Elon Musk's Carbon Footprint

 

Or, maybe, butt-print.

Try putting “Elon Musk carbon footprint” into a search engine. You will find plenty. This is, you realize, the world’s richest man, who just managed to talk his company into giving Him a trillion-dollar pay package. This is all money that Tesla is not going to spend on making their products innovative and safe (hint to investors).

You will get an answer right away. According to PC Magazine, “Elon Musk's two private jets alone—not including his emissions from other sources—generate 5,497 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, or an average of 15 tonnes per day. This is equal to 11 average people's emissions in their entire lifetimes.” A tonne is a metric ton, that is, a thousand kilograms. Then you can click on a Guardian article that explains, worldwide, “Twelve billionaires’ climate emissions outpollute 2.1 million homes.” And that article is even out of date; it has gotten worse.

As if you did not already have enough reasons to hate Elon Musk. Imagine him trying to tell a government how to be more efficient.

But we will get nowhere complaining about how the richest people not only waste money while millions of people suffer, or complaining about how the rich do not deserve to be millions of times richer than the average person. Maybe a little, but not a million times. There is a serious point here.

The fault for global warming, caused by carbon emissions, is primarily due to rich nations (like America) and rich people in those rich nations. China emits more carbon than America, but it has over a billion people. The average Chinese person does not emit, directly or indirectly, as much carbon as an average American. I drove a small car when I was living in America, and my “guilt” was much less than an average American, certainly a rich American.

It is clear that one major contributor to global warming is that so many Americans are so rich and wasteful. You knew that. I just want to give you a couple of numbers to consider.

In France, where I now live, the richest ten percent are responsible for 31.2 percent of carbon emissions. But in America, the richest ten percent are responsible for 84.5 percent of carbon emissions. What this means is that rich Americans are really, really rich and wasteful. America needs to become more like France, in which the rich people (at least, the ones who live around Strasbourg) have only moderately showy wealth and are only moderately wasteful.

As long as rich Americans continue to be joyously wasteful, then there will be no solution to the problem of global warming.

American wasteful wealth and inefficiency cannot possibly be in accordance with any serious religious ethics, Christian or otherwise.

Sam Harris and The Moral Landscape

I realize that I am adding my voice to the discussion about Sam Harris’s book, The Moral Landscape, long after its initial publication and after many others have spoken. My excuse is that I have only now read it.

Harris spends a lot of time in his book going over what I consider the prolonged and painful contemplation of the obvious. Of course there is a difference between right and wrong. Of course we should all act in ways that contribute the most to the general well-being. I am astonished that cultural relativists still exist and stand ready to exonerate evil practices simply because one society or another may consider them a cultural norm. If a tribe somewhere practices human sacrifice, it is simply wrong, even if it is a cherished tradition within that culture. I am astonished that some liberals defend the right of Fundamentalist Mormon polygamists to invite thirteen-year-old girls to be one of their many concubines (unofficial wives). (The mainstream Mormon church abandoned this practice in the late nineteenth century.) The thirteen-year-old girls cannot freely choose to be “multiple wives.” They are too young to understand what they are doing, and are easily overwhelmed by the powerful church leader who tells them that they will go to hell if they do not submit to being a multiple wife. (I obtained this information from a different book, Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven.) We all know this and there is no point in wasting time discussing such points with cultural relativists. They have had a field day attacking Harris with their own brand of fundamentalism: the unswerving belief that there is no absolute morality. So one problem I had with Harris’s book was that it defends an idea nearly all of us already know.

But there was a problem with Harris’s approach. He said that science can determine what is right and wrong. I do not believe that science is equipped to do this. I suggest that it is much easier if we take an evolutionary approach. Perhaps our major human evolutionary adaptation is altruism. Therefore, for our species, and probably for all other intelligent social species in the universe, things are good if they promote general altruism, and bad if they erode it. By general altruism, I mean for everybody, not just for your own rapacious tribe. Altruism can be scientifically studied. The only assumption we have to make is that this adaptation is not only successful but good. We have to start with some assumption somewhere. Harris points out that scientists assume the scientific method is good; that it is good to be honest about data and to be logically consistent about reasoning.

So I believe that Harris reached the right conclusion, and did so by the right path. He just apparently misnamed the path, calling it science instead of altruism. And we can scientifically study the degree to which any given behavior enhances altruism. Anyone who questions the goodness of altruism does not understand our species very well.



This entry will also appear in my evolution blog.

Christianity and the Environment: Guest Essay, Part Two

This is the remainder of Chris Baroody’s essay, the first portion of which I posted previously, used with permission.

“And God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth (Genesis 1:28).

Many Christians denigrate environmentalism, citing the above scripture as justification, yet they ignore the second command give: we have indeed dominated, yet we have been exceedingly loath to replenish. Furthermore, many Christians claim as something of a self-evident truth that God will not allow nature to fail us. And yet the Bible clearly states that wicked men bring desolation to the land:

“How long will the land lie parched and the grass in every field be withered? Because those who live in it are wicked, the animals and birds have perished. Moreover, the people are saying, 'He will not see what happens to us'”( Jeremiah 12:4).

How much more so then now in the wake of technology and Global Warming?

Many Christians hold that environmentalists, in claiming that nature holds spiritual value, merely perpetrate a new form of paganism; however, many of these same Christians have adopted a doctrine that holds the free market and pursuit of wealth as sacred and vigorously attacking environmental regulations that in anyway impede the pursuit of wealth. However, in the time of Christ, the spirit of wealth went by the name of Mammon, and Christ warned that one could not serve both God and Mammon. John Milton, author of the epic Christian poem Paradise Lost, wrote the following of Mammon: “Men...by his suggestion taught, Ransack'd the Center, and with impious hands, Rifled the bowels of their mother Earth for Treasure better hid.

To shrug off one’s responsibility to the world which provides all natural resources, from lumber and coal to complex pharmaceuticals, epitomizes the most dangerous form of arrogance, neglect, and greed. Yet service to Mammon demands the dereliction of responsibility. Just As the Pharisees once fooled themselves into believing that they served God when they served themselves and their own selfish pursuits, a great many Christians today have been led into sanctifying the speciously alluring doctrine of the unrestrained pursuit of wealth. John Milton also wrote: “Hypocrisy [is] the only evil that walks invisible, except to God alone.” Often the sin of hypocrisy is invisible to one’s own eyes. When Christians justify environmental irresponsibility as a God given right, the specter of hypocrisy thrives.

My thanks again to Chris Baroody, author of the above essay (in two entries).

Christianity and the Environment: Guest Essay, Part One

The following essay was written by Chris Baroody, a student in my Honors course on global warming, and is used with his permission. I hope he publishes and/or posts his own writing someday. He would label himself as a Christian, rather than a Christian agnostic.

“The time has come for judging the dead, and for rewarding your servants the prophets and your saints and those who reverence your name, both small and great-- and for destroying those who destroy the earth." (Revelation 11:18)

Early European Christians saw the wild as a place where dangerous beasts roamed and witches held black masses; likewise, if nature did not yield resources it was considered “waste.” This antipathy towards nature has persisted for so long that even today it has permeated through the American psyche. Now, in America, a movement of Christian anti-environmentalists lays complicit in the face of surging ecological decay and threatens to prevent any significant measures to counteract it. Yet these anti-environmental Christians ignore key scripture in the Bible that warns against the reckless abuse of nature and contradicts the popular notion that nature belongs to man to ruin and disregard as his whim may dictate.

In the past 200 years our species has felled over half of the world’s tropical rain forests. Between 1960 and 1990, 1.7 million square miles of rain forest, an area approximately the size of the United States, have been clear cut. Each year a further 2 percent falls, extinguishing all life therein. Roughly half of the world's biodiversity exists in the tropical rain-forests, with many species endemic to only a few isolated acres. We will never know how many miracle cures or unique and intricate life forms have been lost to clear cutting. To a believer, such disregard for the sanctity of creation should be akin to blasphemy, and yet, for many professing Christians, it is not.

In all areas of life wastefulness and myopia are condemned as wickedness; yet when applied to treatment of the environment, many Christians see them as just and natural attitudes to take, attitudes even mandated by scripture; to these Christians, men alone possess nature and it is for them to exert whatever will they may upon, no matter how rapacious the will or how savage the exertion.

Yet far from being ordained by God, the Bible specifically warns against such attitudes. As Psalm 50:7-12 explains, “Every animal of the forest is mine, and the cattle on a thousand hills. I know every bird in the mountains, and the creatures of the field are mine. If I were hungry I would not tell you, for the world is mine, and all that is in it." Not only does nature belong to God rather than man, God knows nature intimately and cares for it; even creatures maligned for their predatory natures : “The lions roar for their prey and seek their food from God. In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures,” (Psalm 104-10-28). It is ironic that only 50 years ago nearly a half a million lions lived in Africa. Now there are as few as 16,000, a decline of more than 95 percent wrought solely by the hands of men.

Close to 800 species have gone extinct in only the last 400 years, and almost 16,000 are threatened with extinction. This is well beyond the background rate of extinction, and is comparable to the "great extinction" events of the fossil record, although at a faster rate, and for no natural cause. By 2100, one half of the species on Earth will likely have gone extinct and we alone hold the blame.

Thanks, Chris. The rest of Chris’s essay will appear in the next entry of this blog.