees with the 10% figure and says 3% is more reasonable.

Personally, I'm more worried about my back than the power.

Even so, I wasn't consulted and California has decided that there be limits on TVs over 58 inches wide.

So they're shooting for a one-third reduction by 2011 and a one-half reduction by 2013. Those that can't meet the standards won't be allowed in CA. I wonder if they'll stop you at the border when you're moving into the state and make you throw your TV into the desert if it's too big.

And that's not all. Washington, Oregon, and Massachusetts, along with Canada and Australia, are considering similar measures.

My biggest TV is 42 inches. Just upgraded from 27. So I'm set even in California, but it's not about me.

Well, okay, it's about me, but it's about a lot of other things as well - where do we draw the line, for instance, between consumer rights and the needs of the environment? What becomes necessary? And how much can we justify in the way of government interference?

The environment is a precious thing. We only have one. I'm a Heathen - a Pagan if you will - and Pagan religions are nature religions, as all original religions were. We have a good healthy respect for the environment. That's perhaps natural when you understand that we live in a world filled with the divine.

As such, I try to be careful. I try not to drive when I don't have to. I don't leave unnecessary lights on. In short, I follow Solon's advice: Nothing in excess. Or, as it is put in the Icelandic Sagas, "A wise man does all things in moderation" (Thorkel in Gisli Sursson's Saga).

If everybody lived according to these rules, we could go a long way towards voluntarily resolving some of the problems we are now seeing legislated against. As we go on, we may see more extreme measures taken to protect the environment.

And they will likely be necessary. The problem is, most of the burden falls on the individual in this country. Very little in the way of regulations control what industry does to our environment. They have power lobbyists in Washington. They practically own members of Congress.

So industry pollutes and we lose our big TVs.

Now being a moderate guy, I can probably live without a TV bigger than 58 inches. Honestly, I don't have the wall space for more than that unless I finish my basement.

Will that be next? You can't finish basements because the construction process pollutes? Or will it harm some heretofore unknown microbe that dwells in the cracks of the concrete.

Excess, you see, can go many ways, not only in individuals who might be careless environmentally, or in businesses which remain unregulated, but in governments - even environmentalists, who resort to extreme solutions where moderation might suffice.

I'm not trying to discourage California. After all, they've always been at the forefront of environmentalism. Environmental Heatlh Perspectives (EHP) tells us that

According to a 2006 survey conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), a San Francisco–based research organization, 65% of Californians don't think the federal government is doing enough to combat global warming.

That certainly seems above the curve, and I applaud them for that.

I'm just saying I've seen some crazy things over recent years. Crazier even than wanting to take away our TVs (and you don't see an NRA-like group protecting our TVs do you? If they come to take them, are we just going to throw them at them, and wouldn't that be counter-productive?).

I would just like to see common-sense, moderation prevail.

I don't think that's too much to ask, or to expect - from all sides.

A View From the Idiot

And as long as we're on the topic of Global Warming, I thought we'd look at a little issue of brain cooling: Rush Limbaugh. There is definitely no warming taking place in this joker's head. Honestly, I can't think of a word to describe him, but then he speaks pretty much for himself, doesn't he? So without further ado, this just in from the MediaMatters Limbaugh Wire:

Limbaugh: Climate Scientists Are "Whoring Themselves Out For Money, Abandoning Science"

Published Mon, Nov 23, 2009 4:35pm ET
Rush: Emails stolen by hacking were "leaked" from a "whistleblower"

By Zachary Pleat

Wasting no time as usual, Rush joined Glenn Beck in calling Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) "the most expensive prostitute in the history of prostitution." Rush then claimed that the hacked emails that were reportedly stolen from the University of East Anglia "are the real deal" and baselessly claimed that they were "leaked" by a "whistleblower." As classy as ever, Rush used these possibly illegally obtained emails to continue his long-running claim that global warming is a hoax:

LIMBAUGH: These emails that we told you about last week from that group in Great Britain that formed the basis for the UN's climate change panel and their recommendations, those emails apparently now are the real deal and they may not have been leaked -- well, leaked -- they may be from a whistleblower inside the organization who is just unhappy with what's going on. Now, the bottom line is, the whole global warming -- manmade global warming movement is a fraud. It is a hoax. It's made-up lies.

Next, Rush explained how "[l]iberalism is a lie from top to bottom," then took the opportunity to bash President Obama for having run a campaign on, as he put it, nothing but hope, change, and empty platitudes. During this typically deranged rant, Rush channeled Alex Jones yet again, saying that Democrats "believe in a one-world government." Rush's theme of liberalism being a lie continued throughout the rest of the show.

Our kindly radio host then explained that the congressional members, scientists, and others who are working to combat climate change are "whoring themselves out for money." Still never mentioning that these emails were hacked into and possibly stolen, Rush then compared them to the Pentagon Papers.

Heathens and the Environment

I recently read James Hoggan's Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (2009) and am about to begin Stephen H. Schneider's Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save Earth's Climate (2009). These, and all this talk about the big "Global Warming Hoax" which I wrote about on here has got me thinking about our home: Midgard. In the Heathen scheme of the cosmos, this is the human enclosure, and Asgard is the home of the gods. I will speak of the Outlands momentarily.

Everyone knows that Paganism is earth-centered religion. All original religion (ethnic religion) used to be earth-centered. And no surprise: the people lived very close to nature. Heathenism even has an entire tribe of gods associated with nature: the Vanir, as contrasted with the gods of the sky, the Æsir. The Vanir are distinctly gods of earth and fertility. However, the whole "nature-worship" thing is considered an evil by Abrahamic monotheistic thought. People should, they tell us, be looking to a god outside the world, not gods who are part of it.

Revealed religion, Book religion, that is, Abrahamic monotheism, turned that whole association with nature on its head.

The extreme-conservative Christian-dominated GOP is, not surprisingly, still largely hostile to nature and the environment, as recent statistics demonstrate. A Pew Research Poll from May 2008 illustrates the problem: 84% of Democrats say the earth is warming. The percentage of Republicans is 49%. Asked whether humans are responsible for that warming, 58% of Democrats said yes, a mere 27% of Republicans.

It gets worse when you follow the dollars. Looking at "oil-and-gas industry contributions to U.S. politicians" we see these stood at 60/40 between Republicans and Democrats in 1990; by the time of the Bush Administration they were at 80/20. The picture from the coal industry is similarly bleak: 90/10 between Republicans and Democrats by the middle Bush years (Hoggan 2005:152-153. 169). It is no secret to anyone that the Bush Administration was hostile not only to science in general, but to the environment in particular. We all remember, I think, the ridiculous specter of an EPA that insisted it did not have a mandate to protect the environment.

In fact, statistics show, the same Republican senators who oppose gay marriage and stem cell research also oppose environmental legislation.[1] In May 2000 the Family Research Council actually lumped "population control, economic redistribution and the environment" and called environmentalism a "socialist-leaning movement" and noted with some degree of paranoia that the 30th Annual Earth Day "happens to coincide with communist dictator Nikolai Lenin's birthday."[2]

It gets crazier, believe it or not. In 2000 the Interfaith Council for Environmental Stewardship, a new coalition of conservative religious leaders that offered a "Judeo-Christian" alternative on the environment.

The Council held a press conference in Washington, D.C., April 17 to release a document called the "Cornwall Dec­laration on Environmental Steward­ship." Endorsers include James C. Dobson of Focus on the Family, TV preacher D. James Kennedy, the Rev. Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association, Charles Colson of Prison Fellowship, Bill Bright of Campus Cru­sade for Christ, World magazine editor Marvin Olasky, Christian Recon­struc­tionist author George Grant and Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

Conservative Catholics included the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus of the Institute on Religion and Public Life, the Rev. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life and the Acton Institute's Robert Sirico, a Catholic priest who spearheaded the Cornwall Declaration.

The religious leaders charge that liberal environmentalists "elevate concern for nature above concern for people." They deny that global warming is occurring, argue that there is no overpopulation crisis and insist there is no evidence for rampant disappearance of species.[3]

It is no surprise then that in the 2007 National Environmental Scorecard released...by the League of Conservation Voters, John McCain, Republican presidential candidate in 2008, received

a score of ZERO. McCain was the only member of Congress to skip every single crucial environmental vote scored by the organization, posting a score lower than Members of Congress who were out for much of the year due to serious illnesses--and even lower than some who died during the term. By contrast, the average Member of Congress scored a 53 in 2007. McCain posts a lifetime score of only 24.[4]

And Sarah Palin is clearly no friend of science; in her anti-intellectual worldview there is room for neither evolution nor human-caused global warming.[5]

But we polytheists realize that live in a world filled with the divine. The gods, the spirits, are all around us, a part of this world we live in, not apart from it, not outside. I don't know about you, but I take comfort from this cosmological scheme. From a Heathen perspective, what is outside of the community is not to be trusted. What comes from outside is a stranger. Those are the Outlands (Utgarðr). Why put your gods in the Outlands? The gods should be part of the community. This so-called Judeo-Christian alternative elucidated above seems to be from the Outlands. The lack of concern shown for the human enclosure (Midgard) is obscene.

But in polytheistic religions, the gods are part of the community.

This is particular true for Heathens, who see the gods as not just deities but founders, originators, even ancestors in some sense. You want to talk about having personal relationships with gods? Not to be too flippant about it, but "we got yer personal relationships right here."

I think it's fair to say that from a certain perspective, the ancients understood nature better than we do. Oh sure, we have science, we understand the science of it quite well. Any high school graduate knows more about environmental science than the wisest of the ancients. But scientists don't generally live among the trees, among the wild that they study. Much of what we read is ivory tower intellectualism, as separated from nature as the god of monotheism is from the world. An academic might understand nature on one level but be completely unable to survive when thrown into it.

I am not denigrating science. Far from it. It is not that science has no role, but that it has its own role. There are some things science cannot explain, things science is not designed to explain, just as there are things religion cannot explain. They each have their own realm, necessary but different, like men and women.

The immediacy of nature is lost to most moderns. I say this every fall, but think of what the fall must have meant to our ancestors? They didn't just pile up wood to have some nice cozy, romantic fires over the winter, but to survive. To stay alive. They didn't go hunting to add some spice to their diet, or because it was a sport. They hunted to survive. I might look at a deer and admire its beauty, its sleek lines. They'd be looking as well at a piece of food with four legs. I don't see it first and foremost as food. I don't have to. I have a grocery store down the street.

That's not to say they objectified the animals they killed. Nature was part of their grand narrative, a narrative inseparable from their own. They understood the role of the deer in nature. They thanked it for giving its life to feed them. That early humans, pre-monotheistic humans, gave a lot of thought to what they were doing when they hunted, the careful rearrangement of bones on the altar, shows that they understood things on a level lost to most of us. Life taken for life to continue, and a return of that life force to the gods who provided that life in the first place.

They say, based on the literary evidence, that ancients did not admire the beauty of nature in the same way we do. I suppose we will never know for sure what the common folks thought about it. After all, unlike the wealthy city-dwellers who wrote most of what survived, they didn't leave us any written testimony. But it seems reasonable when you're trying to eke a subsistence-level existence out of nature that you wouldn't have time to sit around admiring it.

I say this because I've read some of the letters and diaries written by early Minnesota settlers, folks, as it happens, who were mostly from Sweden and Norway. I remember then talking about the swamps and the mosquitoes and the other hardships the land put in their path, but beautiful as the country is, they didn't have as many words for that aspect of the scenery. Mostly they dwelt with its harshness. This might or might not provide evidence for the scholarly position.

But at the same time, you won't find the modern home-owner or contractor apologizing to a tree before he cuts it down. There aren't many laws (outside of the California Redwoods) regarding cutting down trees (that I'm aware of), unless it's some neighborhood/community standards thing.

Nobody is worried about religious associations in nature any longer. Nobody but modern Pagans. And what Heathen does not know that the oak is sacred to the Thunderer? Or that Yggdrasill is an ash? Or that it was an elm and an ash that gave birth to the human race?

For most, trees, if they are loved at all, are loved for their beauty, or for the shade they provide. Their religious associations are mostly lost. How many sacred groves do you see on your local city map? But once there were Groves of Thor. Bad things happened to those who violated such places. Look to the example of Þórir and Karli, who ransack a Finnish grove dedicated to Jómali (Óláfs saga helgi). Their greed in violating this sacred grove results in their eventual downfall (DuBois 1999:7).

It would stand to reason then that where environmental issues are concerned, whatever ones feelings about Anthropogenic Global Warming, that a certain heightened level of concern about the environment, will be visible among Heathens. Heathens will not objectify nature. They will not set themselves apart from it but will in some sense try to accommodate themselves to nature.

It makes sense, doesn't it, given the tale of Aksr and Embla? As I noted above, in Heathen mythology, the first people were made from trees, which scientifically speaking, has a great deal more to say for it than the idea that we were made out of lumps of dirt, or just conjured up out of thin air. As Carl Sagan noted in his series Cosmos,

We’re virtually identical to trees. We both use nucleic acids as the hereditary material; we both use proteins as enzymes to control the chemistry of the cell and most significantly, we both use the identical code book to translate nucleic acid information into protein information. Any tree could read my genetic code.

I don't know about you, but when the oil and coal industries start paying lobbyists, journalists, and various non-climate specialist scientists to tell me that C02 emissions are good for me, or worse, that DDT should be a "food group" and that its liberal application over the face of Midgard can save the human race...well, I'm just a bit suspicious of their motives.

I'm more inclined to believe the scientists who actually study climate for a living - and who aren't being paid by big oil and big coal to toot the company line (remember those tobacco company studies promoting the completely healthy effects of smoking?). I don't think it takes a genius to figure out that big oil and coal are not thinking about our best interests as humans, or the religious associations of nature and of the things in nature. They don't care that my tree is sacred to Thor.

But I do.

I have long argued that whether you accept Anthropogenic Global Warming as a fact (I do), we should still be showing some concern for our environment. This for religious as well as common-sense reasons. You don't have to think of the planet itself as a goddess (Gaia) to see it as part of the divine. Everything around us is part of the divine. It is part of the human enclosure (Midgard). Would we treat our own homes like we treat the world around us?

And everything, literally everything we see in nature is part of something bigger, that "circle of life" thing you hear so much about. Every object in nature has some purpose that does not include humans. Pluck it out, and everything changes. Some creatures adapt, some do not. Usually, humans adapt. But at some point, even humans might fail to adapt. Blind faith that "god" will take care of everything, that "he" will see to it that everything is okay, is worse than absurd. It's reckless.

Yes, species go extinct all the time. And many without any involvement from humans. They've had their chance and blown it. They couldn't keep up with the changes. This used to happen all the time before there were any humans to affect the balance. But that doesn't mean we should willy-nilly help them along. If we get too careless with nature, rather than managing nature, we might find nature managing us. Not a pretty picture.

I want to go back to polytheism. I don't want to go back to the 9th century to do it.

Notes:
[1] http://www.grist.org/article/scherer-christian/
[2] http://www.au.org/media/church-and-state/archives/2000/05/pampe.html
[3] Ibid.
[4] http://www.sierraclub.org/pressroom/releases/pr2008-02-21.asp
[5] On the issue of Anthropogenic Global Warming, http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/09/sarah-palin-record-environment.php. On the issue of evolution, http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2009/11/19/going-rogue-is-sarah-palin-a-creationist/
[6] For health risks associated with DDT, see "Public Health Statement for DDT, DDE, and DDD" by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/phs35.html#bookmark09

Quote of the Day

Here is a great quote I found in the New York Times relating to the stolen data mentioned in my previous post:

"Science doesn’t work because we’re all nice. Newton may have been an ass, but the theory of gravity still works."
GAVIN A. SCHMIDT, a NASA climatologist whose e-mail messages were hacked by global warming skeptics, contending the stolen data proves little except that scientists are human.

I would wholeheartedly agree with Dr. Schmidt's perspective of the incident.

A Big Day for Deniers? Not so much...

The climate denier community thought they scored big today with a hack-job of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU). According to the conservative spin machine (see Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'? for some typical hysteria) the great global warming hoax has been exposed. Has it? No.

A few cherry-picked, out of context emails make up the denier argument. These supposedly betray a super-evil conspiracy that is somehow meant to financially benefit Al Gore and scientists while completely exonerating the denialist community - and by extension, the real conspirators: big oil and coal.

For a good, unbiased report of the incident see the BBC piece, Hackers target leading climate research unit

But as usual, the spin bears little resemblance to the facts. The fix is in, ladies and gentlemen, but the fix comes from the deniers, not from the world of science. For the best examination of the CRU "scandal" please visit Kevin Grandi's blog at DeSmogBlog.com, here.

If you want to know more about the denialists own methods of propaganda, distortion, and outright dishonesty, please read James Hoggan's Climate Cover-Up (2005). I've read it. You won't be disappointed; you will, however, be disgusted.

Screw the Environment! (It's too expensive!)

This is the kind of representation I have in Congress...and believe it or not, this guy is better than Souder:

Thank you for contacting me regarding the impacts of global climate change. I appreciate your thoughts and concerns on this issue.

I am deeply concerned about the threat posed by global climate change. The scientific consensus on this issue is unequivocal. Global warming is real and greenhouse gas emissions from human activity are causing it. Scientists and others warn that climate change threatens our nation's security, and may imperil future generations' opportunity for safe, healthy, and prosperous lives.

However, any carbon-constraining mechanism must protect Hoosier ratepayers, workers and businesses from increased costs. Additionally, other nations of the world must be included in this effort, because if they are not, our action will be for naught.

Please rest assured, should legislation regarding global climate change be introduced in the 111th Congress, I will keep your views in mind.

What this clown doesn't realize is that pretty soon it will be too expensive to take a breath. Time to stop worrying about things getting more expensive and do what needs to be done. If we constantly complain about the cost, it will never be done, and then what?

You lost my vote already, Mr. Bayh, but you'd lose it again if you hadn't already. I don't know who you are representing here, but it isn't me. I am beginning to suspect it is yourself.