The big environmental issue nowadays is global warming. Anyone who watches or reads the news even occasionally has been told that humans are causing global warming through all the fossil fuels we’re burning. They’ve also been told that this warming process eventually will prove catastrophic if we don’t reverse course as soon as possible.
As thinking Christians and good stewards, how should we respond?
The short answer is, we should respond thoughtfully. Thoughtless stewards are rarely good stewards.
Notice that my brief summary of the global warming controversy bundled together several distinct claims. To think clearly about this issue, we have to tease apart this bundle of claims and consider each one. For each claim, there is a corresponding question we need to answer. And it’s only after answering these questions that we can be in a position to determine what, if anything, we ought to do about global warming.
Here are the four central questions:
Is the earth warming?
If the earth is warming, is human activity (like carbon dioxide emissions) causing it?
If the earth is warming, and we’re causing it, is that bad overall?
If the earth is warming, we’re causing it, and that’s bad, would any of the proposed “solutions” (e.g., the Kyoto Protocol, legislative restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions) make any difference?
It’s important for us to think carefully about how best to achieve the goals set out by the Bible. And that means undertaking a close study of how the world works and how best to affect change for the good.
That’s one case, but are leftists always hypocrites like that?
Do As I Say Not As I Do
I recently listened to the audio book version of Peter Schweizer’s 2004 book “Do As I Say Not As I Do“. In that book, he profiles a number of leftist public figures, and he discovers that leftists don’t practice what they preach, because even they know that leftist ideas don’t actually work. I really recommend the book, so let’s take a closer look at it and you’ll see why you should read it, too.
FrontPage: Give us some of the best examples of the gulf between some liberals’ social criticisms and the ingredients of their private lives. Give us some insights, for instance, into the likes of Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Cornel West, Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy and Barbra Streisand.
Schweizer: Looking for liberal hypocrisy is, as they say in the military, a target-rich environment. Noam Chomsky, for example, has attacked wealthy Americans who set up trusts to avoid paying inheritance taxes. But this self-professed “radical socialist” has a tax attorney and did the very same thing. (When I asked him about this hypocrisy he said it was okay because he and has family have been working on behalf of suffering people all these years.)
Michael Moore’s hypocrisy is pathological. He has said numerous times that he doesn’t own a single share of stock and that capitalism is not acceptable “on any level.” And yet, I found that, according to tax returns filed with the IRS, he has owned shares in Halliburton, numerous oil companies, defense contractors and other multinationals through a tax shelter. When it comes he race he’s also wildly hypocritical. He says that Americans who happen to live in largely white neighbhorhoods do so because they are “racists.” But he lives in Central Lake, Michigan, which according to the U.S. Census has more than 2,500 residents and not a single black person in the entire town.
Cornel West has numerous times condemned middle class blacks that abandon the “chocolate cities” for the “vanilla suburbs” but guess what, his flavour of choice is vanilla, too.
Ted Kennedy likes to pose as the Robin Hood of the Senate, forcing wealthy Americans to pay their taxes to help the poor. But I discovered that Kennedys record of actually paying taxes is horrible. Tax the inheritance tax. He says that Americans should pay 49% to the IRS when they die in the name of “social justice.” But according to public records, the Kennedys have almost completely avoided contributing to “social justice” by placing their assets in trusts that are located overseas. The Kennedys, over the past thirty years, have paid less than 1% in inheritance taxes on more than $300 million. Ted Kennedy, like Hillary Clinton and George Soros, loves higher taxes. On other people.
And:
FrontPage: Why do you think people are drawn to leftist ideals and what kind of people are they? Self-contempt appears to be a common ingredient, no?
Schweizer: Yes, self-contempt is a big part of it. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German pastor who stood up to Hitler, wrote a book about “cheap grace.” Liberals are guilty of cheap grace in the political sense. They feel guilty and their form of penance is embracing the destructive ideas of the progressive faith. But it’s cheap grace because as I show it the book, they don’t actually change the way they live. I think that the religious comparison makes sense because in many respects the modern day left represents a religious movement. They are motivated by a sense of sin, guilt, and the need for salvation and absolution in the political sense. Socialism offers salvation to them. Of course, they don’t actually plan to live like socialists.
I would really recommend taking a look at this book.
Democrats and their unpaid taxes
One last parting shot: Democrats talk about how job creators and employees are greedy to not want to pay taxes on their earnings, but Democrats actually have huge amounts of unpaid taxes that they refuse to pay:
A new report just out from the Internal Revenue Service reveals that 36 of President Obama’s executive office staff owe the country $833,970 in back taxes. These people working for Mr. Fair Share apparently haven’t paid any share, let alone their fair share.
Previous reports have shown how well-paid Obama’s White House staff is, with 457 aides pulling down more than $37 million last year. That’s up seven workers and nearly $4 million from the Bush administration’s last year.
Nearly one-third of Obama’s aides make more than $100,000 with 21 being paid the top White House salary of $172,200, each.
The IRS’ 2010 delinquent tax revelations come as part of a required annual agency report on federal employees’ tax compliance. Turns out, an awful lot of folks being paid by taxpayers are not paying their own income taxes.
The report finds that thousands of federal employees owe the country more than $3.4 billion in back taxes. That’s up 3% in the past year.
That scale of delinquency could annoy voters, hard-pressed by their own costs, fears and stubbornly high unemployment despite Joe Biden’s many promises.
The tax offenders include employees of the U.S. Senate who help write the laws imposed on everyone else. They owe $2.1 million. Workers in the House of Representatives owe $8.5 million, Department of Education employees owe $4.3 million and over at Homeland Security, 4,697 workers owe about $37 million. Active duty military members owe more than $100 million.
The Treasury Department, where Obama nominee Tim Geithner had to pay up $42,000 in his own back taxes before being confirmed as secretary, has 1,181 other employees with delinquent taxes totaling $9.3 million.
As usual, the Postal Service, with more than 600,000 workers, has the most offenders (25,640), who also owe the most — almost $270 million. Veterans Affairs has 11,659 workers owing the IRS $151 million while the Energy Department that was so quick to dish out more than $500 million to the Solyndra folks has 322 employees owing $5 million.
The country’s chief law enforcement agency, the Department of Justice, has 2,069 employees who are nearly $17 million behind in taxes.
Even that leftist Warren Buffett’s company is in court for unpaid taxes. Leftists are hypocrites, and when we hear them talk, we need to keep in mind that this isn’t how they live themselves. It’s just posing and preening for admiration.
Obama’s astonishing takeover of the automobile industry, unlike his health care takeover, occurred without even a vote of Congress. Yesterday, to much fanfare, the administration announced its astonishing ratcheting up of vehicle fuel economy standards to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. These regulations — I call them “ObamaCar” — were accomplished not through open debate in Congress, but through corrupt backroom deals in which our elected officials had no voice.
ObamaCar will, according to the administration’s own estimates, add over $2,900 to the price of a new car. This low-ball estimate was created by using a brand-new cost-estimating methodology that uses arbitrary factors to produce a cost estimate for a vehicle considerably lower than the total cost of its individual parts.
An analysis by the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA), which followed the government’s usual methodology, found the cost impact would be $4,800 per vehicle. But NADA also found that even the usual methodology has historically underestimated the actual cost impact by an enormous factor. NADA suggests a worst-case scenario of a $12,349-per-vehicle price jump.
Even using the EPA’s official low-ball estimate, NADA’s analysis found that “6.8 million licensed drivers will no longer qualify for a loan on that least expensive new vehicle.” So people will buy used cars, or drive their old cars longer. There will be less efficient, dirtier vehicles on the road, and reliable, affordable transportation will be much less accessible.
And if you can afford a car under ObamaCar, will it actually be a car you want to drive? Even the vaunted hybrids only get around 35 to 40 miles per gallon — if you’re light on the gas. Cato scholar Pat Michaels has observed that the third-generation Prius maxes out at 50 miles per gallon, but its vehicle weight is too heavy to get much more than that. At 54.5 miles per gallon, cars will be smaller, lighter, less crash-worthy, less powerful, and less comfortable than you can even imagine. A nice-sized family vehicle? Good luck.
Obama is trying to save the environment. So what if your cars cost more? So what if lighter cars don’t protect you as well as a heavier car? You peasants shouldn’t be driving a car at all – cars are only for your betters in government! It’s Obamanomics.
WINTERY KNIGHT 