All that remains is a fragment of song

April 17, 2011 By Fred Clark 23 Comments

The Revealer brings us news of a study on the religious right’s bold new campaign to stand up for bullies and bullying. Among the groups bravely fighting for the right of the strong to torment the weak are the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family and the American Family Association.

Basically, any group with “Family” in the name is demanding the right to steal your lunch money.

The objective of most of these organizations isn’t to just influence hearts and minds to follow their idea of moral living but to do so via legal and legislative means, using existing local and national networks for fundraising, media reach, and legislative influence. And so, attempts to teach kids that heckling their neighbors for being different has rhetorically become an attack on tolerance.

It reminds me of that song we used to sing in Sunday school, “Dare to Be a Nebuchadnezzar.”

Jim Evans has more on the AFA campaign at Ethics Daily: “As Self-Appointed Media Watchdog, AFA Goes on Attack.” Ethics Daily is a mostly Southern Baptist site, and Evans is the pastor of First Baptist Church in Auburn, Ala. That’s why it’s really encouraging to see him shaming the AFA for its recent efforts against the Day of Silence:

The idea behind the Day of Silence was to call attention to the pain inflicted on LGBT individuals by bullying, mean-spirited jokes and harassment.

The AFA encouraged parents to take their children out of schools that were supporting this observance. Apparently, in the skewed AFA view of the Christian gospel, making fun of people is a way of showing the love of Jesus.

Regardless of where Christian individuals stand on the issue of homosexuality, there can be no defense for condoning attacks on people – verbally or otherwise.

The suggestion by AFA that parents withdraw their children from efforts to restrain verbal and other assaults is a tacit blessing of promoting verbal and other assaults. And from my perspective that is totally unchristian and they should be ashamed.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered individuals remain first and foremost human beings. And the God who became human and dwelt among us has made it abundantly clear that there is profound love for the human species – all of us.

That’ll preach.

* * * * * * * * *

I picture this as a slightly more affordable alternative to the Charlie Sheen tour: “Love Worth Fighting For Events With Kirk Cameron and Warren Barfield Sell Out Across Country.”

It’s a bit odd that a marriage and relationship advice seminar would choose the verb “fighting” for it’s title. They mean the good kind of fighting, I guess, the kind that encourages “men and women to find the victories on the other side of the battles they face in their relationships.”

Not just fighting, then, but fighting to win because relationships are battles. That’s our Buck.

* * * * * * * * *

Hugh Hollowell gets the usual questions from the evangelical inquisition. “Occasionally I get emails demanding to know my stance on a particular piece of ‘historic orthodoxy,’” he writes.

Hollowell, you see, runs a ministry for homeless people. So for the self-appointed evangelical inquisitors, that suggests he’s some kind of Spong-lovin’ librul. His most recent catechist demanded to know whether or not he denies the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Hollowell responds by quoting Peter Rollins:

I deny the resurrection of Christ. … I deny the resurrection of Christ every time I do not serve at the feet of the oppressed, each day that I turn my back on the poor; I deny the resurrection of Christ when I close my ears to the cries of the downtrodden and lend my support to an unjust and corrupt system. …

As Hollowell notes, such an answer probably won’t satisfy his inquisitors. But here’s the thing: No answer will ever satisfy those inquisitors. Their whole sense of identity comes from trying to control others by catechizing them about proper and correct dogma. They imagine that this gives them power.

Such people can never and will never be satisfied. Trying to satisfy people who can never be satisfied is a waste of time.

* * * * * * * * *

Grist reports on yet another energy-related catastrophe. A year after the Gulf oil spill, in the midst of Japan’s nuclear crisis, and in the wake of countless coal mine explosions and collapses, this happens:

Oh the humanity.

As Grist notes:

The most recent reports indicate that so far the only casualties are a wide swath of grass and possibly a family of voles. So far no evacuation zone has been declared. There are no threats to sea life, and the fallout from the disaster was not detectable thousands of miles away. Cleanup efforts are in progress, and will not include covering the area in a giant concrete dome. No workers have been asked to give their lives in order to save their countrymen from the menace of this fallen wind turbine.

* * * * * * * * *

Amanda Marcotte has pointed out that on any given day you can type the words “youth pastor” into Google News and … well, the results won’t be pretty.

It’s true. And it’s sad. And it clearly suggests, as she says, that American Christianity’s obsession with mostly imaginary external monsters is in part an attempt to escape dealing with our own internal problems.

But then I don’t want to read too much into that because I am, among other things, a stepdad.

And the same exercise produces similarly dismaying results if, on any given day, you type the words “step father” into Google News.

* * * * * * * * *

The title here comes from Paul Simon’s new song, “The Afterlife.” It’s kind of brilliant.

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3. Offshore wind farms

August 13, 2010 By Fred Clark 147 Comments

Right now, in 2010, the United States has the same number of offshore wind farms as Mali.

Mali is a much poorer country, but its primary obstacle to developing offshore wind power is not a problem of money or technology. Mali’s main problem when it comes to offshore wind is that it’s landlocked.

America has no such excuse. It stretches, famously, from “sea to shining sea.” The United States has 12,383 miles of coastline. And yet, in 2010, 41 years after putting humans on the moon and 74 years after building the Hoover Dam, we don’t have a single offshore wind farm. None. Zero.

That’s just embarrassing.

We have the technology to do this. As we’ve just seen graphically demonstrated, this is far easier, technologically, than deepwater oil drilling. And it’s much, much less risky. And we’ve got a pretty good idea where offshore wind farms ought to be — i.e., places with a lot of wind and few migrating birds. We even have several capable companies lining up for a chance to make this happen.

And yet here we are, in 2010, without a single offshore wind farm. That’s a decent snapshot of the short-sightedness, lack of ambition and lack of vision that has come to characterize 21st-century America.

Wind power is reliable, renewable and clean. Wind power also strongly recommends itself to the reality-based community for its lack of greenhouse gas emissions. (That’s immensely important — even if every attempt to confront the problem of climate change politically is likely futile due to a vocal third of Americans believing that scientists are making the whole thing up to pave the way for Nicolae Carpathia’s One World Government.)

And right now, we have 14.6 million Americans who need jobs. Going from the current situation of zero offshore wind farms to, say, eight over the next five years would create tens of thousands of jobs at least. Maybe hundreds of thousands.

For a sense of just how many jobs could be created directly and indirectly by such an undertaking, look at the numbers the offshore oil drilling industry says are affected by the post-Deepwater-Horizon-debacle moratorium on deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Now imagine creating that many good jobs in every coastal state and doing so without the trade-off of tar balls on the beaches and decimated fisheries.

The Gulf spill ought to have generated more new support for cleaner energy. If nothing else it provided a much clearer recognition of the worst-case scenarios arising from drill, baby, drill. That sort of calamity isn’t a danger with offshore wind farms. A collapsed turbine won’t result in plumes of wind polluting the open seas or sticky wind residue threatening the fishing and tourism industries.

The reason I’m suggesting a goal of eight offshore wind farms within the next five years is because that’s how many Denmark has right now. If Denmark had beaten us into space, America would have scrambled into crisis mode. If Denmark’s military had this kind of technological advantage we’d be in a full-on panic to re-establish our supremacy. So there’s no reason we shouldn’t also be racing to catch up when it comes to offshore wind power. We’re talking about energy and the technology of the future — things red-blooded Americans are supposed to be boisterously proud of being No. 1 at.

Yet we seem to have lost that swagger when it comes to offshore wind, complacently accepting our last-place tie with Mali. This is too important to accept failure. We can’t just pretend it doesn’t matter because we’re not as good at it as other countries are (you know, like we do with soccer).

Keeping pace with Denmark actually would require more than eight offshore wind farms. We’ve got about three times more miles of coastline than Denmark. Three times eight is, conveniently, 24 — which also happens to be the number of coastal American states. Going from zero to eight is probably a sufficiently ambitious goal for the first five years, but if we want to reclaim our swagger, we’re going to need to shoot for 24 in, say, the next 20 years.

Achieving this goal would require some new approaches from the federal government. (That shouldn’t be surprising considering that the current approach is what has thus far produced, again, zero offshore wind farms.) Whatever we call the agency that replaces the dysfunctional Minerals
Management Service will need to adopt a bit more urgency for evaluating proposals and approving and expediting worthy ones. Ditto for the Environmental Protection Agency.

But achieving the goal of eight new offshore wind farms in the next five years would not likely require the federal government to commit to massive new spending. These projects will be built and paid for mostly by the private sector (with some public help, probably, but less than is involved in your typical football stadium).

What the federal government needs to do to help make this happen is to commit to buying some of the electricity generated by these plants. This is the step that Delaware Gov. Jack Markell and Maryland Gov. Tommy Carcetti Martin O’Malley requested and urged in a letter last month to President Barack Obama:

Markell and O’Malley asked Obama to direct the Department of Defense, the General Services Administration and other federal agencies to commit to buying a gigawatt of offshore wind energy from the mid-Atlantic region. The electricity would help power federal offices and military installations, especially those around metropolitan Washington, they wrote.

A gigawatt represents 1,000 megawatts, enough to power the equivalent of about 300,000 homes. That much energy would require about three times the number of turbines for which NRG Bluewater has contracts today for its wind farm planned for 11 miles east of Rehoboth Beach.

The governors said developing that much wind energy could lead to the creation of up to 20,000 jobs.

If we trust the governors’ number there — one wind farm = 20,000 jobs — then it seems my Grand Scheme here isn’t actually all that ambitious. Eight wind farms in five years would only provide 160,000 jobs, and we’ve got 14.6 million Americans looking for work. So, no, offshore wind
farms are not The Solution to unemployment, but they could be part of the solution.

We need these 160,000 jobs, after all. And we need cleaner, renewable energy.

And maybe more than either of those, we need to shake off the can’t-do attitude being preached these days by the smaller-smaller-smaller crowd advocating austerity in budgets, austerity in living standards, austerity in aspirations and austerity in achievements. America can’t do things like that anymore, they say. Too expensive. Too difficult. Too big. We pulled off the Apollo missions using less computing power than your typical cell phone has, but that was back in the old America. The old America was able to do things like space programs and rural electrification and fully-funded schools and the interstate highway system. The new, smaller-smaller-smaller America, they say, mustn’t attempt anything quite so ambitious.

Those folks may be perfectly satisfied with a tie for last place, but I think America can do better than that.

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