Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Religious scholar and climate activist Laurie Zoloth is concerned. She is worried about people who “deny” climate change. But she is also worried about the lack of integrity displayed by people who claim to believe, but who don’t reflect those alleged beliefs in their personal lifestyle choices.
According to the Pittsburg Post-Gazette;
Laurie Zoloth is deeply convinced that climate change represents a great moral challenge for modern times. But she doesn’t spend time complaining about those who deny the scientific consensus of human-induced global warming.
“What I want to think about is my denial, our denial,” she told a group of about 250 people Thursday at the conference, “Integrity of Creation: Climate Change,” which began Wednesday and continues through today at Duquesne University.
It is denial, she said, to acknowledge global warming but continue a lifestyle burning fossil fuels for nonessential travel and eating foods such as meat with a high-carbon footprint. While it’s difficult to make such changes all at once, as president of the American Academy of Religion last year, she proposed that her group take a sabbatical year in 2021 by skipping the annual conference that fills the jet streams with thousands of scholars converging on one city.
It would be just a step, but in reducing one’s fossil fuel use, “then we’re believable, then we have integrity.”
Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/local/city/2015/10/02/Duquesne-to/stories/201510020146
I find Laurie’s quest for personal climate integrity refreshing. I don’t mind that she has a different view about the alleged risks of anthropogenic CO2. Integrity is a solid foundation, which will eventually lead her to climate skepticism.
Leading climate activists who spend their lives jetting to climate conferences, or who use enough energy to power a small town, to light and heat their houses, should be an utter laughing stock. The screaming hypocrisy of jetset climate activists should utterly invalidate their self righteous demands that the rest of us make sacrifices, to “save” the planet. But curiously this rarely happens – climate foot soldiers don’t often criticise the carbon profligacy of their heroes.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Meat is high carbon footprint? This woman apparently has no idea how food is grown in mass quantity.
Steve, let’s be honest here. Grass-fed meat is just efficient use of land, especially land unsuitable for farming. Grain-fed meat is actually more energy intensive than just eating grain. As a whole, eating meat is in general more intensive than vegetarianism. This is historically why regions without strong hunting backgrounds were mostly vegetarian pre-industrialization,
Whether it’s worthwhile to cut back is obviously a matter of contention, but given her beliefs, it’s at least internally consistent to complain about.
If you have to travel more than 300 miles then air transport is the lowest emission transport you can choose. Modern aircraft have a fuel consumption of 120 miles per gallon per revenue passenger mile or better some significantly better than that such as the Airbus 320neo. These figures are obtained without any infrastructure requirements between departure and destination airport. Older 4 jet aircraft can burn more fuel at around 60 mpg per revenue passenger mile but even so these are not the kind of figures that should earn opprobrium from even a Prius driver. Air travel is also far safer and allows time efficient journeys that would be impossible by any other form of transport.
Nevertheless, there is often little reason for large number of people to travel to conferences apart perhaps from the post conference networking. It seems that many of these large conferences are held in attractive locations and try to squeeze 8 hours of work into 5 days.
Top post that man! +1
While there is satisfying to see warmists being called out on their hypocrisy, i’m not too gleeful. All popular movements, and even some not popular ones, eventually become full of people who are only along for the benefit it can bring to themselves. The same thing will happen to the skeptical ‘movement’, if there is such a thing. The day will come when some of these same people will be attending conferences titled ‘CO2 how it benefits the biosphere’ and they will claim they were skeptics all along.
I don’t doubt it will happen. When we reach that point, we will have already won the war, and hopefully can disband the entire thing.
I wonder how large a surge in business the Parisian prostitutes are expecting?
Religious scholar and climate activist Laurie Zoloth has the wrong idea about the Cimate and CO2 but has the right idea about integrity and responsible action. All popular movements like CAGW are populated with people who are only in it for the benefits they get.
Ms. Zoloth would be very disappointed in James Kinter of IGES/COLA at GMU who is currently tied into the Shakula affair.
Dr. Kinter’s presence at the 2014 AGU Fall meeting was so important that he flew roundtrip from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco in just one day. An expense report available on the IGES website shows that he only spent 6 hours in San Francisco before returning home.
According to carbonfootprint.com that’s 1257 lbs of CO2 for just one workshop.
Does anyone want to do a carbon footprint for the Paris conference before it happens so it can be made public. Also how many limos will be used. Remember the 1000 or so that had to be imported to Denmark?
The we can wait for the excuses.
Someone upthread mentioned “virtue signalling”?
Here is the first time I came across the term.
http://new.spectator.co.uk/2015/04/hating-the-daily-mail-is-a-substitute-for-doing-good/
Also upthread, Suzuki has been mentioned.
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2015/10/sanctimonia.html
“she proposed that her group take a sabbatical year in 2021 by skipping the annual conference that fills the jet streams with thousands of scholars converging on one city.”
Nothing is new. St. Augustine, in his “Confessions” wrote:
“As a youth I prayed, Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo. “Give me chastity and continence, but not right now.”
Which reminds of the scripture:
EC 1:10
“Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.”
That chapter begins: “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.”
Only a hypocrite or a procrastinator would wait until 2021 to do something.
what’s with 2021? That’s so manana! Let’s go with 2016, now wouldn’t that make your bones all the more believable? It’s like I’m giving us smoking in 2021; yeah, right.
Ms. Zoloth probably had Al Gore in mind.
Here in Canada, a large group of celebrities used the Toronto International Film Festival to launch (yet another) “countdown to the apocalypse” group.
Someone suggested that anyone who signed on should be immediately placed on a “no fly” list.
You know, to protect their integrity and save them from hypocrisy…
It’s worse with taxpayer funded flights to Paris as reward for message management and beating back fact checking or even the suggestion of it.
Have been saying for years that snake oil salesman never buy their own product. So when someone runs around screaming that we’re all doomed unless we reduce our carbon footprints immediately, and I find out later that they haveca carbon footprint 100 times my own, it’s a little hard to believe them. In fact, one might conclude that they are even more skeptical about AGW than I am.
They should walk…like the religion of peace does to Mecca…that is if they really believe in that AGW junk.
And on the side, I’m chuckling at the illustration of a turbofan airliner.
– wing leading edge slices into engine intake
– nose shape is from an old airplane that has had a radome for weather radar added, as done with Convair twin turboprops (this shape looks familiar but I can’t place it).
I was banging on about this earlier upstream. Rather than a hodge-podge of parts from different planes, I think what you’re seeing in the nose is an artifact of the modeling tool, probably NURBS or something like it, and see my earlier comments about the engines. But 3D modeling is not easy, and it can be difficult to get everything right.
http://oi61.tinypic.com/2lbjrsz.jpg