Climate Change and Poverty

Southeast Asia oneworld.net
It is an utter tragedy that those who are not responsible in polluting the planet and bringing on the adverse effect of systematic pollution are the very ones who will bear the brunt of climate disaster.

Today is Blog Action Day 2009. A day when thousands of bloggers across the world will blog about the chosen topic for this year, "Climate Change". This is not a topic that I know a lot about. Like all of us I know that it is happening and at least some of the responsibility for this change lies at my feet. I know that using fossil fuels and eating meat, especially factory farmed meat, add greatly to the sum of human causes for climate change. So I eat very little meat or fish and am trying to grow more of our food and buy more locally. But when it comes to fossil fuel use I plead guilty as charged. We live in the woods and when we go to town it is a long way (24 miles round trip). We try to limit our trips to two a week. Then there is the infrequent air travel of family coming to visit and our also infrequent vacations.

On Saturday Jim and I leave for our long-awaited trip to California. We plan to spend five days at Esalen Institute at a workshop for couples led by Gangaji and her partner Eli, then spend a few days in and around San Francisco. We will drive to Kansas City, 300 miles away and then fly to San Francisco. That's a lot of carbon exchanges, right! An article on this subject in Ode, the magazine informs us

According to the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, an independent group of scientists that advises the British government, emissions from aircraft will likely be one of the major contributors to global warming by the year 2050. According to USA Today, on a flight from New York to Denver, a commercial jet generates between “840 to 1,660 pounds of carbon dioxide per passenger. That’s about what an SUV generates in a month.”

This trip seems extravagant in many ways. Yet, we decided to go for it. It has been 11 years since we took a real vacation like this. I can't help but think that in another eleven years the world will be a very different place. Flying to San Francisco or anywhere may be a luxury as it once was, only for the very wealthy. Also if we are still living, we will have moved from the older adult to the old adult stage of life and may not be able to travel. So off we go on Saturday even though it seems a bit like fiddling while Rome burns. How did art ever get so literal?

One of the huge and largely unrecognized issues surrounding global climate change, one that has has been essentially unaddressed, is the injustice of the consequences of our consumption. The US is responsible for 21% of the world's energy consumption with 4.6% of the world's population. As a comparison, India consumes 3.1% of the energy with 16.6% of the population. We in the US are definitely the high consumers of the world. Yet as already has been seen in recent climate disasters, the poor people of the earth are the first victims of our consumption. We have a great moral responsibility to all of these people. Jim Wallis, theologian and editor of Sojourner Magazine spoke out about this responsibility at a meeting with Democratic senators last week. These were his words:

Put Poor People on the Climate Change Agenda
by Jim Wallis 10-15-2009

Thanks for the invitation. You have, I am sure, heard us speak about creation care as the commitment we have to the environment. Most of us believe that human-caused climate change is a threat to God’s creation. Religious leaders actually do listen to scientists, and they are telling us that the pace of climate change is all happening even faster than expected. A good climate bill could signal a whole new direction and could even be a “three-for.”
It could protect the environment and begin to slow and eventually even reverse the dangerous and deadly impact of climate change.
It could create important and meaningful green energy jobs, many of which could be an opportunity for low-income and undereducated people, and also be good paying work.
It could change our foreign policy, which has been dominated by successive wars over oil. This could begin to decrease our dependency on foreign oil.
But here is the heart of the moral issue for many of us. Simply put, those around the world who have contributed least to global warming and climate change will be the most and first to be impacted by the consequences of it all. Sadly, it’s an old story. We, the affluent, create the problem, and the poor pay the price for our sins. It is wrong, and it is a sin — ours.
Yet the amount of money to help poor people and countries mitigate or adapt to climate changes being proposed in this legislation is not nearly enough (through the emissions “cap and trade” penalties that wealthy countries would have to pay). The numbers are not clear yet in your bill, but the amount of funds directed toward “adaptations” for the poorest countries in the House bill (which came before the Senate bill) is pitiful — really pitiful. It is wholly and woefully inadequate.
This is such an important issue for us that some in the faith community are considering not supporting this bill at all. They have called me to say that they might not support the final bill unless you do much better in the Senate. So if you hear anything from us today, hear that. Your Senate bill must do better — much better — for the poorest of God’s children.
Read entire speech here.
Take action here.

Love Your Neighbor - It's Universal

Click below to watch the video
Charter for Compassion

The Charter for Compassion springs from the dream of Karen Armstrong, well-known religious scholar. She is the current winner of the prestigious TED award (find out more about TED here) which calls on the recipient to create a dream for the world and then gives them funding and other support to help accomplish their dream. Armstrong's dream is for all the faith traditions of the world to return to their natural root of compassion. As a means to accomplish this goal the "Charter of Compassion" was created by Armstrong in dialogue with people from all over the world. It is to be unveiled November 12th. Please check it out and if possible do what you can to make this dream happen.

The Story of Stuff

click here to watch "The Story of Stuff"
This is the best economics lesson I have ever seen in my life! Can you imagine how things could change if this was taught in our schools? Please watch it if you can and then think of ways you could get it out to as many people as possible.

A recent New York Times article on the video and its creator Annie Leonard says,

"So far, six million people have viewed the film at its site, storyofstuff.com, and millions more have seen it on YouTube. More than 7,000 schools, churches and others have ordered a DVD version, and hundreds of teachers have written Ms. Leonard to say they have assigned students to view it on the Web.

It has also won support from independent groups that advise teachers on curriculum choices. Facing the Future, a curriculum developer for schools in all 50 states, is drafting lesson plans based on the video. And Ms. Leonard has a contract with Simon & Schuster to write a book based on the video.

The enthusiasm is not universal. In January, a school board in Missoula County, Mont., decided that screening the video treaded on academic freedom after a parent complained that its message was anticapitalist.

But many educators say the video is a boon to teachers as they struggle to address the gap in what textbooks say about the environment and what science has revealed in recent years."

(read the entire article here)

Today I started putting away my summer clothes and taking out the fall stuff. We are headed for a vacation to California in a couple of weeks, our first vacation in over ten years. So I started to think about how dowdy my Arkansas thrift store clothes might look in California. I started to wonder if I should go shopping for some new duds. I have plenty of clothes to keep me warm and dry of course. So maybe I will just "make due" now that I have been newly inspired by this great little video. I bet none of those chic Californians will even notice.

Let Us Be the Change We Want to See

Today I am posting an article from Truthdig.com by Robert Scheer. I wrote my own version of this article last week but then couldn't bring myself to post it. I was feeling too sorry for President Obama because of the vile attacks against him. But after reading Robert Scheer's article, I believe that this is something that has to be said. Its just another case of "The Emperor Has No Clothes". Everybody with a brain sees it. Now who is going to speak out and demand that this President serve the people? Its too important to let it all slide by because he is the first African-American president or because the right wing fundamentalist crazies are so out of control. We need Obama to step up to the plate and bat for the people not the corporations and powerful. That is not too much to ask. He wanted to serve us so let's tell him in no uncertain terms what we need. Just like every other politician I have encountered, he is not going to do the right thing just because he is a nice guy. There is too much pressure on him to go the way of the insurance companies or the bankers or the Wall Streeters or the arms merchants. We have to learn to put on our own pressure even if we would like it to be different.

I, like everyone I know who voted for Obama, want a president who is on our side, who works for us and for the people at the very bottom of the power pyramid. He talks like that and we love it. But of course as my mother told me maybe a million times, "actions speak louder than words." We have to look at the president's actions and not be fooled by his rhetoric. I hate to say it, but it is clear as day to me. We have to push this man to be the president we want him to be or it ain't gonna' happen.


Obama’s Presidency Isn’t Too Big to Fail

Posted on Sep 15, 2009
By Robert Scheer

A president has only so much capital to expend, both in tax dollars and public tolerance, and Barack Obama is dangerously overdrawn. He has tried to have it all on three fronts, and his administration is in serious danger of going bankrupt. He has blundered into a deepening quagmire in Afghanistan, has continued the Bush policy of buying off Wall Street hustlers instead of confronting them and is now on the cusp of bargaining away the so-called public option, the reform component of his health care program.

Those are not happy sentences to write for one who is still on the e-mail list of campaign supporters urged to back the president in the face of attacks that are stupidly small-minded. But to remain silent about his errors, just because most of his critics are so vile, is hardly an example of constructive concern for him or the country.

Yes, Obama was presented with a series of crises not of his making but for which he is now being held accountable. He is not a “socialist” who grew the federal budget to astronomical proportions. That is the legacy of George W. Bush, who raised the military budget to its highest level since World War II despite the end of the Cold War and the lack of a formidable military opponent— a legacy of debt compounded by Bush’s decision to first ignore the banking meltdown and then to engage in a welfare-for-Wall-Street bailout. And it was Bush who gave the pharmaceutical companies the gift of a very expensive government subsidy for seniors’ drugs.

But what is nerve-racking about Obama is that even though he campaigned against Bush’s follies he has now embraced them. He hasn’t yet managed to significantly reduce the U.S. obligation in Iraq and has committed to making a potentially costlier error by ratcheting up America’s “nation-building” role in Afghanistan.

Just as he was burdened with the Afghanistan situation, Obama was saddled with a banking crisis he didn’t cause, and the worst that can be said of his attempted solutions to the financial mess is that they were inherited from Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. But Obama, who raised questions before his election about the propriety of a plan that would rescue the banks but ignore the plight of ordinary folks, has adopted that very approach as president. He elevated Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner, the two Democrats most closely aligned with Paulson’s policy, to top positions in his government.

Obama’s proposed new regulations, while containing some kind words about better informing consumers, do not portend any breakup of the “too big to fail companies” whose problems were permitted to fester by previous deregulatory measures. His answer is to increase the regulatory capacities of the Federal Reserve, which failed to use its already existing and considerable powers to avoid the debacle.

The promise is that next time the Fed will behave better. As Obama put it Monday, “So our plan would put the cost of a firm’s failures on those who own its stock and loaned it money. And if taxpayers ever had to step in again to prevent a second Great Depression, the financial industry will have to pay the taxpayer back every cent.”
Why not now? And why has he accepted the Wall Street line that all this represents a “collective failure,” as if the con men and the conned had equal responsibility? According to Obama, “It was a failure of responsibility that led homebuyers and derivative traders alike to take reckless risks that they couldn’t afford to take. It was a collective failure of responsibility in Washington, on Wall Street, and across America that led to the near-collapse of our financial system one year ago.” Hogwash. The chicanery of the financial system, securitizing highly suspect mortgages, was codified into laws that made the hustle legal.

That insistence on equating the swindled with the swindlers is also what is wrong with the evolving health care reform plan. The assumption from the beginning, when Obama reached out to insurance companies to come up with a deal, was that they had the interest of their customers at heart. They don’t, and it is the purpose of government regulation in the area of health as well as banking to even the scales between the powerful corporations and the consumers from whom they profit. That is the purpose of a public option worth its name.

Without a government program as a check on medical costs, Obama will end up with a variant of the Massachusetts program, one that forces consumers to sign up with private insurers and costs 33 percent more than the national average. He will have furthered the Bush legacy of cultivating an ever more expensive big government without improving how the people are served.

August 29, Saturday - A Small Group of Citizens

Here is a photo from our little demo in Jasper, AR today in support of health care for all. There were eight of us, Jim of course was there but he is the photographer so I am holding both of our signs. You can click on the picture and enlarge if you want to read all the signs. Hopefully this is going on all over the nation. The reception in Jasper was cordial with about half the people driving by without looking, another half honking and giving the thumbs up. Just a couple of thumbs down and no other fingers that I saw. Do you think this is what Margaret Mead had in mind when she said:“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”? I hope she is right because this thing is getting really weird.

August 21 Plus ca change...

Sunrise Over Berlin photo by Hanson59

The other night I woke up in the middle of the night with the feeling of impending doom. I didn't go to bed with it, it came upon me in the night. It felt like a sudden serious case of depression complete with uncontrollable crying and hopelessness. I tried for a couple of hours to get back to sleep. But, as usual, my mind had other plans. It wanted to review in sordid detail the subject of my despair. This matter happens not to be personal but communal so to speak. I was utterly distraught over the state of discourse on national health care reform. This sounds funny, but it is not. If you have been alive in America for the last month you know the scene. The vitriolic, mean-spirited, contentious and down-right evil nature of the health care debate has unnerved me. I know that it is fueled by professional lobbyists, the hired guns of the insurance and pharmaceutical companies who want to keep their profits coming no matter what the cost to the American people. Their lies are spouted by Fox News, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbough, and especially on the Internet. But, excuse me, does that mean that so many people have to believe them? Why can't people choose to act in their own best interest? Are we as a nation really that stupid? These are of course rhetorical questions from the middle of the night.

I laid in bed and longed for a nation where we could have reasoned debate. There are plenty of real reasons to criticize the proposed health care bills. Why do we have to be side-tracked by ridiculous lies about the bill allowing the government to kill your grandmother, leave veterans without care, stand between you and your doctor and then get into your bank account? I might be extra sensitive to this craziness since I live in a place where my neighbors make copies of these lies from the Internet and pass them out to the community just in case we haven't heard them on Fox News or The Rush Limbaugh Show.

The morning after my sleepless night I read the Daily Lectionary from the Episcopal Church as has been my practice for the last six months or so. These are daily Bible readings chosen for each day of the year. Since I have never been a Bible reader, I am learning a lot. On that bleary eyed morning after my sleepless night the designated Old Testament reading was Psalm 140. It was supposedly prayed by King David. But don't you think it would be a perfect prayer for Barack Obama right now?

Psalm 140
To the leader. A Psalm of David.

1 Deliver me, O Lord, from evildoers;
protect me from those who are violent,
2 who plan evil things in their minds
and stir up wars continually.
3 They make their tongue sharp as a snake’s,
and under their lips is the venom of vipers.
Selah

4 Guard me, O Lord, from the hands of the wicked;
protect me from the violent
who have planned my downfall.
5 The arrogant have hidden a trap for me,
and with cords they have spread a net;*
along the road they have set snares for me.
Selah

6 I say to the Lord, ‘You are my God;
give ear, O Lord, to the voice of my supplications.’
7 O Lord, my Lord, my strong deliverer,
you have covered my head in the day of battle.
8 Do not grant, O Lord, the desires of the wicked;
do not further their evil plot.*
Selah

9 Those who surround me lift up their heads;*
let the mischief of their lips overwhelm them!
10 Let burning coals fall on them!
Let them be flung into pits, no more to rise!
11 Do not let the slanderer be established in the land;
let evil speedily hunt down the violent!

12 I know that the Lord maintains the cause of the needy,
and executes justice for the poor.
13 Surely the righteous shall give thanks to your name;
the upright shall live in your presence.

New Revised Standard Version (Anglicized Edition), copyright 1989

Maybe we could leave out the part about "Let burning coals fall on them! Let them be flung into pits, no more to rise!", but it is a satisfying mental image, I must admit. The French have a saying that seems to apply to this health care reform fiasco as well as to many other situations especially in politics, "Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose" (The more things seem to change, the more they stay the same.) We could just leave it at that. Just say along with at least half the country, "Whatever". Right now the debate on health care is so vicious and mean that I feel like giving up. That seems like the sanest response. However, not being completely sane, I just wrote another letter to the editor and I am planning to go to one more rally in support of the public option for health care, carry my sign, "Do the Right Thing, Health Care for Everyone!", and hope that someone doesn't hit me.

Acknowledging the light of a new day, I have started to think about alternatives to the contentiousness that has infected our country. Perhaps teaching young people the arts of mediation and listening to others might be the most radical thing we can do right now. There are already some good people doing this and lots of helpful resources. Check out one great program here. God knows it is needed. I can begin to see a glimmer of hope for civil decision making in the US in the future. If we worked really hard maybe we could even prove the French wrong for once. That would be satisfying. Just say No! to "Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose" we could say. America finally joined the rest of the developed world and found a way to provide health care for all her people! It's amazing how things look a little brighter after the sun comes up.

August 13. Thursday - Lest We Forget

artwork by Hiroshima bombing survivor

For the last week I have been thinking about what I might do to remember the 64th anniversary of the nuclear bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US military, that occurred on Aug 6 and Aug 9, 1945, the year before I was born. When I lived in Colorado I often helped to organize a memorial gathering in honor of the victims of the bombing. That had a kind of soothing effect on my grief. What can you do but be a witness to the atrocity of war and especially this kind of unthinkable mass destruction of innocent life in all of its holy manifestation? Now that I live in the deep woods, I can't really organize a gathering. So I thought I would dedicate this essay to the memory of the 200,000 people who died and the equal number of survivors of those August days in 1945 when life on this planet was changed forever.

This morning when I was doing the research for this essay, I watched one of those old black and white news shorts that they used to show before the main feature in movie theaters. This one was created just days after the bombing. The camera pans the razed cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the narrator extols the obvious immense power of America’s bomb. Cement buildings were turned to dust and steel girders were “twisted and bent like pipe cleaners”. As the camera moves past the site of a former factory in Hiroshima the narrator mentions, almost as an aside, that 20,000 people had worked in this factory. Other than this there is no mention of victims. As banal as most of the narration is, surprisingly at the end very end it asks a profound question. With rising ominous orchestral drama in the background, a man in US military uniform traces with chalk the outline of a human body which had been incinerated into the sidewalk, and the narrator booms in his deep voice, “Unparalleled progress or unparalleled destruction, atomic power puts the question squarely to mankind!”

Sixty some years later we still have not faced this question and its consequences. The generation of people who lived through the experience of the bomb is passing. For the most part we have failed to listen to their story. In 1995 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the bombings, the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC planned an educational exhibit about the 1945 bombings of Japan. After months of planning, the exhibit was scrapped due to controversy over graphic photos of victims, a school girl’s charred lunch box and the mention of scholarly historical studies some of which suggest that the bombings may not have been necessary to end the war. Americans are not yet ready to take a hard look at what our country did and why, and the unthinkable consequences of these acts. Yet, this very failure to face the truth, this national cowardliness or lack of stomach for the truth, may also be keeping us from seeing the truth of our current situation in regard to the ominous threat to our world posed by nuclear weapons.

According to Nuclearfiles.org a project of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, the, there are approximately 31,000 nuclear warheads in the world today. Of these 13,000 are deployed and 4,600 are on high alert, meaning they can be launched within minutes. Each of these warheads has the destructive power of 100,000 to 400,000 tons of TNT. In comparison, the bombs dropped in 1945 had the force of 15,000 tons of TNT. There are eight nuclear armed countries in the world including, the US, Russia, Britain, France, Israel, China, Pakistan and India. Ninety-five percent of the nuclear warheads are in the US and Russia. In addition, according to the International Panel on Fissile Materials, substantial quantities of highly enriched uranium used to make the bombs, remain in more than 40 non-weapon states. There are varying accounts of how much enriched plutonium is actually missing. Most likely, non-state terrorists have access to some of this missing plutonium, if not the means to manufacture a nuclear weapon. The state of the world in terms of the risk of nuclear holocaust is dire. In fact,there is a doomsday clock, maintained by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and used to symbolize our proximity to global annihilation. Currently this symbolic clock is set at 5 minutes to midnight.

Any day is a good day to start to look this beast in the eye, but August seems particularly appropriate. It is incredibly difficult work. I think that the only way we can do this is to gather the necessary courage from each other. The issue is not only about how many thousands of nuclear warheads are aimed at us, and at our perceived enemies. It is about the hopes and dreams we each have for our children and their children and for the future of human life on this planet. We must learn to tell our stories and above all to listen. Surely, we will come to find mutual benefit in nuclear disarmament, ending forever the nightmare of nuclear weapons. Governments and corporations will not then be able to convince us that we need these weapons of mass destruction for our safety. We will together see the lie.

Toward this end, an enlightening documentary film has been released by HBO, “White Light, Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki” directed by Japanese American, Steven Ozakazi. It premiered on television on Aug 6, the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and will run throughout August. This film tells the stories of 14 of the 200,000 survivors of the bombs. In an interview on YouTube Okazaki said that he has been trying to produce this film for ten years. Neither US or Japanese movie companies wanted to get involved, saying that the people were not ready for this. Then last year, to his relief and surprise, the proposal was accepted by HBO and he was given free reign to tell the story through the eyes of the survivors. He says, “The conversation is never about people’s lives. It is about just strategy, as if war is just strategy and battles won or lost. The point of the show is to put a human face on it and to show the real tragedy of it.”

After watching the trailer and the interview of Mr. Okazaki, I feel that these survivors have something important to tell us. I don’t have HBO so I will have to wait to get it from NetFlix. I am sure that in a way it won’t be easy to watch. But in another way, it will be so beautiful, a story of human courage. Here is a site that shows some of the art work of survivors. You can see immediately the pain they experienced and also the beauty of the human spirit. We do not get this kind of opportunity very often so if you are able, please watch this movie and encourage your friends and family to watch it also.

White Light/Black Rain airs August 13 at 11:30 a.m. and 11 p.m.; August 19 at 3 p.m. and August 22 at 4 p.m.. It also plays on HBO2 August 16 at 12:30 a.m. and August 20 at 8 p.m. All times are Eastern Standard Time. You can of course also purchase the video from Amazon or HBO or rent it from NetFlix and maybe your local video store.

Although the situation is dire, it is not hopeless. After their meeting in July Presidents Obama and Putin announced a preliminary agreement to reduce each of their respective country's nuclear stockpiles by thirty percent. This is a pretty big deal.
Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a Washington foundation focused on nuclear-weapons reduction and nonproliferation said, “They’ve hit the sweet spot in finding numbers that will be a significant reduction and likely to get the necessary support in their respective parliaments,” In fact, the numbers announced Monday, Mr. Cirincione notes, “amount to a 30 percent reduction in the nuclear arsenals of the two countries that possess 95 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons.”

Even on this hot August day there is reason for hope, while at the same time being aware that if these cuts are made, there will still be enough nuclear weapons in the world to destroy all life on the planet many times over. It seems to be the gift of our times to live with this kind of paradox. Just exactly what is hope in the face of the kinds of issues which face us? A thirty percent reduction sounds good for today, and we will work for total nuclear disarmament as we celebrate. We have examples of courage to guide us. Even when their loved ones and entire world disintegrated before their eyes, the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not give up. Their lives give us courage. Isn't that part of what it means when we call ourselves the human “family”? We take our courage and support from each other especially in the things that are too big to look at alone. I am grateful that even a few of these people were able to speak to the world before their voices are gone forever.