Catholic Climate Movement

[Ridgerunner]

The FAO of the UN (though not my favorite source) predicts that food production will continue to be sufficient for the world’s population for decades to come. We’re not facing worldwide starvation at all. FAO does acknowledge, however, that poverty in many parts of the world and trade barriers will limit the effectiveness of the increased production into the future, just as it does now.

There are those who say some warming, combined with other factors, does improve agricultural production on the whole.

 

[lynnvinc]

I didn’t source my comments with a link, so I don’t know which lies you think I’m repeating.

Well, I guess is wasn’t entirely a lie, because you didn’t say humans are not causing CC this time.

I guess I’m getting very sensitive and war-weary in this struggle to help people understand we are causing very serious problems.

It is good you are doing your part to help reduce env impacts. That’s really what counts. Unfortunately there is no silver bullet to mitigate CC, only 100s of measures people need to take in their daily lives.

 

[lynnvinc]

The FAO of the UN (though not my favorite source) predicts that food production will continue to be sufficient for the world’s population for decades to come. We’re not facing worldwide starvation at all. FAO does acknowledge, however, that poverty in many parts of the world and trade barriers will limit the effectiveness of the increased production into the future, just as it does now.

There are those who say some warming, combined with other factors, does improve agricultural production on the whole.

That’s actually true. There is enough food in the world now for everyone…it just doesn’t get to some poor people who need it.

However there are some areas of the world where CC is harming food productivity, esp some poor countries in Africa.

And experts say that our food productivity in the US will be increasing somewhat over the next few decades, partly due to warmer, longer growing seasons and CO2 fertilization. However, the warming is expected to cause serious harms later on even in the US, after 2050, when they expect a sharp decline.

I guess many here don’t feel they need to worry about that if you’re over 50, since you may not be around to go thru that.

 

[vz71]

I’d say killing people is risking one’s immortal soul. I’m not talking about doing charity or following a social gospel. I’m talking about violating the 10 Commandments.

Thou shalt not kill.

When we cause environmental harms we contribute to the harm and death of people. That’s just plain wrong…

Still lowering accusations of murder I see.

This is a serious charge. Perhaps you could fill in the specifics. Maybe you should call the police.

 

[lynnvinc]

Still lowering accusations of murder I see.

This is a serious charge. Perhaps you could fill in the specifics. Maybe you should call the police.

Well, someone got real snarly against social justice in the Catholic Church as being a new “god.” But I’ve never considered environmental concerns primarily social justice concerns, even tho I do feel obliged to tell other about them.

What motivated me to change from a passive environmentalist (just concerned about the problems) to an active environmentalist (turning off lights not in use, weather-stripping, getting energy efficient lighting and appliances, etc) was the dawning of the understanding that I was contributing to people’s harm and death. That understanding was like a fire lit under me. Especially since I was entering a 3rd order Carmelite group and doing a rigorous examination of conscience.

And that’s a different matter than doing something for charity or seeing there is a wrong being done by others, like racism, that needs to be pointed out.

You are free to live as you wish, without doing environmental deeds to reduce your harms. And I don’t think there are serious spiritual repercussions, but I don’t know, there may be. As for me and my household, we chose differently, more bec we don’t like harming and killing people, rather than there might be spiritual repercussions.

Sorry for being frank. I never was much of a people person. I totally lack finesse and don’t have many friends.

 

[qui_est_ce]

That’s actually true. There is enough food in the world now for everyone…it just doesn’t get to some poor people who need it.

However there are some areas of the world where CC is harming food productivity, esp some poor countries in Africa.

The problems with food distribution in Africa have little to do with CC. It is due to dictators, Islamic terrorists, and resource mismanagement. The below is just a small sampling of what goes on in Africa.

allafrica.com/stories/201302060769.html

Omuthiya — The Swapo Party Regional Coordinator for the Oshikoto Region, Armas Amukwiyu, has condemned an incident in which food donated by a local businessman to the San community ended up rotting in a warehouse while its recipients face starvation.

Food and various non-food items were bought and donated to the San community last December by businessman Oiva Shivute and his family as a Christmas gift, but the donation remains in a warehouse belonging to a traditional leader. The incident is almost a repeat of what transpired in the Caprivi Region several years ago, when several senior officials got off scot-free after 230 tonnes of maize donated to needy communities was allowed to rot in a warehouse.

washingtonpost.com/world/africa/south-sudans-people-are-starving-and-fighters-are-blocking-aid/2017/03/31/69ef31c2-0f60-11e7-aa57-2ca1b05c41b8_story.html?utm_term=.8fbd38e4d442

MAYENDIT, South Sudan — When his stepbrother starved to death in January, Matthew Yaw buried him in the sand next to the family’s shack of sticks and plastic, one more grave at the epicenter of the world’s most severe hunger crisis.

It is a man-made disaster — born not of drought or floods but a vicious conflict that destroyed the livelihoods of farmers like Yaw and then prevented aid workers from entering their villages.

A U.N. declaration of famine in February was supposed to bring a surge of assistance to this northern county. But within days, the South Sudanese government ordered aid workers to leave ahead of a planned offensive, and the area was soon consumed with fighting.

Yaw and his neighbors have been reduced to eating waterlilies and an occasional fish from a nearby river. The few relief workers who managed to visit Mayendit county in recent days saw people languishing half-
naked. Their clothes had been burned in the last attack.

There are now four hunger crises across the Middle East and Africa in what is emerging as the greatest humanitarian disaster since World War II, according to the United Nations. In each place — Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen and South Sudan — aid workers are being blocked from reaching the needy, in some cases by insurgents, in others by soldiers
or bureaucratic restrictions. Twenty million people across the four countries could starve if they don’t quickly get help, according to the United Nations.

“When you get one month of food for three months, you go hungry,” said Yaw, 37, a tall man who leaned on a stick, his ankle shattered last year by a bullet as he fled the fighting.

And experts say that our food productivity in the US will be increasing somewhat over the next few decades, partly due to warmer, longer growing seasons and CO2 fertilization. However, the warming is expected to cause serious harms later on even in the US, after 2050, when they expect a sharp decline.

I guess **many here don’t feel they need to worry **about that if you’re over 50, since you may not be around to go thru that.

Stop judging.

I worry about how government overreach and corruption are hurting the poor. And I hear this first hand from our deacon who is from Nigeria.

Ever wonder about those jeans you donate to clothing drives? Good intentions are not good enough.

huffingtonpost.com/entry/these-african-countries-dont-want-your-used-clothing-anymore_us_57cf19bce4b06a74c9f10dd6

But a number of countries in East Africa are fed up with the onslaught of secondhand items they receive from Western nonprofits and wholesalers, and want to ban such imports altogether.

In 2014, a handful of East African countries imported more than $300 million worth of secondhand clothing from the United States and other wealthy countries. The used items have created a robust market in East Africa and thereby a decent amount of jobs. But experts say the vast amount of these imports have devastated local clothing industries and led the region to rely far too heavily on the West.

In March, the East African Community (EAC), which is made up of Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi and Rwanda, proposed banning all imported used clothing and shoes by 2019. The goal is to stop relying on imports from rich nations, boost local manufacturing and create new jobs.

 

[Xystus]

Well, someone got real snarly against social justice in the Catholic Church as being a new “god.” But I’ve never considered environmental concerns primarily social justice concerns, even tho I do feel obliged to tell other about them.

What motivated me to change from a passive environmentalist (just concerned about the problems) to an active environmentalist (turning off lights not in use, weather-stripping, getting energy efficient lighting and appliances, etc) was the dawning of the understanding that I was contributing to people’s harm and death. That understanding was like a fire lit under me. Especially since I was entering a 3rd order Carmelite group and doing a rigorous examination of conscience.

And that’s a different matter than doing something for charity or seeing there is a wrong being done by others, like racism, that needs to be pointed out.

You are free to live as you wish, without doing environmental deeds to reduce your harms. And I don’t think there are serious spiritual repercussions, but I don’t know, there may be. As for me and my household, we chose differently, more bec we don’t like harming and killing people, rather than there might be spiritual repercussions.

Sorry for being frank. I never was much of a people person. I totally lack finesse and don’t have many friends.

I’m curious if you consider you and your household as not harming and killing people because of the steps you have taken or do you consider you and your household as still harming and killing people but at a lesser extent?

 

[Ridgerunner]

And I don’t think there are serious spiritual repercussions, but I don’t know, there may be.

Happy to see you say that.

I don’t know anyone who has no concern for the environment. But different people have different views of it, and oftentimes not without reason. As perhaps you know, my particular concerned is land use. Huge areas of the planet have been desertified in the last century by mismanagement. And what does that do? It increases atmospheric temperatures, reduces water tables, destroys soil fertility, decreases carbon sequestration by plant life. It’s an enormous problem, and yet nobody pays attention to it.

As you now, Cdl Turkson is concerned about the environment, as well he should be. His own country is afflicted with mining practices that reclaim nothing, poison the water tables and leave toxic waste among human habitations. At the same time, the poverty in Ghana causes people to try to extract more and more out of the land for food without ever putting anything back. The environmental concerns in a context like that are different still.

 

[lynnvinc]

Happy to see you say that.

I don’t know anyone who has no concern for the environment. But different people have different views of it, and oftentimes not without reason. As perhaps you know, my particular concerned is land use. Huge areas of the planet have been desertified in the last century by mismanagement. And what does that do? It increases atmospheric temperatures, reduces water tables, destroys soil fertility, decreases carbon sequestration by plant life. It’s an enormous problem, and yet nobody pays attention to it.

As you now, Cdl Turkson is concerned about the environment, as well he should be. His own country is afflicted with mining practices that reclaim nothing, poison the water tables and leave toxic waste among human habitations. At the same time, the poverty in Ghana causes people to try to extract more and more out of the land for food without ever putting anything back. The environmental concerns in a context like that are different still.

That’s right. We only have time and energy to devote to a few issues in terms of being more active in alerting others, etc. ((Also Cdl Turkson is concerned about CC, esp its impacts on poor countries.))

However, in terms of our own lives, we are still called to do what we can to reduce our own contributions to harms. And that itself can be a highly burdensome, confusing task.

I actually spent my Lent in 1990 (after coming to the understanding that I was contributing to CC & thereby to the increasing droughts and famines in Africa) feeling very bad, not knowing what to do, but wanting to reduce my harms. I imagined myself as the Good Thief on the cross next to Jesus – feeling bad for what I was doing, but unable to get down from that cross and make amends. Then Good Friday it got ratcheted up when I realized I was not the Good Thief but the Roman soldier pounding the nails into Jesus, who was nevertheless forgiving me because I knew not what I was doing. Except I knew. I just didn’t know how to get out of the structures of doing it.

Then the week after Easter was Earth Day, the 20th anniversary, and my husband and I watched programs on TV that gave lots of practical tips on how to reduce our env impact, and we went to the Earth Day fair in the park and picked up a lot of other tips. It was as if the chains holding me back had suddenly been broken.

We started out with CF bulbs, changing a light fixture with 5 amber chimneys faced up (using 300 watts) to a beautiful oak and beveled glass fixture (the $49 floor model at WalMart) using only a single 15 watt CF globe bulb, which actually gave us better reading light.

My husband was only on board if it didn’t reduce our living standard, so he was worried about the 40 watt incandescent light over the stove where he did a lot of cooking being already a bit dim. So I replaced it with a 15 watt CF bulb = 60 incandescent watts, thereby lowering our impact while increasing our living standard . And we put in more insulation, changed our showerhead to one that uses half the water (without noticing any difference in pressure). Note that water requires energy to pump and heat it. We replaced our 5 gallon a flush toilet with a 1.5 gallon flush one that actually worked better.

We had already being living within a mile or 2 of work since 1970 when we had become aware of diminishing finite resources (one of the env concerns back then), but we hadn’t done much else. So I got a bicycle and we started walking and cycling more to offset our driving, which was actually good for our health and spirits. In 1991 as our old frig was giving out we replaced it with an energy efficient frig that used 1/10 the electricity. We saw our electric bill do a nosedive the following month.

There are 1000s of things on the list of reducing env impact, from which people can pick and choose which are best for them. Now that we have the internet, it would be very easy to find these.

The unexpected upshot is that we ended up saving $1000s over the past 27 years from doing these various things, reminding me of “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and its righteousness and ALL things will be added unto you.” Alleluia!

I don’t think I would have done all that if I had not come to the God-given grace-filled realization that I was harming people. That really set a fire under me.

 

[MidwestGuy]

This question has been asked before but I have never seen an answer?

I’m curious if you consider you and your household as not harming and killing people because of the steps you have taken or do you consider you and your household as still harming and killing people but at a lesser extent?

 

[lynnvinc]

I’m curious if you consider you and your household as not harming and killing people because of the steps you have taken or do you consider you and your household as still harming and killing people but at a lesser extent?

“To a lesser extent,” is the answer.

However, bec few others seem to care I’ve become pretty much demoralized in my efforts, so I’m not as much into looking for further reductions in my harms to others.

I know I should NOT be looking sideways at what others do or think, only looking at God and God’s will. And my husband (whom God uses as an instrument to try and make sense to me) has warned me many times never to come over here again to CAF – which he considers a sinful waste of time and is in not Catholic (even tho he has never visited this site) – I still come back and get more demoralized.

 

[qui_est_ce]

“To a lesser extent,” is the answer.

However, bec few others seem to care I’ve become pretty much demoralized in my efforts, so I’m not as much into looking for further reductions in my harms to others.

Who doesn’t care? Don’t you think most here have already done what you have done, if not more? I, for one, don’t run my air conditioning 12 months of the year. I moved to a smaller more efficient home when my kids grew up and left the house. Unfortunately, I can’t afford an electric car, although my taxes are supporting people who can, like my nephew who is married to a doctor. He drives a Lamborghini, she drives an electric car (subsidized), which she can fuel for “free” (tax payer expense) in Santa Monica, CA. Not blaming them at all for taking advantage. It’s the system that allows for this that I’m blaming. Meantime, I’m driving around in my oil-burning car killing people, according to you.

People care about the environment, they just don’t agree with your solutions. You are so busy patting yourself on the back for all the “lesser harm” you are doing to people, you have no room to even consider the harm some of the government solutions are really doing to the poor - higher used car prices, soaring utility bills, spikes in gasoline prices, loss of jobs, to name a few.

I know I should NOT be looking sideways at what others do or think, only looking at God and God’s will. And my husband (whom God uses as an instrument to try and make sense to me) has warned me many times never to come over here again to CAF – which he considers a sinful waste of time and is in not Catholic (even tho he has never visited this site) – I still come back and get more demoralized.

So now, we CAF posters are sinners for spending time here trying to learn more about what’s going on in the world???

And you wonder why your credibility is questioned.

 

[MidwestGuy]

Who doesn’t care? Don’t you think most here have already done what you have done, if not more? I, for one, don’t run my air conditioning 12 months of the year. I moved to a smaller more efficient home when my kids grew up and left the house. Unfortunately, I can’t afford an electric car, although my taxes are supporting people who can, like my nephew who is married to a doctor. He drives a Lamborghini, she drives an electric car (subsidized), which she can fuel for “free” (tax payer expense) in Santa Monica, CA. Not blaming them at all for taking advantage. It’s the system that allows for this that I’m blaming. Meantime, I’m driving around in my oil-burning car killing people, according to you.

People care about the environment, they just don’t agree with your solutions. You are so busy patting yourself on the back for all the “lesser harm” you are doing to people, you have no room to even consider the harm some of the government solutions are really doing to the poor - higher used car prices, soaring utility bills, spikes in gasoline prices, loss of jobs, to name a few.
So now, we CAF posters are sinners for spending time here trying to learn more about what’s going on in the world???

And you wonder why your credibility is questioned.

 

[lynnvinc]

Who doesn’t care? Don’t you think most here have already done what you have done, if not more? I, for one, don’t run my air conditioning 12 months of the year. I moved to a smaller more efficient home when my kids grew up and left the house. Unfortunately, I can’t afford an electric car, although my taxes are supporting people who can, like my nephew who is married to a doctor. He drives a Lamborghini, she drives an electric car (subsidized), which she can fuel for “free” (tax payer expense) in Santa Monica, CA. Not blaming them at all for taking advantage. It’s the system that allows for this that I’m blaming. Meantime, I’m driving around in my oil-burning car killing people, according to you.

People care about the environment…

That’s great to hear. I don’t feel so demoralized now.

So now, we CAF posters are sinners for spending time here trying to learn more about what’s going on in the world???

That’s my husband commenting on me – being a sinner for wasting my time at CAF, when I could be spending more time in prayer and more useful pursuits.

Plus he does have a point – face-to-face relations should not be short-changed for excessive blogging. I’m only referring to me here, since I don’t know others’ situations.

 

[lynnvinc]

A poster was concerned about coral reefs. Here is an article I just read about how CC is killing them:

“Ruins, Not Reefs: How Climate Change Is Fast-Forwarding Coral Science”
theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/04/how-catastrophe-is-changing-the-science-of-coral-reefs/522648/

 

[MidwestGuy]

“To a lesser extent,” is the answer.

WOW - You still think your harming people, but harming less than other people?

If I thought I was harming people I wouldn’t be driving a car, using a computer, etc. I don’t think I could justify only hurting one person instead of 5,10,20, etc.

 

[LeafByNiggle]

WOW - You still think your harming people, but harming less than other people?

If I thought I was harming people I wouldn’t be driving a car, using a computer, etc. I don’t think I could justify only hurting one person instead of 5,10,20, etc.

I don’t think that is true. It depends on the extent of the harm. Whenever you drive your car on a public road, you increase (very slightly) the probability that you will cause an accident and harm someone. Yet that does not keep you from the road, nor should it.

 

[qui_est_ce]

WOW - You still think your harming people, but harming less than other people?

I wonder how she knows how much or little I do for the environment ? This is the problem, they always think they do more than “deniers” to reduce pollution and to recycle.

If I thought I was harming people I wouldn’t be driving a car, using a computer, etc. I don’t think I could justify only hurting one person instead of 5,10,20, etc.

Don’t worry, she drives a Chevy Volt, subsidized by taxpayers.

 

[Hoosier_Daddy]

WOW - You still think your harming people, but harming less than other people?

If I thought I was harming people I wouldn’t be driving a car, using a computer, etc. I don’t think I could justify only hurting one person instead of 5,10,20, etc.

I think Lynn’s ideas are absolutely off base. Theologically I think she is out there. Her faith does not resemble mine.
Logically and scientifically I think she is misled. But she can indeed back her position quite well. But I will say one thing. She is the real deal. A true believer. And she backs up her ideas with action and a way of living that reflects her beliefs. We could all learn from that.
I disagree with her but I also admire her.

You know, like how muslims pray to Mecca 5 times a day…

 

[Xystus]

You know, like how muslims pray to Mecca 5 times a day…

they pray while facing the direction of that city, not to the city.