Bishop Klaus and the Reset Religion

Under the mastery of a global elite, the World Economic Forum is out to remake the world. To this end, as I have previously noted, its 1973 Manifesto is a tad less ambitious than is its 2020 Manifesto. No doubt any future manifesto will be bolder still. Unnerving? Indeed. For context, though not for peace of mind, turn to a quite different manifesto: A Christian Manifesto by Francis Schaeffer. I doubt Schaeffer had Klaus Schwab in mind when writing his manifesto, first published in 1981. The Great Reset had not come of age. On the other hand, as a matter of pure speculation, I wonder whether perhaps Schwab has read Schaeffer.

As humanism supplants Christianity, Shaeffer writes, the freedoms and prosperity which Western civilization owes to Christianity are taken for granted. True enough. Among many in the increasingly secular West you’ll find a hangover of lots of Christian moral precepts, with little accompanying insight into whence they came. Needless to say, anchorless precepts are disposable as circumstances dictate. Then it’s a lottery as to what comes next.

Humanism can create any number of moral orders. It’s a bootstraps creed, susceptible to the politics of the day. Things can go badly wrong. We don’t have to go to the brutal excesses of history; say, to the French revolutionary Reign of Terror or the Holocaust or Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Not comparing, but how about the wanton killing of millions of healthy unborn babies or the (demonic) chemical and physical maiming of mentally-disturbed teenagers, confused about their sexual identity. Evidently, today’s humanist moral order finds this not just acceptable but righteous. Humanism is truly a flexible creed. Who knows where it will land tomorrow.

What would Erasmus do?

Shaeffer “guesses” that whatever flavor it takes, it will likely end in some form of “elite authoritarianism.” He is eerily prescient about the form such authoritarianism will take. He points particularly to the emergence of what he calls a “technocratic elite.” And approvingly quotes American physicist and science historian Gerard Holton.

More and more frequently, major decisions that profoundly affect our daily lives have a large scientific or technological content…if the laymen cannot participate in decision making, he will have to turn himself over, essentially blind, to a hermetic elite, Margaret Mead wrote about scientists elevated to the status of priests… now there’s a name for this elevation… From the point of view of John Locke, the name is slavery.

And haven’t we effectively become vassals, if not already slaves? When it’s claimed that ninety-seven percent of climate scientists say that the science is settled— a science we can’t begin to understand—then what choice do we have but to fall into line? Sure, it’s not nearly ninety-seven percent, but it is the received wisdom. And it has the unqualified support of almost all politicians; all media hacks; the majority of corporate big-wigs; and, to boot, activists of pedigree aplenty: Hollywood stars; King Charles; David Attenborough; Al Gore; Bill Gates; Klaus Schwab; Greta Thunberg; and many others. Ask your next-door neighbors about the cumulative greenhouse effect of CO2 and of its radiative forcing. Blank look. Ask them whether climate change is a serious even existential problem. Chances are they’ll be onboard.

Among laymen, it’s only an incorrigible few (of us) "deniers" who have the temerity to question "the science." The rest simply follow the script. And so be it; if that means replacing reliable and affordable sources of energy with intermittent and costly forms of energy; and, soon -- wait for it -- having smart meters compulsorily installed in our homes, giving the authorities the ability to monitor our power usage and cut us off at will. I’d say that degree of servility is close enough to slavery. However, it needed another group of scientists, in this case medical scientists, to close out the game.

A disease threatening only a relatively small cohort—those (generally aged) with multiple serious co-morbidities—became universally deadly in the mouths of public health experts. In turn, this allowed authorities to close businesses; to lock us in our homes; to prevent us visiting our sick or dying relatives; to prevent us attending church services; to pepper spray, fire rubber bullets and arrest us if we dared protest; to make us wear face masks; and to make us accept experimental vaccinations, by otherwise preventing us from travelling, participating in civil society, and from working. So extraordinary was it that it’s hard to believe it happened. But happen it did.

Hail, victory!

Would Shaeffer have been incredulous? Perhaps not. He foresaw tyrannous outcomes when societies turn away from God-given inalienable rights and adopt bespoke humanistic values in their stead.

"Scientists" called the tune for your neighbors. They aren't epidemiologists. Each day medical experts were rolled out to present the grim news of hospitalizations, deaths, and the virulent, ever-mutating, "deadly" virus. Each day they were told that disobeying senseless diktats would result in hospitals being overrun; would put themselves at grave risk and, cruelly, their friends and neighbors and their aging parents or grandparents.

The lesson that Schwab and his elite Davos co-conspirators have learnt, if they were in any doubt, is that science can be wielded to push common people around and control them. And they need to be controlled for their own good. Moreover, if indeed the elites (or some of them) have read Shaeffer then they know that the absence of Christianity serves their cause. The more humanism dominates societies, the easier it will be to impose a set of values and moral code to suit the political agenda of liege lords. Serfdom revisited. Saving the planet and warding off diseases will require fealty.

Will science play ball? These days science is for sale. Research dollars call the tune. The billions upon billions spent on researching the state of the Great Barrier Reef is an exemplar. The Reef is in rude good health. That won’t do. That won’t bring in the money. It’s threatened by climate change? Got it in one.

Forget the Bible, Listen to the IPCC

The Anglican Church in Australia is part of the worldwide Anglican Communion. As, among others, is the Episcopal Church in the United States, the Anglican Church in Canada, and the Church of England. Today’s establishment Anglicans have a well-earned reputation for being on the woke side of things and also on the side, it appears, of the Bible being a living document. À la liberal Justices and the U.S. Constitution. Hence the establishment of the breakaway Anglican Communion GAFCON (the Global Anglican Futures Conference) in 2008, triggered by the consecration of an openly-gay man as a bishop in the U.S. Episcopal Church.

GAFCON views the Bible as textualists-cum-originalists view the U.S. Constitution. They think that when Jesus said something he meant it and that the words he used accurately reflect that meaning. On the other side, the established Church thinks there’s indulgent wriggle room, shaped by ever-evolving fashion.

The Australian-wide Anglican Synod met in May earlier this year. To cut to the chase, the House of Bishops voted 12 to 10 against a motion to affirm that marriage was between a man and a woman. Others from the clergy and laity voted in favour; still a substantial number of them voted against. Strange business indeed, when the Bible as a whole and Jesus in particular are definitive on the matter. Unless, that is, Jesus and St Paul didn’t really mean what they said. C’mon love is love, ain’t it?

Who said anything about a man and a woman?

Subsequently, in August, a group of Australian clergies under the auspices of GAFCON established a new breakaway diocese. Passions run deep and those behind the new diocese have come in for vitriolic criticism from some of those who’d prefer to keep the Church intact, even at the cost of heresy. But, hold it there. There’s heresy and then there’s heresy. Offences against God and offences against the IPCC. Never let it be said that Anglicans fall victim to the latter.

While the Australian Anglican Synod found it possible to spurn the eternal Biblical truths uttered by Jesus Christ; they paid homage to the pronouncements of Hoesung Lee, the current chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Not that they acknowledged him personally, simply his gospel. From Southern Cross magazine:

The Synod lamented the suffering already being endured across the world by communities facing drought, water insufficiency, loss of arable lands, destructive fire events, cyclones, floods and rising sea levels, and the increasing challenges caused by rising global temperatures, air pollution, and loss of biodiversity, which will be borne disproportionately by the poorest of the world’s poor. [And] called on the Australian Government, the community and all people of faith to support Pacific and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in their call for urgent reductions in emissions of greenhouse gasses.

There is no record of anyone disagreeing with this motion, “calling for action on climate change.” You would be considered unsound, distinctly odd, if you did, I suspect. Yet, the motion is mostly based on lies. Biblical truths rejected; alarmist environmental lies accepted. That’s where Anglican Christians are at a leadership level In Australia. Swapping Biblical truths for climate-cult idolatry. Idolatry is not a new phenomenon. It’s happened before. Moses had to deal with it.

Golden Calf 1, Ten Commandments, 0.

If churchmen would only look, there is no compelling evidence that the unproven hypothesis of man-made climate change has had any influence at all on extreme weather events or, in fact, that extreme weather events are becoming more frequent or intense. Yes, there are plenty of tendentious predictions. Matched by previous predictions falling embarrassingly wide of the mark. Michael Schellenberger (Apocalypse Never) quotes Roger Pielke Jr.

There is scant evidence that hurricanes, floods, tornadoes or droughts have become more frequent or intense in the U.S. or globally… In fact, we are in an era of good weather when it comes to extreme weather.

On fires, Schellenberger cites a discussion with Jon Keeley.

We’ve looked at the history of climate and fire throughout the whole state [California]… we don’t see any relationship between past climates and the amount of area burned in any given year.

Australian bushfires in 2019-2020 made the news worldwide. Got Hollywood stars agitated. Yet, as Bjorn Lomborg says in an interview dispelling climate-related myths, the land area burnt at 4 percent was in the lower range when compared with other major bushfires since 1900. Incidentally, he also covers the well-known facts that Pacific atoll islands are on the whole increasing in size not sinking and, confounding Al Gore, that the number of polar bears has trended upwards. Well-known facts, that is, among those interested in facts rather than in giving currency to myths; like, to its shame, the Anglican Church.

As a churchgoer, I find difficult to accept the mindless unanimity on a keenly contested issue. Have Christian church leaders read anything from Schellenberger, from Lomborg (False Alarm), Steven Koonin (Unsettled), John Christie, Roy Spencer, Richard Lindzen, William Happer, Patrick Moore, Joanne Nova (The Skeptic’s Handbook) and many others outside of the IPCC group-think fraternity? I think not. Galling too is the reference by the Australian Synod to the poorest of the world’s poor suffering. Too true they’ll suffer. Not because of climate change but because of the reckless and cruel abandonment of affordable power in the name of climate change.

Are burning bushes caused by "climate change"?

Christian churches across all denominations have become strident on climate change. My generous take on the Pope’s climate encyclical Laudato Si’ issued in May 2015 springs readily to (my) mind. Good intentioned? Maybe. But, whatever the motivation, they’re stooges for the mercenary rent-seeking climate lobby. What of pensioners freezing, children in the Congo and in China digging for cobalt and lithium to power fancy EVs. Collateral damage for the greater good?

Truth is central to Christianity. Sometimes it’s hard to find. But there’s definitely a Christian duty to search for it and avoid gullibly falling into line with fashion, whether that takes the form of subversively redefining marriage or of swallowing the codswallop of catastrophic climate change. And I’d add that some things are within the bailiwick of the Church, such as marriage, and some like "climate change" are not core business. Best to leave declarations on the latter things alone. As I once said to a former Anglican minister of mine when leaving church, after he’d part sermonised on climate matters. “I can’t find anything that Moses or Jesus said about global warming.”

The Rise of the Christian Gaia

“Gaia is Angry” was a popular Green slogan some years ago, and its message was later transmitted in the 2017 Jennifer Lawrence movie “Mother!”—a biblical allegory of how Man destroys God’s Creation by his careless devastation of the world’s resource and makes Mother Earth really, really, well, mother-bleeping mad. The result is global warming among many other plagues.

Or maybe not. Cinema audiences were confused by the allegorical plot, and attempts to explain it confused them further. One made it seem that God was the villain because his over-ambitious male creativity was constantly upsetting a Cosmos that Gaia’s gentle female touch might otherwise have made a little bit of heaven.

That’s the problem with allegories. They ride off furiously in all directions. Let’s get down to earth.

The Venus of Willendorf: Miss April of 22,000 B.C.

Gaia began her career as the goddess who represents the earth in Greek mythology. She was brought down from Olympus a few decades ago by the British scientist, James Lovelock, to give a divine face to his scientific definition of the Earth. Lovelock’s description of the earth is in fact a cool, rational one and it was well-summarized in the Summer 2020 issue of The New Atlantis by Joel Garreau, professor of law, culture and values at Arizona State University, as follows:

The physical components of the earth, from its atmosphere to its oceans, closely integrate with all of its living organisms to maintain climatic chemistry in a self-regulating balance ideal for the maintenance and propagation of life.

That’s a long way from seeing Gaia as the vengeful goddess seeking to punish her rape by murdering her assailants which is the admiring deep green view of her. It’s not even an attempt to personify and feminize the old-fashioned philosophy of pantheism (i.e., God consists of Everything all rolled up together) that the Victorian Scottish critic, Andrew Lang, summed up in the following verse drawn from the religion of cricket:

I am the batsman, and the bat,
I am the bowler, and the ball,
The umpire, the pavilion cat,
The roller, pitch, and stumps, and all

Lovelock’s view is a scientific analysis that treats human beings as valuable participants in nature and proposes to protect them (i.e., us)  by  geo-engineering solutions to global warming—e.g. spraying stuff into the stratosphere to reflect the sun’s rays back into space-- of the kind we used to hear from the late Edward Teller. It’s a good thing for Lovelock that his admirers don’t read him, as both he and Garreau concede, and so don’t know that Gaia is not quite the nice progressive girl they took her for.

Plus ça change...

That is small comfort to the rest of us, however, for Gaia has escaped from her Pygmalion and now wanders around freely, accepting not only the worship of Greta Thunberg and her New Age children’s crusade but also that of senior converts from established religions who seem to believe that she’s already a Christian saint—it’s just that she hasn’t been canonized yet. That’s the culmination of a slow movement by the Christian churches to adopt more and more of the Environmentalist Creed as the Christian creed seems less and less sure of itself.

When Gaia was first presented to the world by Lovelock, there was still some theological resistance to the new secular religion of environmentalism on the grounds that it saw humans not as part and parcel of the nature that ecologists seek to defend but as a plague or “bacillus” that is a threat, maybe a mortal one, to the Earth. Christians and other critics saw Gaia worship as a kind of hostile and aggressive pantheism, and in some of the policies it advanced—notably, population control or reduction, including support for abortion as a right—as self-consciously hostile to Christianity, especially Catholicism.

That suspicion has now vanished down the memory hole of Western Christianity. A few Catholic intellectuals, theologically serious about religions that rival Christianity, continue to resist Gaia’s charms. Otherwise, however, green policies are now a main orthodoxy of the Catholic and mainstream Protestant churches, and Professor Garreau see signs that U.S. evangelicals are increasingly converting to Gaia too.

He envisages two streams in the broad overall Christian exodus to Gaia diverging from each other: the less extreme is what he calls “the greening of Christianity”; the more extreme is a Calvinism-derived “carbon fundamentalism.” The first theme is reformist and open to practical compromises that improve the world’s carbon footprint without solving all climate problems; the second is a totalist approach that subordinates everything to the emergency need for net-zero carbon reduction. It is authoritarian in its politics, punitive towards those who disagree with it, aka mortal sinners, and has no provisions for compromise with the Devil or even for forgiving those who repent.

(It’s worth noting here that Andrew Sullivan has just written a column arguing that if Republicans were to adopt a mix of climate solutions—notably, nuclear power plus innovative new clean energy technologies—it would have a good chance of solidifying its support among electoral groups that closely resemble Christians who have undergone “greening.”  So we're talking electoral politics here as well as faith-based policy solutions.)

Professor Garreau makes a persuasive and reasonable case, and I’m inclined to agree with eighty percent of it. But the twenty percent on which we differ is also worth examining. It comes down to three things:  (a) are these two streams of Christian environmentalism really diverging? (b) does religious environmentalism develop a mistaken dogmatism unsuited to secular controversies? And (c) do the newly green Christian inevitably abandon Christian perspectives and Christian language when they are discussing climate change.

Queen of the May.

First, it’s my impression from reading Christian apologetics on the environment that these two “new traditions” are not so much diverging as that carbon fundamentalists are gradually gaining influence and leadership over the newly-Green Christians (maybe born-again environmentalists?) Consider, for instance, a recent survey of Anglican beliefs on public policy, Rotting from the Head: Radical Progressive Attitudes and the Church of England,  from the UK think-tank Civitas, which consists largely of quotations from Anglican  sources on how they are committing to Green and other progressive causes . It’s summed by one statistic:

Over 70 percent of all Dioceses (71 percent) appoint clergy who promote climate activist warnings and calls for recognition of the ‘climate emergency.’

But that statistic does not convey the radical character of what a large majority of Anglican bishops and priests are advocating: they assume the truth of the most extreme forecasts of climate emergency, propose the most extreme solutions to it with no serious consideration of their impact on human life and well-being plus no serious consideration of trade-offs, and urge support for civil disobedience by Extinction Rebellion and other social activists on the grounds that the “climate emergency” is too important to be left to democratic decision-making.

In other words, the carbon fundamentalists are leading their moderate religious allies towards the most extreme rhetoric and policies of a form of environmentalism that is utopian, pessimistic, authoritarian, and anti-democratic. That's a very bad fit with most of the Christian message and as a result it produces a number of perverse effects.

One is the second difference I sense with Garreau: that many Christians converted to Gaia embrace global solutions which take little or no account of their overall impact on people. In particular, as Bjorn Lomborg has pointed out, they violate the commonsense rule that the costs of a remedy for climate change should not be higher than the costs of climate change itself. When we cease to apply such tests to climate policy, we're not doing what Christ wants; We're substituting moral vanity for thought. Such broad-brush errors are not, of course, confined to Anglicans.

Pope Francis won’t be at the U.N. Climate Change COP26 conference in Glasgow—almost certainly for medical reasons—but he will be there in spirit. Only two weeks before it opened, he made a series of demands upon the world “In the Name of God” which began with a request to “the great extractive industries–mining, oil, forestry, real estate, agribusiness–to stop destroying forests, wetlands and mountains, to stop polluting rivers and seas . . . “ and in short to stop destroying the environment for their business.

Freeze to death.

Since Pope Francis is known for deploying ambiguity in argument, we can legitimately ask what he means here. If his meaning is that mining companies should clean up after their activities, he is amply justified. If he means that they should treat the environment in general, including local peoples, with respect, ditto. But if he wants an end to mining fossil fuels asap, as some have interpreted his words, then we must point out that today fossil fuels provide eighty-five percent of the energy for the world, that there is no possibility they can be phased out in anything like the near future, and that if they were to be phased out prematurely, the poor and marginalized in all countries would suffer dreadfully in ways for which neither taxpayers nor “corporations” could possibly compensate them.

That's something that Catholics in particular must consider seriously. Catholic social teaching is blend of moral principles on which the Pope is an authority and practical secular knowledge which is the province of the layman. That’s why its judgments tend to be balanced and to seek to reconcile conflicting legitimate interests. That is not the spirit in which Christianity’s carbon fundamentalists approach climate policy or reform in general. In their moralistic zeal to punish what they see as evil, they risk destroying the huge gains in living standards—several billion Asians lifted into the global middle class since 1989—that are rooted in cheap carbon energy. That fierce spirit has spread to all of Gaia’s new Christian converts. But they don’t know what they do.

And, finally, that spirit is reflected in the language that Christian preachers too often use in debates on the environment. Simply look through the twenty-seven pages of Rotting from the Head devoted to statements by Anglican bishops and priests and you find  very few traditionally Christian terms justifying their radical green demands. Their rhetoric is drawn largely from the radical progressive wing of climate Christianity which is itself shaped by a punitive godless Calvinism.

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There are very occasional references to Christian stewardship or God’s Creation—and that’s it. Interestingly, there are even fewer rebukes to radical Green attacks on human beings as a plague on the planet. And most interestingly of all, there are many fire-and-brimstone punishments threatened to polluters, “deniers,” and the merely uninterested. Except for the elect in Extinction Rebellion, we are all guilty.

But punishments imposed by Whom? God is no longer allowed by progressive Christianity to threaten such things. It seems that for a satisfying denouement we’ll have to rely upon an “Angry Gaia." And unfortunately, as we have seen, Gaia’s thunderbolts are more likely to strike the sheep than the goats.

Pelosi's Delusion: Catholics Can be Pro-Choice

No doubt the fires of Hell burned a little warmer and brighter at the Vatican this weekend as Pope Francis met with U.S. speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

The geriatric speaker, 81, and the daughter of a mobbed-up family of Baltimore politicians whose brother Franklin D. Roosevelt d'Alesandra was once arrested for statutory rape, and of course skated on both that charge and another for perjury, was lucky in her choice of popes. Although Francis has called abortion "murder," as the Church has long taught, he has also resisted the notion of some American bishops to deny the sacrament of communion to nominally Catholic politicians who support it.

Indeed, Pelosi was recently criticized by Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco, her place of residence, after the Speaker claimed to be a devout Catholic who supports a woman’s right to have an abortion.

No one can claim to be a devout Catholic and condone the killing of innocent human life, let alone have the government pay for it,The right to life is a  fundamental—the most fundamental—human right, and Catholics do not oppose fundamental human rights. To use the smokescreen of abortion as an issue of health and fairness to poor women is the epitome of hypocrisy: what about the health of the baby being killed? What about giving poor women real choice, so they are supported in choosing life? This would give them fairness and equality to women of means, who can afford to bring a child into the world.

There are really three distinct ways to look at human life. One, that human life is unique and involves a God-given soul that is given to each person at the moment of conception. Anyone who believes that cannot and should not support abortion in any way. If you are of this frame of mind, then no one has a “right” to an abortion any more than any person has a “right” to blow away an annoying two-year-old.

We should certainly be tolerant of women who choose abortion, as we should be tolerant of all sinners since, after all, we  too are sinners. But to love the sinner does not mean one should approve of the sin.

Why is this man smiling?

The second way to look at human life is to say that we are uncertain of its significance. Perhaps it is unique and perhaps it involves a soul. Perhaps it is neither. Perhaps one applies, but not the other. We simply do not know and it is up to each person to figure out what he or she believes.

This is of course the classic path that justifies the legality of abortion. Since people can disagree about when human life begins and what makes human life different, each prospective mother should be able to make a choice that is consistent with her beliefs.

Speaker Pelosi is free to be an advocate of this line of thinking, but she needs to be crystal clear that to a Catholic – specifically the “devout Catholic” she claims to be – this reasoning is completely and unalterably inconsistent with the Catholic faith. It is as inconsistent as claiming to be a devout Catholic who supports a communicant’s “right” sell the Eucharist to devil-worshipers.

Catholics believe some things are sacred, such as the Eucharist and human life from the moment of conception. There is no “wiggle room” that allows us to say its all right for someone to abuse or destroy what is sacred.

It is worth noting that the original Roe v. Wade decision recognized that medical advances would make the life of a fetus outside the womb more and more possible at earlier and earlier stages of pregnancy as medical science advanced. Thus the “trimester formula” was part of the decision: no abortions allowed in the third trimester, abortions possible but limited in the second trimester, and abortions allowed in the first trimester. (And yes, I’m over-simplifying, but this is a column, not a legal treatise).

So why are late term abortions routinely performed? Because there were two escape clauses incorporated in Roe: 1) the court said that a fetus is not a person and thus not entitled to protection under the 14th amendment (thanks Potter Stewart), and 2) if the health of the mother was at stake, then abortions could happen at any time. In a subsequent decision the court decided that the “health of the mother” essentially included her emotional state, ergo if being pregnant made a woman sad, she could have an abortion whenever she wants, ergo any woman can have an abortion whenever she wants.

There is third way to look at human life: that it is neither unique nor involves a soul. It is a mere accident of nature. This is the depressing view of the atheist, a materialistic doctrine that values human life no more than that of a rat or a stalk of corn. It holds that we blinked into existence for our short stay in the material world and will blink out of it, never to manifest any other form of existence. We just disappear.

You can say that again.

This mindset not only finds abortion a perfectly reasonable proposition, it eventually leads to the horrors of eugenics and euthanasia. Indeed, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was primarily interested in using birth control as a means to prevent the spread of what she considered to be “mongrel races” like our black- and yellow-skinned brothers and sisters. It is an evil way of thinking that spawns systems like Nazism and Communism.

As a Catholic, I fully recognize the problems my church has had and the mistakes that it has made. It is a human institution and human beings are fallible. But there is no mistaking the Catholic view that abortion is the taking of a human life and no Catholic should support it. Pelosi, like Joe Biden -- another nominal Catholic -- needs to pick a lane.

Mother Gaia Likes it Hot

If you've noticed that the greens are in an especially reverent mood of late, it is because the holiest months of their neo-pagan religion are now upon us. What we call summer is referred to semi-officially in their calendar as "Air Conditioning Antipathy Season," and it is traditionally celebrated with the proliferation of various and sundry bits of anti-A/C propaganda whose object is to berate the unenlightened among us for preferring not to be roasted alive from June through August.

Time Magazine recently released a perfect example of this pious genre. Written by Eric Dean Wilson, author of the unpleasant sounding "After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort," the piece begins by mentioning the heatwave that hit the Pacific Northwest last month, with temperatures far exceeding 100ºF and department stores predictably running out of A/C units.

"Unfortunately," Wilson asserts, dutifully, "air-conditioning is part of what’s causing the unusual heatwave in the first place." He then walks us through the supposedly disreputable history of air conditioning, which he says contributed to socio-economic divides (because it was initially prohibitively expensive), was a marker of structural racism (because southern whites got it first), and, more recently, contributed to a near environmental calamity, namely the depletion of the ozone layer which was related to the use of chlorofluorocarbons as refrigerants.

One of the reasons folks used to go to the movies. (YouTube)

The article is strange reading for outsiders, as is often the case with religious texts. The race and class references seem awkwardly inserted, perhaps to appease other factions within their broad church. But there are some difficult-to-comprehend passages even within the purely environmental sections.

For instance, you'd think the fact that CFCs were banned in 1987 and have been largely replaced by the much more environmentally friendly hydrofluorocarbons (or HFCs) would be a relief for Wilson, but you'd be wrong. While HFCs don't deplete the ozone layer they still contribute to global warming, he says, as does air conditioning generally, simply because it uses energy.

But if "thou shalt avoid excess energy" is just part of their decalogue, air conditioning is an odd target. As Megan McArdle explained in Bloomberg a while back," Americans still expend much more energy heating their homes than cooling them." This might seem surprising, but it makes sense upon reflection:

The difference between the average temperature outside and the temperature that is comfortable inside is generally only 10 to 20 degrees in most of America, for most of the summer. On the other hand, in January, the residents of Rochester, New York... need to get the temperature up from an average low of 18 degrees (-8 Celsius) to at least 60 or 65. That takes a lot of energy.

Heating homes often seems natural in a way cooling them does not, but this is illogical. Both extremes can (and do) kill people every year. Moreover, McArdle points out that one of the environmental benefits of air conditioning is that it has enabled Americans to progressively move in the direction of the sunbelt, where heating needs in winter are minimal, meaning that less energy overall is used in regulating temperature.

In any event, Wilson's own solution to the  "problem" suggested in his piece is not for his co-religionists to move south, but rather to drastically reduce the amount of A/C used by both elect and reprobate alike. This he would apparently accomplish by banning home air conditioners and having us all become "more comfortable with discomfort." If A/C is allowed to remain legal, it should be available only at "public cooling centers" where, presumably, rich and poor alike can gather joyfully together to gather together to avoid the scorching heat.

If you can't take the heat...

This seems about as realistic to me as the idea that there was a soul-saving spaceship following the comet Hale–Bopp -- how well would those public cooling centers have worked in, for instance, Portland, Ore., when the mercury hit 112º? More than likely people would have rioted to get in and to stay in.

But I guess that (apocryphal) St. Thomas Aquinas line holds true here -- "For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don't believe, no proof is possible." Happy A/C Antipathy season to our devout readers.