The Earth is the Lord's

Gas Taxes with justice

Whew! Gas prices are back down nationwide, to levels not seen in years. Most people are rejoicing, since the last thing they feel they need in uncertain times is to be sending their hard-earned money to oil companies who are already producing record profits.  

But the fact is, we probably weren’t paying enough for gasoline even at its highest levels, because we weren’t paying the full costs of producing and using it. [See this great post for economics students for more details]. Full-cost pricing for gasoline would include not just the extraction and transport costs of crude oil, the costs of refining and shipping gasoline, and the costs of distributing it through a retail network to your local gas station. Full-cost pricing would mean  paying the full social costs of gasoline, the private costs and the public costs imposed on others, including in the price of gasoline the impacts of pollution on human health, the damage mining and shipping does to the ecosystems that provide economic benefits to people, and the cost we impose on future generations by using up non-renewable resources….

"Dominion" means dominion

Journalist G.K. Chesterton once quipped (in Orthodoxy), that original sin was "the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved." Approaching theology, as Karl Barth famously suggested, with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other, certainly finds the hypothesis of total depravity unfalsified.

Yet by the end of the twentieth century, another fundamental Christian doctrine could be regarded as empirically verified. The placement of the human race in "dominion" over the planet has shown up in study after study of global change--in articles on soil erosion, species extinction, biological invasions, nutrient pollution of water bodies, mercury pollution of global fish stocks, alterations of the global nitrogen cycle, and interference with the climate system.

Starting points on Global Warming

A pastor wrote in this week in response to an ESA ePistle post. He had this to say:

"Please send me your proof, not theory, on global warming."

The best emails are short and to-the-point.

I think he must have meant that he wanted proof of human impact on global warming, because no-one really disputes global warming--that's just a measurement. Actually, I heard a friend say recently he didn't believe in global warming based on just a few recent years of data--either because 1998 was such a hot year that its temperature wasn't surpassed until 2005, or because 2006, though hot, wasn't as hot as 2005. It's better to look at a longer time period, as the graph from NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies shows. There are some wiggles along the trajectory but it's the 20th century trend that matters most.

Two pilots were coming in for a landing, and they found it very challenging. After they stopped the plane, one of them said "Man, that was a short runway." The other looked from side to side and gawked, "But look at how wide it is!"

Sometimes we look at things at the wrong scale, and forget to see the big picture.

So, the implied question still stands, where the proof that global warming science is true?