The Inconvenient Sequel to Ecovangelism

Urban Dictionary defines “Ecovangelism”: A socio-political movement disposed to make extreme claims and advocate extreme measures regarding the preservation, restoration, or improvement of the natural environment.

First, let’s have a word on Urban Dictionary for those not familiar with it.   

“Urban Dictionary is a crowdsourced online dictionary of slang words and phrases that was founded in 1998 as a parody of Dictionary.com and Vocabulary.com by then-college freshman Aaron Peckham”.

 “Crowdsourced” means anyone may suggest or nominate a word. Popular usage will ultimately determine its fate towards a permanent place in the Standard Dictionary.

There had since been millions of entries by 2009 and new submissions per day are registered.  This is all possible because online information, unlike those in hard copy book-bound dictionaries or Encyclopedia, can be collected and sorted almost without limit in “the cloud”.

Meanwhile, the word “televangelist” first came to global use in 1973.  Only 100 new words came out in that same year. Believe it or not, words and phrases which sound new, like fact-check, factoid, and yes, affluenza were words introduced then. As an aside, most who watched the news last year thought affluenza was a newly minted word. A Dallas legal team used it to defend/justify the behavior of a teenager – scion of a millionaire family - for drunk driving that killed four people.  But I digressed.

Televangelism is uniquely a U.S. original, perhaps brought about in the early years of broadcast media when radio and television were largely unregulated, in a country that was and still is anchored in Judeo-Christian philosophy. Televangelists proliferated globally until many of them fell out of grace (pun intended) after a series of scandals that were moral, social and financial in nature. There is just a handful now. It is the reputable ones that survived and do still enjoy a substantial support – free of any scandals or cases of fraud – and in return they continue to do a lot of public good in the world. {The true standard upon which televangelism should be modeled after is Rev. Billy Graham, who has now been succeeded by Franklin Graham}. A significant alteration at the turn of the new century was a subtle change to more positive messages against what used to be fire and brimstone, gloom and doom to those not heeding the ways of righteousness.

But, in case you have not noticed, the gloom and doom remains an active forecast but not from televangelism. It is no longer for those violating the tenets of piety. Instead, humanity and the world are both doomed due to man’s profligacy and reckless abuse of resources.  We are destroying the environment with our carelessness and irresponsible behavior. Fire and brimstone will be the literal heating up of the planet as human settlements and practices continue to spew carbon into the air.  The melting of the polar ice caps and rising sea level will be the end of humanity.  Suddenly, our sins are against the environment. The televangelists of yore, barely over a generation ago, were replaced by the new, louder voices from the wilderness – the ecovangelists. Both televangelists and ecovangelists prophesy despite the fact that predicting the future is a universal impossibility. The world had ended many times over from century to century if the countless doomsayers had their say. Today, sea levels will inundate many places on earth as polar ice caps melt.  This is despite the fact that there is not enough ice to melt from both poles to raise sea levels as to submerge even half of what Mr. Gore says will be under water.  It is not like melted ice will be concentrated in places ecovangelists choose to highlight. Water will spread out evenly – seeking the appropriate level. BUT, as depicted in many monster and disaster movies, Manhattan, New York becomes the epicenter for raging sea levels or a speeding glacier (an oxymoron in itself). If its earthquakes and fire it is San Francisco or LA.  If it is space alien invaders or Superman’s nemesis, it will have to be Washington, D.C., specifically, the White House.

Let us not forget that the “tip of the iceberg” says a lot about what the doomsayers may neglect to mention. If only 1/10^th of the iceberg is visible from the surface, and 9/10^th underwater, then only 1/10^th of every floating ice berg will contribute to the rise in sea level. 90% of all ice berg everywhere is  already accounted for in the current sea level.  Likewise, only the surface of the ice sheets, just 1/10^th of the entire ice shelf, in both the Arctic and Antarctic will contribute to additional sea level. Mountain ice and snow, if they all melt completely, will contribute to the rising sea level; but not the entire mountains made up of rocks and soil. Mr. Gore may need to re-do his math or review his accounting principles.

It is easy to label those whose views on climate change are different from the prevailing ideas put forward by those who claim that climate change is the world’s biggest existential threat. Climate change deniers are also called by many other names: ignorant, uneducated, ill-informed on the science of climate change, uncaring, heartless, selfish individuals, etc.

Arguing over the science of climate change does not present a simple straightforward platform.

There is not enough data because even if we go beyond the past century, it will not be enough from the context of earth’s history. Often, proponents of climate change go back or begin their perspective only from the time of the industrial revolution. Part of the reason is that that was the starting line for when carbon began to emerge as a polluting agent.

Climate change proponents, to use their labeling system, are historical deniers if they fail to acknowledge the far longer history of the planet – multiple-glaciation alternating with global warming over thousands and thousands of years.  We must consider where we are today in the history of the planet. The last ice age lowered the sea level around the world when much of the fresh water was frozen and concentrated in and around the poles. The islands of Japan, Taiwan, The Philippines, Indonesia and many others were connected to the mainland by so called land bridges. That is how early humans and all other organisms reached and colonized those places. When sea level rose as polar ice caps melted the land bridges disappeared under oceans, separating these island-countries as we know them today. Please read the quote below:

“At least five major ice ages have occurred throughout Earth's history: the earliest was over 2 billion years ago, and the most recent one began approximately 3 million years ago and continues today (yes, we live in an ice age!). Currently, we are in a warm interglacial that began about 11,000 years ago”.

Imagine a stair case that is 11,000 years long.  The industrial revolution began in 1820, or maybe as late as 1840.  So, if we reckon the global warming story from that period, it will be as if we just stepped from an imaginary platform on the side and hopped onto that stair case less than 2-1/2 centuries ago, ignoring our story before that. That’s when we began using fossil fuels but already for over 10,000 years earlier the entire earth was emerging and warming up from the last active ice age. We are merely a part of the natural processes that encompass millions and millions of years where organisms adapted to the changing environment. Adaptation defines what we are and how we look today. We reached the top of the food chain when we began to lose much of our body and facial hair so we can take advantage of a warming climate. Organisms that did not adapt became extinct. Or, if we go back farther than that, the mighty dinosaurs died off when they could not adapt to the global cooling after an asteroid impact 67 million years ago. Relatively few dinosaur species actually died outright from that impact that covered merely 110 miles across. Global cooling created by all the impact dust that blocked much of the sunlight was what killed the big dinosaurs. There is undeniable scientific evidence to back it up. Mammals with their fur and live births and extended period of parental care, thus passing on knowledge for far longer time made for superior adaptation.  And we are here today because of global warming.

All of these arguments will be for naught if we do not suggest an alternative.

1.       If carbon build up is the concern then we should be developing the proliferation of the eater of carbon – trees and all plants. Money and resources for a global campaign to plant more trees will be far less than how much had been spent arguing against the use of fossil fuels and endorsement of alternative forms of energy. Trees for building materials and for food production are clearly the low lying fruit (pun intended) that will have far ranging benefits, including flood control, that will truly have relatively more immediate global reach, specially to third world countries. If only a fraction of time and energy spent on climate change campaigns were on planting trees, the planet can be a tad cooler.  Imagine if just a little more of the sun’s energy were absorbed by trees and plants around the world, while gobbling up carbon and exhaling oxygen in return.

2.       We can continue with alternative energy program that works, discard the white elephant projects, but nuclear energy should remain a viable option as well. In fact, it is more critical against limited supply of fossil fuels.  It is more consistent, if not even more reliable, and unhindered where wind power and sunlight can be interrupted by weather. We are aware of the issues dealing with the byproduct of fission reactors and potential accidents (quite low now due to modern safeguards). Make note of this: On top of existing reactors operating worldwide, China has 23 under construction, 33 planned; Russia has 11 and 14, respectively; India 4 and 20; Japan 2 and 12; S. Korea 6 and 6; USA 1 and 9, putting America under a clear energy disadvantage.  Fusion power – the energy source of the universe – should be a priority for alternative power source. The universe had been using it for 13.7 billion years. We should be funding its research more than we are spending on electric cars.  Speaking of electric cars, we should keep in mind that no matter how much we increase the use of electric cars in the U.S., its impact on carbon footprint reduction is negligible because 81 per cent of electricity (from which all electric cars get their charge) comes from oil, coal and natural gas – all fossil fuels.

 

3.       Efficiency in electrical usage by way of more efficiency in electric motors that run the machines, low wattage high output lamps; more energy-saving homes and offices and factories, etc. deserve more research funding and should be ongoing until more than 90% efficiency is achieved.

4.       Here’s a radical idea. Much of fossil fuel today is used by the commuting public – wasted on the road to and from work. While public transportation works in many places, there is a lot more wasted by individuals driving, often singly, their own vehicles. All kinds of scheme had been tried that worked for a while, like carpooling, but we know the best way is still to cut the distance between each commute. City planners and residential visionaries should get together to make the ideal condition: Place every worker’s residence close to where they work. Every morning in every city we observe this: vehicles jamming every artery towards each metropolis but make note there are vehicles too, perhaps not as heavily but still quite significant, leaving the city areas outward the suburbs. From a much higher view we see vehicles going to and fro, much of them commuting from homes to their places of work. An algorithm ought to be developed in work/residential placements, matching people to their work location(without sacrificing lifestyle: amenities and affordability and needs like school and day care, etc.) , with the aim of cutting commute time and distance.  Ideally, people’s residences are matched to their places of work; a matching program in place so as to make that a permanent fluid activity by and between human resources, city planners and home builders and residential managers. Like I said, this is a radical idea but it should be part of the conversation platform where more pipe dream suggestions had been brought up before.


This might be inconvenient to ecovangelists but they ought not be left to monopolize the conversation.