Let's Approach the Future Now!

Sunday School Lesson — An Enlightenment on Climate Change

Public Interest Article by S. Tom Bond, Lewis County, WV, May 15, 2015

Several things have come together in last few days that have made an impression I want to share with readers. The first is an article that identifies the ethic of big business as a sort of religion. The gist of the article is that the thought of big business serves much of the same human needs that religion did in earlier times.

It provides a conceptual frame that explains much of the world, such things as the value system one should hold, why some are more affluent than others, what controls man’s efforts (the market). It organizes people and provides a sense of individual worth. It is a set of ideas that many people can believe in and get pleasure from. It tells us how to get satisfaction. Owning and using is a principal value of this system. Strictly speaking, it is not religion, but has many of the same characteristics.

A second article marks the decline of traditional religions in the United States. In a Pew survey adherents to all major religions declined rapidly between 2007 and 2014, while the category “unaffiliated” rose from 16.1% to 22.8%. Only the category “Evangelical Protestant” has more, a skinny 2.4%, and it is declining, too. What is the replacement, what understanding do people have to replace church going and the value systems of those institutions? Is it getting material things and short range satisfactions that can be gained by proper manipulation of people and things around one’s individual self?

There’s no denying the hold of business on government. As John Dewey said early in the last century, politics is the shadow cast on society by big business.” That situation is increased, not lessened. More recently Noam Chomsky has put it this way. “The United States effectively has a one-party system, the business party, with two factions, Republicans and Democrats.” Business is the state religion, not only of the U. S., but of other English speaking nations, but several of the European nations as well.

So we have this ridiculous situation where many in congress deny what almost all scientists working on the problem agree: the world is warming, and the use of the atmosphere as a dumping ground for the waste product of burning carbon is a principal cause. The effects are shown by satellites, cameras on the ground, measurements of many kinds, and felt by people, particularly in the Arctic. But not of course, in air conditioned offices and homes of congressmen and people at the top of corporate hierarchies. Lyndon Johnson was the first President to warn the nation about global warming in 1965, fifty years ago! At that time carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 320 parts per million. Now it is 400 ppm.

So what about the continual publicity that global warming is not true, that it won’t have any effect, that carbon dioxide will make plants grow faster so is fertilizer? What about the denigration of adverse claims about fracking, deep ocean drilling, tar sands development, the “war on coal,” and people who complain about them?”

The fervor of these people is best understood as part of a faith hierarchy in business. It certainly isn’t the result of examination of the facts or of the value of an individual present in traditional religion.

Take for example an article written in 2012 by one Barry Stevens, who seems to have made a career of publishing pro-fracking articles in such publications as Oil Price, Breaking Energy, Shale Energy Insider (“Are anti-fracking protestors hypocritical?” is one article) and Power Magazine.  Actually, he has left his academic background behind and is really a pure salesman, divorced from experiment and observation. He even thinks fracking may be feasible in the Karoo Desert of South Africa, one of the world’s driest areas. He suggests exports from there to boost South Africa’s national income, no less.

His arguments are economic. He doesn’t recognize health problems, he claims fracking just like this has been going on for 60 years, there is no property devaluation, no aesthetic loss (probably doesn’t recognize aesthetics as valuable), no loss of ecosystem services such as clean water, and certainly no consideration for the kind of humans who would choose to live in the landscape, rather than a highrise.

As for carbon dioxide, it is as though it doesn’t even exist. Maybe he is rich enough to retire to a place in the mountains of Greenland when the oceans rise and the temperature is too hot to live anywhere outside the Arctic Circle. That’s faith in a kind of heaven, I suppose, so maybe that fits the new religion of business. Imagine a colony of energy company executives and favored subordinates on a mountain in Northern Greenland. I’ll bet this is one of their favorite hymns! Be sure and watch the whole of it! Once in a lifetime is enough, though.