_________
In an interview with John Kerry—President Biden’s point‐man on climate change diplomacy—the New Yorker’s David Remnick asked the following crucial question:
One of the main difficulties, and there are so many, is that the climate demands sacrifice of everyone to avert catastrophe. Yet we are told we can save the planet and grow the economy at the same time. Transitioning to renewables is going to cost trillions of dollars and upend huge industries. We’re likely to have to eat less meat, use more public transportation. All of this is necessary. To what degree are you and Joe Biden and your foreign counterparts really levelling with everybody?
Here, Remnick channels the obvious: Climate change mitigation is hard. Every act of economic production requires an energy input, and energy production everywhere is a function of fossil fuel combustion, which causes global warming. The upshot is that mitigating climate change requires a wholesale overhaul of the global economy. As Remnick rightly observes, “[t]ransitioning to renewables is going to cost trillions of dollars and upend huge industries.”
Kerry, however, rejected the rock‐solid reasoning behind Remnick’s question, answering:
We’re being completely direct and totally transparent. I don’t agree with you that this is sacrifice. I do not believe people will have to necessarily eat differently. Agriculture will change. There’s a lot of research and work being done now on the diet of cattle, for instance. There’s a thing called asparagopsis—I believe that’s the right name—which is a seaweed that, apparently, in its early trials, has reduced if not eliminated flatulence from cattle. I’m confident that there will be huge research done that will change some of these things. All of the economic analyses show that there are millions of jobs to be created.
In the United States, we need to build a legitimate [electrical] grid. We can go to the moon, we can direct a Rover on Mars from Earth, we can invent vaccines, but we can’t send a simple electron from California to New York? In building that smart grid, you will put electricians and plumbers and pipefitters and steelworkers and heavy‐equipment operators and countless disciplines to work. There’s so many exciting parts of this. Cars will be electric. They won’t have an internal‐combustion engine, but you’re still going to have workers, the United Auto Workers, producing those cars. I just think we’re looking at a remarkable transformation. This will be the biggest economic transformation since the Industrial Revolution, literally. (formatting added)
Kerry, therefore, denies that climate policy involves individual sacrifice. To the contrary, he says that climate policy will “create” millions of jobs, by which he implies that government regulation would (somehow) create wealth. His answer supposes that no one has to pay anything to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, because we’ll all be getting rich from our green jobs and free energy (or something).
Rather than parsing Kerry’s non‐answer with follow up questions, Remnick immediately dropped this line of inquiry. Still, the exchange is revealing, in that Kerry’s response reflects the official position of the Biden administration—that Americans can have their climate cake and eat it, too. Last Earth Day, the president described climate regulation as both “a moral imperative” and “an economic imperative.” In a speech last week, Biden gushed that “when I hear ‘climate,’ I think ‘jobs’—good-paying union jobs.”
Seen in the most positive light, the Biden administration is engaging in wishful thinking. Seen in the worst light, this is cynical propaganda. Either way, the ramifications are troubling.
For starters, can President Biden lead on climate policy if he buries his head in the sand about the costs? Yesterday, for example, the White House sought for OPEC to ramp up oil production in an effort to ensure “Americans have access to affordable and reliable energy … at the pump” But this call to OPEC doesn’t make any sense from a climate perspective. High gas prices are a global warming “solution” because they reduce consumption, which lowers greenhouse gas emissions. The president’s messaging—that Americans should have cheap gas—stands diametrically opposed to his climate goals. This glaring contradiction cannot be lost on the rest of the world as Biden calls for international action on global warming.
Another worry pertains to executive authority. President Biden has established sweeping climate goals for his regulators, including the decarbonization of the electric grid by 2035 and the electrification of half the auto fleet by 2030. To meet these goals, the Biden administration asserts vast unilateral powers, based on expansive interpretations of laws that are already on the books. Along these lines, it’s a lot easier to justify a gross expansion of presidential power if one simply pretends that costs don’t exist.
—
This Kennedy descendant insists in her New York Times Book Review that “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” doesn’t offer “any actual instructions” for explosions. Pictured: The New York Times building seen on June 30, 2020, in New York City. (Photo: Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images)
If the name Tatiana Schlossberg sounds like a brand for white privilege, you would be right. She’s not a top chef or fashion designer. She’s the 30-year-old daughter of Caroline Kennedy and Ed Schlossberg, the granddaughter of former President John F. Kennedy.
Like Maria Shriver at NBC News, Tatiana Schlossberg became an “objective journalist” for a while, covering the environment for The New York Times from 2014 to 2017.
When she wrote a book in 2019 called “Inconspicuous Consumption,” NBC put her on TV and pushed her to run for office. She deferred, saying she is a journalist … a political activist of a different stripe.
On Jan. 24, she reviewed three books on “environmental disaster” for The New York Times Book Review. One book had an especially provocative title: “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” by a far-left Swedish professor named Andreas Malm. It was published on Jan. 5 by Verso Books, which calls itself “the largest independent, radical publishing house in the English-speaking world.”
The Left has declared war on our culture, but we should never back down, nor compromise our principles. Learn more now >>
That was one day before the terrible, violent rioton Capitol Hill.
Verso’s promotional blurb for this latest version of a Unabomber treatise is really something.
“In this lyrical manifesto, noted climate scholar (and saboteur of SUV tires and coal mines) Andreas Malm makes an impassioned call for the climate movement to escalate its tactics in the face of ecological collapse,” it says. “We need, he argues, to force fossil fuel extraction to stop—with our actions, with our bodies, and by defusing and destroying its tools. We need, in short, to start blowing up some oil pipelines.”
It seems intellectually incoherent for The New York Times to cheer social media platforms for squashing voices that promoted conspiracy theories about Donald Trump’s “landslide victory” because they might lead to violence … and then offer space to a book advocating property destruction.
Online, the Times promoted it with the headline “Three Books Offer New Ways to Think About Environmental Disaster.” When it comes to Big Energy (as opposed to Big Government), a few pipeline bombs offer “new ways to think,” an expansion of our ecological possibilities.
Schlossberg calls it “a compelling but frustrating treatise.” She says, “one of the most satisfying parts of his book comes when he brutally dispatches with ‘climate fatalists.’” (Perhaps when reviewing a book that endorses blowing stuff up, the words “brutally” and “dispatches” should be avoided.)
She loves how Malm writes that “climate fatalism is for those on top.” But here’s the poster girl for white privilege, a roving global correspondent born “on top,” promoting violence against energy companies, which provide jobs to Americans in flyover states much less privileged than she is.
This Kennedy descendant insists Malm doesn’t offer “any actual instructions” for explosions. She concludes, “the problem with violence, even if it’s meant only to destroy ‘fossil capital,’ is that ultimately it’s impossible to control.” That’s true.
Philosophically, one can ask whether it would be advisable or appropriate to publish a book titled “How to Blow Up a Book Publisher.” Did Verso Books ever consider that, or whether someone who’s hurt (or whose family members are killed) in a pipeline explosion could sue for damages?
And shouldn’t President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security broaden its focus on “domestic terrorism” from merely the far right to the far left? The left’s attempt to place the entire terrorism narrative on the right is completely undermined by its promotion of noxious books like this.
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A crowd of about 35,000 had gathered near the Washington Monument during a cold blustery Presidents Day weekend in the midst of an unusually mild winter to prod the Obama administration to take actions against climate change. The largest climate action rally in American history had been scheduled for noon on a Sunday, not exactly a time chosen with regular church-goers in mind”though, undoubtedly, for some present the environmental cause would be the closest thing to a religion in their lives.
I carried a sign that declared “Jesus is Pro-Planet” in 175-point type. I have no hesitation about the truth of the statement. Paul makes it clear in Colossians 1 that, through Christ, God is indeed reconciling to himself “all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven,” and that this is good news for “every creature under heaven.”
As C.S. Lewis noted in Mere Christianity , the true cosmic nature of Christ’s atonement is difficult for our inwardly focused minds to fathom but “there are strange, exciting hints in the Bible that when we are drawn in [to Christ], a great many other things in Nature will begin to come right.”
Francis Schaeffer made a similar point in his important Pollution and the Death of Man , a neglected manifesto for Evangelical environmentalism:
The blood of the Lamb will redeem man and nature together . . . . But Christians who believe the Bible are not simply called to say that “one day” there will be healing, but that by God’s grace, upon the basis of the work of Christ, substantial healing can be a reality here and now.
In 1970, Schaeffer spoke against the “greed and haste” that was destroying creation and called for the Church to be a “pilot plant” demonstrating the healing of man and nature. The failure to do so would, to Schaeffer, be both disobedient and bring the loss of a great evangelistic opportunity, with pantheism filling the vacuum as long as the Church practiced this “sub-Christianity.”
While Evangelical leaders enthusiastically embraced Schaeffer’s push to engage on abortion and other cultural issues in the 1980s, his words and actions about the darkness of environmental degradation and the beauty of nature have largely been forgotten. He agreed with the 1960s countercultural critique of a “plastic culture” with its overreliance on “the machine” of technology and a diminished concept of nature.
The counterculture’s diagnosis was largely correct , Schaeffer thought, but the favored prescription”implicit or explicit pantheism”reduced man to “no more than grass,” after which he feared that “impersonal technology will reign even more securely.”
Also problematic was the popular but “perverted” form of Christianity that embraced a type of Platonic dualism, focused exclusively on the soul and getting it to the higher state of Heaven. For such Christians, the realm of nature might, at best, serve as an apologetic tool, but it had no real intrinsic value to them or their version of God, despite his having proclaimed it “good” from the start.
Pollution and the Death of Man illustrates this point with the true story of a Christian institution run with its eyes solely on the sky. This austere school campus sits across a large ravine from what, despite its lushness, was derisively labeled as just a “hippie community” by the Christians. Schaeffer, after speaking at the school, visited the neighbors. He spoke with their leadership about ecological issues, saw the lovely fields, trees, gardens and even the site of their communal grape stomps.
Schaeffer realized that the Christians, with their unbiblical and cavalier attitude towards nature, were offering little to draw the sincere but lost pagans toward a true vision of creation and redemption. “When I stood on Christian ground and looked at the Bohemian people’s place,” wrote Schaeffer, “it was beautiful. Then I stood on pagan ground and looked at the Christian community and saw ugliness.” Schaeffer took it as a sad compliment when his hippie host said he was the first to come from “across the ravine” in such a manner.
Indeed, Schaeffer (who loved to hike the Alps and did not own a car after 1948) believed that only a return to orthodox Christianity could effectively bridge this chasm. He countered Platonic Christianity by emphasizing that all of creation, from the human body on down to a tree or a stone, has inherent value stemming from its association with the Creator. “What God has made, I, who am also a creature, must not despise.”
Schaeffer insisted that man is finite, as separated from the infinite God, as are our kin, the animals and the grass. But, lest we slide into pantheism, he also emphasized the separation from nature brought about by our special creation in the image of God. Here, the rest of creation lies below us, and in this regard we are much more than grass.
Maintaining these two truths in proper tension allows us to engage the environment with an appropriate respect for its order and worth. It is not a plaything, designed solely for our hedonistic enjoyment. We may use it, yes, but we should exercise dominion without utter destruction, always avoid disdain for what God has made, and delights in it independent of its utility to us. In practice, the Christian community should be a people that have learned “to say ‘Stop!’” and “refuse men the right to ravish our land, just as we refuse them the right to ravish our women.”
As I approached the D.C. throng calling for a “Stop!” of its own, I felt a bit as though I was taking the name of Jesus across a green ravine similar to the one Schaeffer walked. Looking over the crowd, I was reminded, though, that God has not been without his witnesses in this realm. The ringleader of the event, 350.org founder Bill McKibben, has regularly referenced his Methodist faith, and multiple Earth Flags”first created in 1969 by faithful believers John and Anna McConnell (who, incidentally, met with a little help from Richard John Neuhaus)”were taut in the stiff breeze.
Nevertheless, forty-three years after Schaeffer wrote his little treatise, plenty of pantheistic Mother Earth spirituality was on display as well as the secular humanism that Schaeffer famously warned against elsewhere. Unfortunately, the Evangelical Church did not step into the breach and much of its leadership instead now treats the small creation care movement as a theological leper, unclean because it engages with a green movement viewed as beyond redemption.
Yet the name of Jesus was surprisingly well received on the National Mall. I saw not one glare or frown; instead dozens of people made positive comments and requested photographs. A self-described agnostic hawking The Socialist Worker newspaper engaged with me about mankind’s relationship to God and closed by saying of Jesus with a smile, “Well, if he got you out here, he can’t be all bad.”
A small group of banner-wielding Evangelical college students, who allowed me to join them despite my relatively advanced years, also drew thanks from fellow believers in the crowd and inquiries from the curious. One secular liberal couple stood with us for quite a while asking questions about what it meant to be an Evangelical, honestly discussing their own negative associations of the term with George W. Bush and SUVs. They eventually were comfortable enough”in deliciously appropriate clichéd fashion” to share their granola bars, even with an openly pro-life Bush voter like me.
Plenty of work remains to be done, both to bandage God’s wounded creation and reach his most precious creatures. “ We’ve got the whole world in our hands,” a gaggle of green-clad marchers sang to a familiar Sunday School tune. “I think they’ve got the lyrics wrong,” I remarked with a wink to the students. We set about to sing the song correctly.
John Murdock works as a natural resources attorney in Washington, D.C., and is a member of The Falls Church Anglican in northern Virginia. He has written on environmental matters for numerous outlets including The New Atlantis.
RESOURCES
“ Earth Day’s Forgotten Founder ,” Flourish
“ Crowd marches to voice opposition to Keystone pipeline ,” Washington Post
“ Is Good Friday Good for the Earth? ,” Patheos
“ The Climate of Climate Change ,” The New Atlantis
“ The Genesis of Pixar ,” The New Atlantis
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