Excessive focus on money is destroying the environment and dehumanizing people, said Honduran Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, president of Caritas Internationalis.
Religious communities have a duty to call attention to the importance of the human person, who is “at the center of creation,” he said while international leaders were debating the extension of legal limits on the production of greenhouse gas emissions.
The sport-utility vehicle is making a comeback.
After being largely shunned during the recession, high-riding SUVs and workhorse pickups are regaining favor as U.S. consumers grow more confident and fuel prices remain below the $4 a gallon level that triggered a shift away from larger vehicles.
The rebound was clear Thursday as U.S. auto sales in November hit a 13.6 million annual pace, the strongest in more than two years, with sales of trucks and SUVs surpassing cars at many auto makers. The results are boosting Detroit auto makers that suffered when gas-guzzlers got the cold shoulder in 2008.
Makes this heart sad–read it all; KSH.
The world’s leading oil exporter Saudi Arabia faces rising tensions with regional rival Iran and turmoil in two neighbouring countries hit by the wave of Arab unrest this spring as it tackles changes at the top of its ruling family.
The death of Crown Prince Sultan in October led to conservative Interior Minister Prince Nayef’s promotion to King Abdullah’s heir only a week after the octogenarian monarch had his third back operation within a year.
The stability of Saudi Arabia is of global importance since the kingdom sits on more than a fifth of the world’s oil reserves, is a significant owner of dollar assets and acts as Middle East lynchpin of U.S. security policy.
The National Association of Evangelicals on Tuesday (Nov. 8) called for greater precautions with nuclear weapons and a renewed effort toward disarmament.
“The rules have changed in the past 25 years,” NAE President Leith Anderson said. “Nuclear weapons don’t serve as a deterrent to the dangers of our post-Cold War era, which include rogue nations and terrorist groups.”
As Daniel Yergin writes in “The Quest,” his gripping history of energy innovation, [George] Mitchell fought through waves of skepticism and opposition to extract natural gas from shale. The method he and his team used to release the trapped gas, called fracking, has paid off in the most immense way. In 2000, shale gas represented just 1 percent of American natural gas supplies. Today, it is 30 percent and rising.
John Rowe, the chief executive of the utility Exelon, which derives almost all its power from nuclear plants, says that shale gas is one of the most important energy revolutions of his lifetime. It’s a cliché word, Yergin told me, but the fracking innovation is game-changing. It transforms the energy marketplace.
The U.S. now seems to possess a 100-year supply of natural gas, which is the cleanest of the fossil fuels. This cleaner, cheaper energy source is already replacing dirtier coal-fired plants. It could serve as the ideal bridge, Amy Jaffe of Rice University says, until renewable sources like wind and solar mature.
Earlier this week, leaders from diverse faith traditions and communities launched a Canadian Interfaith Call for Leadership and Action on Climate Change. The statement represents a convergence of Canadian faith-based traditions around a common conviction that climate change is an ethical and moral issue that requires greater governmental action, both domestically and globally.
The statement aims to strategically pressure the Canadian government as it prepares for the upcoming United Nations’ negotiations on climate change in Durban, South Africa (COP17). Based on the ”˜spiritual deficit’ and individualism witnessed within society, communities of faith are reasserting the messages of their respective sacred texts to live in harmony with the earth and be good stewards of creation.
Among the findings in this particular evaluation was that only 11 of the 35 cyber security weaknesses identified in a 2010 review had been fully corrected by the 2011 look-see.
The American phoenix is slowly rising again. Within five years or so, the US will be well on its way to self-sufficiency in fuel and energy. Manufacturing will have closed the labour gap with China in a clutch of key industries. The current account might even be in surplus.
Assumptions that the Great Republic must inevitably spiral into economic and strategic decline – so like the chatter of the late 1980s, when Japan was in vogue – will seem wildly off the mark by then.
Telegraph readers already know about the “shale gas revolution” that has turned America into the world’s number one producer of natural gas, ahead of Russia….
The Diocese of Kigezi has once again been recognised by the Ministry of Water and Environment for its outstanding performance in the Water and Sanitation sector.
The Diocese received an award as the ‘Most Outstanding NGO’ in Water and Sanitation promotion for the financial year 2010/2011 during the just concluded Joint GoU/Development Partners’ Water and Environment Sector Review held at Imperial Royale Hotel, Kampala from 11th -13th October 2011.
Speaking at the SA Parliamentary Christian Fellowship Leaders of Christian Churches Dinner at Parliament House on Wednesday night, the Archbishop encouraged our political leaders to dream of a truly human city.
“Adelaide was founded on a bold experiment, a vision for a different sort of human city,” Archbishop [Jeffrey] Driver said. “So many people came here to a new colony because they had been captured by a dream; the dream of a different place where old inequalities and exclusions could be put aside and a new city of human opportunity could be crafted from dream to reality.”
As part of efforts to save the environment in the semi-arid Karamoja sub region in northeast Uganda, the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches have launched a campaign to help stop the destruction of vegetation and plant more trees in the vast region.
Rev. John Robert Lorech of Anglican Kotido Diocese on Friday launched a program to encourage the local Karimojong communities to shift from using dry twigs to fence off their traditional homesteads to using live hedges.
Under the new strategy being piloted in Nadunget and Rupa sub counties, Lorech said the church would educate the communities to plant kei-apple shrubs to create protective hedges around their homesteads.
One of the most dangerous and daunting challenges we face is global climate change. This is, at least in part, a direct result of our burning of fossil fuels. Such human activities could raise worldwide average temperatures by three to eleven degrees Fahrenheit in this century. Rising average temperatures are already wreaking environmental havoc, and, if unchecked, portend devastating consequences for every aspect of life on earth.
The Church has always had as one of its priorities a concern for the poor and the suffering. Therefore, we need not agree on the fundamental causes of human devastation of the environment, or on what standard of living will allow sustainable development, or on the roots of poverty in any particular culture, in order to work to minimize the impact of climate change. It is the poor and the disadvantaged who suffer most from callous environmental irresponsibility. Poverty is both a local and a global reality. A healthy economy depends absolutely on a healthy environment.
The wealthier nations whose industries have exploited the environment, and who are now calling for developing nations to reduce their impact on the environment, seem to have forgotten that those who consume most of the world’s resources also have contributed the most pollution to the world’s rivers and oceans, have stripped the world’s forests of healing trees, have destroyed both numerous species and their habitats, and have added the most poison to the earth’s atmosphere. We cannot avoid the conclusion that our irresponsible industrial production and consumption-driven economy lie at the heart of the current environmental crisis.
The government’s backing of Solyndra, which could cost taxpayers more than a half-billion dollars, came as the politically well-connected business began an extensive lobbying campaign that appears to have blinded government officials to the company’s financial condition and the risks of the investment, according to a review of government documents and interviews with administration officials and industry analysts.
While no evidence has emerged that political favoritism played a role in what administration officials assert were merit-based decisions, Solyndra drew plenty of high-level attention. Its lobbyists corresponded frequently and met at least three times with an aide to a top White House official, Valerie B. Jarrett, to push for loans, tax breaks and other government assistance.
Read it all. Also, see James Pethokoukis–“Solyndra, the logical endpoint of Obamanomics” which may be found over here.
To dissuade the owners of electric cars from recharging their vehicles at peak times, and encourage them to do so in the wee, small hours of the morning instead, some electricity companies are introducing off-peak pricing for electric cars. Off-peak pricing is a common way of persuading people to run appliances such as washing machines at times of low demand. It is, though, a rigid arrangement that cannot respond to fluctuations in the requirement for power. Far better, reckon Alex Rogers and his colleagues at Southampton University, in England, for car owners to be represented in their interactions with the local power supplier by agents that can negotiate a deal on their behalf. These agents would bargain with one another, and with the power company, to charge the cars in an area in the most efficient way. The twist is that the agents Dr Rogers proposes to recruit for the task are not people, but computer programs.
…[This potential] threat came into sharp focus last week, when shaking from the largest earthquake to hit Virginia in 117 years appeared to exceed what the North Anna nuclear power plant northwest of Richmond was built to sustain.
The two North Anna reactors are among 27 in the eastern and central U.S. that a preliminary Nuclear Regulatory Commission review has said may need upgrades. That’s because those plants are more likely to get hit with an earthquake larger than the one their design was based on.
In South Carolina, SCE&G’s V.C. Summer nuclear plant, about 25 miles northwest of Columbia, is among the 27 facilities possibly needing upgrades to better withstand earthquakes, the NRC records show. So are three reactors operated by Duke Energy near Seneca.
A Glasgow-based company has installed its first commercial “alkaline hydrolysis” unit at a Florida funeral home.
The unit by Resomation Ltd is billed as a green alternative to cremation and works by dissolving the body in heated alkaline water.
The facility has been installed at the Anderson-McQueen funeral home in St Petersburg, and will be used for the first time in the coming weeks. It is hoped other units will follow in the US, Canada and Europe.
A proposed pipeline to convey oil derived from “tar sand” in Canada across the American heartland is facing strong opposition from environmentalists ”“ including faith-based groups ”“ staging nonviolent sit-in protests this week in front of the White House in Washington D.C.
Since the protests began Aug. 20, some 150 activists have been arrested, according to 350.org, one of the organizations involved in the demonstrations, which are planned to continue for two weeks.
Drive through northern Pennsylvania and you’ll see barns, cows, silos and drilling rigs perched on big, concrete pads.
Pennsylvania is at the center of a natural gas boom. New technology is pushing gas out of huge shale deposits underground. That’s created jobs and wealth, but it may be damaging drinking water. That’s because when you “frack,” as hydraulic fracturing is called, you pump thousands of gallons of fluids underground. That cracks the shale a mile deep and drives natural gas up to the surface ”” gas that otherwise could never be tapped.
The second meeting of the Anglican Communion Environmental Network (ACEN) will occur in Lima, Peru from Aug 4-10, 2011.
Hosted by Bishop Bill Godfrey of the Diocese of Peru, representatives from Australia, United Kingdom, USA, Fiji, Canada, Melanesia, Brazil, Madagascar, Tanzania and Mexico will report on environmental ministry in their respective jurisdictions. Together they will create an action plan which will become a template for provincial, diocesan and parish-based ministry. Such a plan will connect with environmental ministry at the United Nations and in relation to the forthcoming COP 17 meetings in Durban South Africa in December of 2011.
If we continue as now seems likely, a crunch is coming ”“ in fact three crunches ”“ our global footprint greatly exceeding what the Earth can support, climate destabilisation becoming severe, and fresh water becoming insufficient to feed the Earth’s large population. These crunches will not, by themselves, destroy humanity but they will cause a Darwinian situation; when the going gets tough there will be survival of the fittest. By mid-century, the Earth could be like a lifeboat that’s too small to save everyone.
To be politically correct, organisations don’t use the term ”˜Darwinian’ or talk about ”˜survival of the fittest’, but I am increasingly finding that at elite dinner parties there is already discussion of who the survivors will be. China has enormous fighting spirit and will soon be the world’s largest economy. In 2030 it will have 1.4 billion people. The average footprint of a Chinese person is a small fraction of an average American. The Chinese government does more detailed future planning than perhaps any other government and is determined that China will be one of the survivors. China has been buying the steel and resources it will need in the future. To the largest extent possible it has already cornered the market in rare Earth metals needed for high technology.
The USA combined with Canada will be a survivor, because it is economically powerful and resourceful, and with Canada it has a large amount of land, much of which will benefit from global warming ”“ the breadbasket of the future. Europe, in my mind, is a question mark. Japan will struggle….
On trash day in San Francisco, bins in three colors line the streets, each with a different purpose.
The city requires residents to put recyclable materials into a blue bin, compostables into a green one and regular old garbarge into a black one.
“We even recycle batteries,” says Johanna Partin, the mayor’s director of climate protection initiatives, adding they can be placed in a clear bag on top of any bin.
The Anglican Synod of Enugu Diocese Sunday joined the growing condemnation of the forum of state governors over their call for removal of fuel subsidy, saying doing so would render useless, the new minimum wage.
Accordingly, the Synod advised the government to among other ways reduce cost of governance as a means of paying the new wage, explaining that cost of running the democracy of the country has continued to increase by the day.
(The above title is from the Ipad edition this morning–KSH).
What’s the emergency, you ask? The White House says that military operations in Libya have disrupted supply. But Libya’s oil has been shut in for months now, and oil prices are down from their highs this year. So on Thursday Obama administration spokesman Jay Carney argued that oil demand is likely to rise over the summer. In other words: It’s vacation season, and the White House is worried about high prices through the summer driving months.
Therein, perhaps, is a political emergency, at least in the White House view: President Obama’s reelection prospects will be harmed if national discontent over high gasoline prices continues….
Whatever the rationale, it is a bad idea.
Check it out if you have not seen it. I had occasion to show it to a friend this morning who was moaning about the over 4 dollars he was paying in Connecticut, whereas whereas where I am in South Carolina we have the 3.30’s and 3.40’s/gallon–KSH.
Fill in the blank: Just one short decade ago, about 10 percent of America’s corn went to ethanol. Now, the number is closer to _____ percent….
The Church of Our Savior, an Episcopal parish on rural Johns Island, was established a little more than 30 years ago to serve the growing populations on the nearby barrier islands of Kiawah and Seabrook.
Its austere interior contains unintentionally Celtic elements, especially the cross inside a circle, which has pagan-Druid origins. When the Rev. Michael Clarkson arrived at Our Savior three years ago from England, where he had been forming Anglican congregations and working for the Church of England for two decades, the Celtic characteristics of his new parish immediately were evident.
And soon he understood why a Celtic theme, which emphasizes the connections between faith and nature, was appropriate for his new parish home.
Read it all from the Faith and Values section of the local paper.
Monks and rabbis have stood alongside Catholics and Anglicans in Canberra to show support for the federal government’s plan to tackle climate change.
Leaders from the Australian Religious Response to Climate Change (ARRCC) met Prime Minister Julia Gillard in support of the carbon tax today.
Anglican representative George Browning said the group wanted to assist politicians to create good legislation and the message to Ms Gillard was that the issue was a moral one.
Twenty-eight religious leaders will converge on Canberra on 2 June to pressure the federal government to act on climate change.
Representatives from many different faiths, acting under the banner of the Australian Religious Response to Climate Change (ARRCC), will meet with Julia Gillard, Greg Hunt, Andrew Wilkie and around twenty other Members of Parliament.
Bishop George Browning, a member of the delegation, said the time to act is now.
Nearly six of 10 Americans ”” 57% ”” say they won’t buy an all-electric car no matter the price of gas, according to a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll.
That’s a stiff headwind just as automakers are developing electrics to help meet tighter federal rules that could require their fleets to average as high as 62 miles per gallon in 2025. And President Obama has set a goal of 1 million electric vehicles in use in the U.S. by 2015.
The anti-electric sentiment unmasked by the poll shows that pure electrics ”” defined in the poll question as “an electric car that you could only drive for a limited number of miles at one time” ”” could have trouble getting a foothold in the U.S.
If it wasn’t already clear, India’s announcement of $5 billion in development deals in Africa should certainly put to rest any question of whether India is dedicated to doing business on the African continent over the long haul.
The pledge of development aid to African countries ”“ essentially a fund to help African countries to meet their development goals ”“ stands in stark contrast to Africa’s largest single trading partner, China.
While China trades large infrastructure projects (built mostly by Chinese labor) for access to African raw materials, India spends money on training Africans to develop their own countries. And while Indian countries certainly have come into Africa as investors, Indian diplomats are quick to stress that the relationship between India and African countries is more one of equal partners.