Tag Archives: Religion Vs Science

News

How the Obama administration opposes the creation of 100,000 jobs

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Comparison of unemployment rates - Bush vs Obama
Comparison of unemployment rates - Bush vs Obama

The Wall Street Journal reports on how Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency is trying to block a pipeline from Alberta that would create 100,000 jobs and lower oil prices at the pump.

Excerpt:

With 9.1% unemployment and gasoline prices in the stratosphere, President Obama must sometimes wish that some big corporation would suddenly show up and offer a shovel-ready, multibillion-dollar project to create 100,000 jobs and reduce U.S. reliance on oil from dictatorships.

Oh, wait. His Secretary of State has had that offer sitting on her desk since she was sworn in. The trouble is that the Administration can’t approve it without upsetting its anti-fossil fuel constituency. And so the proposal sits.

In September 2008 TransCanada applied to build a new pipeline—the Keystone XL—to bring diluted bitumen from the oil-rich tar sands of Alberta to thirsty American refineries on the Gulf Coast. It is hardly a radical proposal. Canadian crude has been flowing to the U.S. for decades. Another Canadian company—Enbridge—operates the Clipper pipeline across the Canadian border to Chicago. In July 2010 TransCanada began operating its Keystone pipeline from Alberta to Cushing, Oklahoma, which is a major storage and pricing depot.

The Keystone XL would cut a slightly different path, through the American heartland to Port Arthur, Texas. Judging from its past experience and that of Enbridge, TransCanada expected that permitting would take roughly 23 months. Thirty-three months, two State Department studies and 208,000 public comments later, TransCanada is still waiting. On current trend, the company will be lucky to get its permit by January, or after 40 months. But even that is far from certain.

If Mr. Obama were drawing up a plan from scratch to boost union employment and deflate Iranian-ally Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, it might look like the Keystone XL. TransCanada estimates that building the pipeline will mean more than $20 billion—$13 billion from TransCanada itself—in investment and 13,000 new American jobs in construction and related manufacturing. The company also expects more than 118,000 “spin-off” jobs during the two years of construction.

TransCanada says it has signed building contracts with four major U.S. unions. It projects that construction will generate $600 million in new state and local tax revenue and that over its life the pipeline will generate another $5.2 billion in property taxes. The Energy Policy Research Foundation in Washington estimates that by linking to the XL, oil producers in North Dakota’s Bakken region will enjoy efficiency gains of between $36.5 million and $146 million annually. Lower transport costs will mean savings for Gulf Coast refiners of $473 million annually if the pipeline meets conservative expectations of shipping 400,000 barrels per day.

Today those refineries are highly dependent on imports from Mexico and Venezuela, which have decreased output in recent years. TransCanada would help to provide Gulf Coast refiners with a more reliable source of supply from a U.S. ally.

Obama wants to create jobs – he just wants to create jobs in Mexico, Venezuela and the Middle East.

Commentary

Denyse O’Leary explains why theists are lacking courage

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From Uncommon Descent. Denyse O’Leary answers the question I posed in my previous post: why do otherwise intelligent, ambitious, qualified Christians shy away from answering questions about their faith?

Excerpt:

Christians confront a deep double standard, to which Darwinism has greatly contributed, by which the atheist position is considered the normal “secular”one and the Christian or other theist position a sort of disloyalty to the public good.

[…] Secular materialists use fashionable words like “skeptical” to describe themselves, when they are not skeptical at all. That confuses discourse and enables remarkably fatuous people to shape public opinion. While working on The Spiritual Brain, I confronted an astonishing fact: The secular materialist would accept any materialist premise, no matter how implausible, to support his view. In fact, I sometimes ask, is there any proposition fronted in the name of, say, Darwinism (as I did here, that you regard as absurd? I often get blank looks or protests that Darwinism is science and there are no such propositions, and an immediate change of subject. Well, when we hear that, at least we know who we are dealing with.

The Christian/theist labours under no such disability. He can accept a materialist explanation when it fits the facts, but not otherwise. But by acting this way, he becomes – in the eyes of the secular atheist – untrustworthy. He can’t be relied on to just shout the party line.

The upshot is that, the Christian risks more, speaking out, and is far more responsible for the need to have intelligent ideas. It’s much safer for Christians to bury themselves in fluffy Christian books and sweat off the flab in Christian weight loss programs, and little by little accommodate themselves to the reigning orthodoxy. After a couple of decades, they don’t even know.

So basically, I understand her to say that the the “skeptics” are actually so committed to the presupposition of naturalism that they are aggressive and close-minded. Their materialism is functioning as a sort of fundamentalism, much like you would find with Islamic radicals. A Christian can look at some new phenomenon in nature and ask the question: is it explained by materialism or is an intelligence required? But the materialist has to presume the answer before looking at the evidence – so they are close-minded to evidence, because of their non-scientific philosophy of materialism.

There are two ways to have a discussion about nature. You can ask a question and then compare evidence for various hypotheses. That’s the non-fundamentalist approach. That’s the approach used by Christians. The naturalist approach is to not allow questions to be asked and to attack the character of the person asking the question. That’s the fundamentalist approach.

And that’s where the fear and intimidation comes in. Who wants to debate with someone who is not open to having their religious pre-supposition validated against the evidence? You’re just going to get fired, censored, arrested or worse. That’s the way it is with fundamentalists like naturalist extremists and Islamic extremists. All kinds of nastiness to others is possible when you are a true believer. Denyse’s point is that the intimidation drives theists to avoid these discussions, and that leads to their decision to just focus on other things like careers and weight loss and fluff.

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