Jesus and wealth #3

The following is part of an email exchange I participated in.

---

Obviously my "source" for the two emails you refer to is the New Testament. Perhaps you're familiar with it.

The first email is replete with references that you can check with your own Bible, if that were even necessary. That email deals with Jesus' admonition to not store up treasures on earth, and other related themes that appear throughout the Gospels.

The second email builds on the first by pondering why Jesus said it's so hard for a rich man to enter  God's kingdom. How hard? "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle [a very small tight space] than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God." Pretty hard. So hard that the disciples asked who then could be saved.

You don't need to be a Bible scholar to see that Jesus is unequivocal; that he doesn't offer any exceptions. Jesus doesn't say, for example, that a rich man will be fine if he gives X percent of his wealth to charity. In fact, he actually makes the point that there is no virtue in donations one makes from one's surplus. It's the destitute widow who gives from her need who is virtuous, Jesus says.

Something about wealth, then, and seeking it, poses great difficulties. But why would that be? My second email explores that question more deeply, including the seeming implication that wealth is intrinsically problematic. We can infer that there is intrinsic danger both because Jesus does not offer any exceptions, and because his warning resonates with many related themes threaded throughout the Gospels. Jesus is nothing if not consistent.

But why would wealth accumulation be intrinsically dangerous? Again, we go back to the Gospels to see that the "side" Jesus consistently takes is the side of the poor, the dispossessed, migrants, the powerless. These are precisely the ones most harmed (and, to use a word favored by Pope Francis, "excluded") by societal injustices that can and usually do arise from the pursuit of wealth. These with whom Jesus made common cause are the exact opposite of the rich man. And it is they, not him, who Jesus said will enter God's kingdom.

As we keep going deeper the "why" question persists, although one could certainly stop asking and content himself with knowing what Jesus said (and simply following that teaching), even if he doesn't understand why Jesus said it.

Me? I'm a "why" person. I always go deeper. After a lifetime of reading and thinking, it's easy for me, but very hard for you, to grasp that the pursuit of wealth almost inevitably places one in deep, intrinsic opposition to a truly just society. This isn't (necessarily) because the wealth-seeker is inherently bad. It's that wealth-seeking unavoidably operates in a particular paradigm where assumptions are made, and society is structured, in a way that benefits the wealth-seeker and disadvantages the dispossessed and powerless with whom Jesus made common cause. It's as if the wealth-seeker can't help himself, probably can't even see the problem, which is why the danger is intrinsic. And yet the wealth-seeker will inevitably and approvingly intuit that the system as constituted suits him quite well, and so he sees it as the natural order of things. His willing and happy alignment with an unjust system places him at risk.

That previous paragraph will be hard, probably impossible, for you to understand. Your mind isn't wired to understand it, and nothing in your intellectual experience has prepared you to do so. All I can say is that this is not a superficial concept; that the meaning goes very deep, and permeates all human interactions. It does seem that if one is paying attention he ought to be able to at least sense that there is deep meaning and strong connections threaded through the Gospels. The Gospels are clear that societal structure organized around justice would look very different from what we have today, and it has  almost nothing to do with who donates what to charity.

Note too that this has nothing to do with my opinion about anybody's prospects for salvation. That's between you and your non-existent God. My interest in this is to ask whether you take Jesus seriously, or not.

And so I wonder how it can be that you've heard the Gospels read in the liturgy all your life, and yet the major themes of Jesus' teaching seem to have not registered in a coherent manner. Somehow you've managed to not connect the dots, even though they're everywhere and easy enough to see. Those dots are all in alignment and reinforce each other, which is why it's so easy for me to argue entirely from the Gospels as I am now doing. Did you ever wonder why Jesus said to not accumulate earthly treasures? Did you think it one of those naive oddities or empty platitudes that could just be ignored? Jesus wasn't always a realist, was he? Is that what you think? Did none of this stuff about eyes of needles and first-shall-be-last never get you pondering what the heck the guy was trying to say?

And, please, enough with sophomoric questions such as: "How does one quote from the Bible when you don't even believe in the God of that Bible?" I quote from the Bible because you claim to believe it, and because it perplexes me that you seem happy to ignore the parts of it that you find uncongenial, even though those parts are at the core of what Jesus was about and what he taught.

And even though I don't "believe in the God of that Bible," I'm happy to endorse how Jesus consistently took the side of the powerless over the powerful. I'll side with the poor and refugees and victims of racism and victims of economic injustice every single time. But you? Not so much. Which, in addition to everything else I've said here, is perhaps a good lesson that morality and religious belief aren't the same thing at all. It's something you'll never understand.

 

Testing the Stealth Cam DS4KMAX trail camera

The camera can be configured to produce images of 4 MP, 8 MP, 16 MP, or 32 MP. Here are some comparisons of the different sizes.

Zoom in as tight as possible to do a meaningful comparison. The most reliable way to get the highest resolution view is to do this: 1. Click on an image. 2. Then, right-click on the image and select "Open Image in New Tab".  3. Go to the new tab. 4. Mouse pointer is now a + in a circle. Click on image once more to zoom to maximum resolution.

Unfortunately, Blogger reduced the resolution of the barn and tree images a bit from what I uploaded. Sigh. The hose image resolution is unmodified.

Here are some links.

Upper Jago watershed, ANWR, Alaska, 1990

Looking south into the Brooks Range from the upper part of the Jago River watershed. Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Alaska. 1990. Linked to from here. 

 Click on photo for a larger view.

New coronavirus cases per day thru Apr 25 -- 25 states

Click on the image for a larger view.

Trump's Jan 2017 WaPo Interview

Below are some choice quotes from an interview Donald Trump gave The Washington Post in January 2017, along with comments by me on recent developments.

“We’re going to have insurance for everybody,” Trump said. “There was a philosophy in some circles that if you can’t pay for it, you don’t get it. That’s not going to happen with us.” 

“It’s not going to be their plan,” he said of people covered under the current law. “It’ll be another plan. But they’ll be beautifully covered.”

Despite Trump's apparent promise of universal coverage, the Congressional Budget Office projected on March 13 that the draft legislation introduced in the House of Representatives would result in an increase in 24 million uninsured persons over 10 years, with 14 million of those occurring in the first year.

People covered under the law “can expect to have great health care. It will be in a much simplified form. Much less expensive and much better.”

Much better? By the time the Republican legislation had been withdrawn, a large list of  "essential health benefits" provided by the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. "Obamacare") had been withdrawn. These include mental health and substance abuse services, prescription drugs, preventive care, maternity care, emergency services and lab services, hospitalization, pediatric services, and others. This his how conservatives achieve low-cost insurance. All these were removed at the insistence of the House's "Freedom Caucus", which then went on to insist that the prohibition of excluding coverage based on preexisting conditions be removed as well.

Trump said his plan for replacing most aspects of Obama’s health-care law is all but finished. Although he was coy about its details — “lower numbers, much lower deductibles” — he said he is ready to unveil it alongside Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

Although Trump implied he had a plan and that he understood its details, neither turned out to be true. Trump actually outsourced the entire process to Paul Ryan and House Republicans. With respect to "much lower deductibles", the Kaiser Family Foundation estimated that deductibles would average $1,550 higher under the Republican plan.

“I think we will get approval. I won’t tell you how, but we will get approval.”

Alas, no. The abysmal legislation was withdrawn on Friday, March 24. And a good thing, too. Near the end of its miserable life, the Republican plan had an approval rating of just 17 percent in a Quinnipac poll, and a disapproval rating of 56 percent.

Global and U.S. Fossil Fuel Subsidies

Here's a quick and not nearly comprehensive survey that seeks merely to show, for anybody in denial, that fossil fuels are and have been heavily subsidized. I link here from my main blog.

The IMF estimates global fossil fuel subsidies at $5.3 trillion per year, about 6.5% of global GDP. Biggest subsidizers are: China $1.8T, U.S. $0.6T, Russia, E.U., and India $0.3T each.

As explained here, the IMF's is an expansive economic assessment that includes the costs of economic externalities, something other treatments don't typically cover: "Just over half the figure is the money governments are forced to spend treating the victims of air pollution and the income lost because of ill health and premature deaths."

Around 6% of the global subsidy is the direct subsidizing of fuel costs for consumers, primarily in oil-producing countries. (see previous "explained here" link)

Ending all subsidies would decrease global carbon emissions by 20% and would prevent 1.6 million premature deaths per year. (see previous "explained here" link)

The International Energy Agency estimated global subsidies at "only" $493 billion per year, but it didn't include externalities.

The OECD has compiled an inventory of 800 policies in member countries that subsidize fossil fuels, amounting to $160-200B annually. Scroll down to the executive summary in this extensive report.

In 2009 the G20 countries agreed to a phase out of fossil fuel subsidies. Here's a joint report by the IEA, OPEC, OECD and World Bank.

Here's a report on production subsidies in the U.S. in 2013 and 2014; it's a companion to a larger report on G20 subsidies.

From the "G20 countries agreed" link above:

Energy producers were not enthused by the subsidy phase-out plan. The American Petroleum Institute, which represents the U.S. petroleum and natural gas industry, said Washington must clarify how the policy would affect the United States. "The Obama administration and Congress now face many difficult choices if they choose to comply with the G20 commitment to phase-out fossil fuel subsidies," the API said.

This year (2016) the G7 countries pledged to end fossil fuel subsidies by 2025.

The U.S. Treasury has identified 11 federal fossil fuel production tax provisions amounting to $4.7 billion annually.

But the U.S. subsidies are not just tax-based. The U.S. government has subsidized, promoted, assisted, and partially funded fossil fuel related projects and research for much of the industry's existence. Consider the U.S. government's crucial role in the development of hydraulic fracturing (a.k.a. "fracking") of shale gas, as described here:

The history of shale gas fracking in the United States was punctuated by the successive developments of massive hydraulic fracturing (MHF), microseismic imaging, horizontal drilling, and other key innovations that when combined made the once unreachable energy resource technically recoverable. Along each stage of the innovation pipeline – from basic research to applied R&D to cost-sharing on demonstration projects to tax policy support for deployment – public-private partnerships and federal investments helped push hydraulic fracturing in shale into full commercial competitiveness. Through a combination of federally funded geologic research beginning in the 1970s, public-private collaboration on demonstration project and R&D priorities, and tax policy support for unconventional technologies, the federal government played a key role in the development of shale gas in the United States.

This 2015 study found coal subsidies of $2.9 billion per year in the U.S. and $1.3 billion per year in Australia.

The "Energy Policy Act of 2005" signed by George W. Bush, and which I called back then a "massive corporate welfare program," provided for, among other things (bullet-point items quoted from Wikipedia):

• increase coal as an energy source while also reducing air pollution, through authorizing $200 million annually for clean coal initiatives, repealing the current 160-acre (0.65 km2) cap on coal leases, allowing the advanced payment of royalties from coal mines and requiring an assessment of coal resources on federal lands that are not national parks
• exempts oil and gas producers from certain requirements of the Safe Drinking Water Act
• exempted fluids used in the natural gas extraction process of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) from protections under the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, and CERCLA
•  provides incentives to companies to drill for oil in the Gulf of Mexico

Tom Delay inserted $500 million in subsidies into the 2005 bill for research into deep-water oil and gas drilling. Also in the bill was "royalty relief for deep-water drilling projects." The industry contended government subsidies were necessary: "If you don't provide the relief, nothing will happen," said John Felmy, the American Petroleum Institute's chief economist. "The start-up costs are just too massive."

Speaking of "clean coal initiatives," the U.S. government is heavily involved in "Carbon Capture and Storage" research and development. One wonders why we need expensive "clean coal" (whose production will remain highly destructive) when we have abundant, cleaner, and far cheaper natural gas.

A Bloomberg editorial says "fuel subsidies are the world's dumbest policy."

An extensive report shows that U.S. fossil fuel subsidies increased under Barack Obama.

Spencer on the "Petition Project"

An acquaintance directed me to this (originally WSJ commentary) piece by Dr. Roy Spencer as refutation of my consistently held characterization of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic (human caused) climate change as "overwhelming." The Spencer piece has a lot of problems. One that undermines his very integrity is his citation of the "Petition Project," which he describes thusly:

Of the various petitions on global warming circulated for signatures by scientists, the one by the Petition Project, a group of physicists and physical chemists based in La Jolla, Calif., has by far the most signatures—more than 31,000 (more than 9,000 with a Ph.D.). It was most recently published in 2009, and most signers were added or reaffirmed since 2007. The petition states that “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of . . . carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”

This petition is a deeply troubled and conflicted operation that verges on outright fraud. It's an example of what you might call "push polling on steroids."

Obviously the petition doesn't and can't try to gauge scientific consensus or lack thereof. Unlike surveys that ask questions of verified respondents, the petition promotes a point of view. It comes with a cover letter from a famous climate change denier. It claims over 31,000 signatories, but has no way to verify who they are. Pranksters have submitted fake signatures with made up names. Most of the "more than 9,000" Ph.D.s that Spencer mentions are engineers, not scientists. From the project's own statistics, a minute fraction of signatories are climatologists or closely related specialists. A document included with the petition was deceptively designed to look like a reprint from the National Academy of Sciences, even though it wasn't. The NAS felt the need to publicly distance itself from the project, and to reaffirm its own assessment of scientific opinion.

Bottom line: If you're honestly trying to gauge scientific opinion, you don't include materials making the case against anthropogenic climate change. Respondents, particularly scientists, ought not need to be told by you what they should believe.

Here's a Wikipedia article on the project.