NAS Blog

SustainaReligion

On Monday I wrote about a judge’s ruling in the UK that belief in climate change could be classified, and therefore protected, as a “philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations Act.” This means that we now have another ism we have to tiptoe around: climatism. To read more about the story behind the ruling, check out my article.

New Academic Programs in Sustainability

Temple University in Philadelphia has created a new certificate program in environmental sustainability “to promote green in the curriculum.” According to an article in the Temple News Online, “Whether the focal point is science or political science, ethics or art, the courses will weave in sustainability as a theme.” The program describes itself as providing “basic knowledge needed to evaluate environmental problems and to draw ecologically – and economically – sound connections between environmental needs, policy issues, and current research.”

Arizona State University has announced that it will create a new Program in Law and Sustainability at the university’s College of Law. In the press release stating that ASU has named Daniel M. Bodansky the College’s Lincoln Professor of Law, Ethics, and Sustainability, Bodansky is quoted on what drew him to Arizona State U: “What Michael Crow [President of ASU] is doing in sustainability, building it throughout the entire university – operations, curriculum and research – is very innovative and makes ASU an exciting place. I’m not sure I know of any other school that has that kind of focus.”

Math? What Math?

At a website called Mobilization for Climate Justice is an article by Rex Weyler entitled “Sustainability and Justice: Do the Math.” The banner over the text is an apocalyptic picture called Manifest Destiny; it appears to contain an ocean-submerged New York City with floating barrels of waste and wildlife struggling to survive, not a human in sight.

In the article, Weyler argues that sustainability and the free market are fundamentally at odds because “the rich” consume exponentially too much of the earth’s “stuff.” He presents a math problem:

1. Total human consumption =
130% of Earth’s capacity

2. The rich 15% use 85% of the stuff;
while the poor 85% use 15% of the stuff

The wealthy 15 percent use about 85 percent of the resources – the total energy and materials, the “stuff,” that Earth provides. The “wealthy” includes anyone who has a home, job, transport, access to education, hot showers, convenient fuel, and food every day: people in the so-called “developed” world. If you have those things, you live among the wealthy 15 percent, who use most of the world’s resources.

Therefore:

The average rich person uses:
110/15 = 7.333 units of stuff

The average poor person uses:
20/85 = 0.235 units of stuff

By these figures, we see that to achieve sustainability and social justice, the rich would have to consume about 1/7 of what they currently consume. If that happened, the world’s poor could increase their consumption by about 4-times.

Reyler also writes that population growth “pushes us farther out over the cliff,” and is “mystified that some people find this so difficult to accept,” but remembers with relief that abortion and contraception can counteract excess procreation.

Mobilization for Climate Justice defines climate justice as:

a vision to dissolve and alleviate the unequal burdens created by climate change. As a form of environmental justice, climate justice is the fair treatment of all people and freedom from discrimination with the creation of policies and projects that address climate change and the systems that create climate change and perpetuate discrimination.