Hot and cold running arguments

Conservative Christians have been arguing that there's no such thing as global warning. I'll admit that it's been a hard winter which certainly makes it easy to doubt the veracity of claims from scientists, politicians and activists who warn us that we're damaging the environment. Be that as it may, Christians should be careful not to close their ears to the pleas of Al Gore too quickly.

The position of many is that humans must be amazingly arrogant to think that we could somehow ruin or damage something which only God Himself has created. Hey, I'm no deist, I'm totally with you that God is God and I am not and that He alone retains ultimate sovereignty over His Earth.

But please hear me out. My wife and I are home owners. The deed is in our name, we pay the mortgage and the property taxes and the utility bills. But guess what- we still have to nag our kids to clean their rooms and pick up their dirty clothes off the floor and hang their towels in the bathroom and their coats on their hooks. Believe me, as much as I love my children, given complete run of the house, they would wreck it in short order.

When we were renters we were blessed with a great landlord. He was a good friend and a master electrician. He took care of the furnace and the air conditioner and the security alarm. Once he even fixed the garbage disposal. But guess what- I still had to take out the trash and sweep the floors and scrub the bathrooms and wash the windows, and change the air filter not to mention flush the toilets and dust the furniture.

Sure, it may seem arrogant to think that humans are capable of destroying what God has made, but I'm afraid that it's also terribly irresponsible and perhaps even just as arrogant to assume that we aren't damaging the planet, even to the point of altering the climate. Just as children naively and perhaps selfishly assume that their parents are going to take care of everything- (especially if they're spoiled and never taught to make their own beds or wash and fold their own clothes) we would be fools to imagine that 7 billion people, ravenously consuming limited resources, especially with fossil fuels are not or could not demean and even destroy God's creation.

Maybe they did a disservice to mislabel climate change as "global warming" so that when Iowa has the 6th coldest winter in recoded history, the conservatives are so quick to declare that it's all some big lie that we should ignore. The weather has more extremes and the oceans are rising, there may not be any more or any fewer volcanoes, earthquakes or wars, but there are more tsunamis and hurricanes and those hurricanes are more powerful that they used to be. The winter may be colder in Iowa, but the summer is also hotter. And smog , contaminated water, and endangered species are not things to shrug off and disappearing polar bears is not something to just joke about.

Please consider something. Conservatives may not have much patience for environmentalists and they're justified be concerned that jobs shouldn't be sacrificed for trivial and emotional campaigns to save obscure animals. However, why would environmental activists, scientists, and all those terrible "Liberals" make up false claims about the environmental crisis? Just to make themselves feel important? To undermine and destroy all our precious freedoms and American way of life? Do they really want to just ruin all the fun?

Please. These are serious people and as "bleeding hearts," they are by definition, caring and concerned people who want to help make things better. Even if you think that they are sometimes overzealous or misguided, you cannot argue that they are uninformed or negligent. They are thoughtful and intelligent and their concern is for all our best interest. So please, don't write them off as morally inferior or irrelevant and ignore them.

Indeed, we all- especially Christians, need to search ourselves and reflect on our behaviors and attitudes toward the environment. I know that I for one am guilty of crass consumerism and laziness when it comes to "leaving more behind than I came in with," which was the opposite of how they taught us to treat out campsites in Boy Scouts.

God calls us to be stewards of HIS Earth. It was the first responsibility He gave to Adam and Eve and a serious responsibility bestowed on Noah. Humans may be the only creatures made in His own image and the apple of His eye, the only ones He sent His Son to die and rise again for, but it is still arrogant, selfish, and short-sighted for us to think that we are the only creatures that He cares about or that all of creation is meant merely for us to use up and cast off any way we please or that He won't hold us accountable for our poor stewardship- including letting us wallow in the squalor we find ourselves in.

I like to tease atheists by letting them know that just because they don't believe in God, He still believes in them. Well you know something- just because conservatives deny that there's such a thing as global warming, doesn't mean that we shouldn't all start buying that ocean front property in Arizona!

Opposition to Ethanol a bunch of manure

Food costs are up and some people seem to want to blame corn farmers. The blame is probably coming from the petroleum lobby, because people who know a lot more about corn and markets than me can tell you that if anything, there is a surplus of corn. If the price of corn isn’t high because of unnatural market manipulation or speculation, than it’s high because the price of diesel and gas that corn growers need for tractors and trucking.

One of the things that the oil companies don’t want us to understand. Corn ethanol/alcohol is made from the starch and sugar in corn. Cows are biologically and anatomically incapable of digesting those corns and sugars. A Cow’s 4-part stomach is specifically designed to design fiber or cellulose.

The starch and sugar goes in one end and out the other. Crap! What a waste of potential energy!

I am less worried about Iowa farmers sending too much corn to ethanol plants than I am about Brazilian farmers plowing under the Amazon rainforest to plant corn that competes with Americans for market share. Less rainforest means less oxygen producing trees and more carbon dioxide, less ozone, more climate change etc. etc. etc. Not to mention less money for Iowa farmers, and more Brazilians driving more cars etc. etc.

But if we’re still worried about sending too much corn to ethanol instead of food products, animal feeds, and the myriad of other industrial uses, there’s always switch grass.

According to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, switch grass “grows fast, capturing lots of solar energy and turning it into lots of chemical energy— cellulose—that can be liquefied, gasified, or burned directly. It also reaches deep into the soil for water, and uses the water it finds very efficiently.” They say it is one of the best crops for protecting the soil and preventing erosion AND, it filters more carbon dioxide out of the air than most crops.

But corn and switch grass are not the only plants that could be used as oil alternatives. Cattails, that’s right, cattails, also known as bullrush or reedmace has all kinds of environmentally friendly uses. Many cities use cattails to process their sewage. Cattails filter out nitrates not only from human waste, but from fertilizer run off. I think that cattails might be a great landscaping idea for big hog operations.

They’re also incredibly valuable as wild life habitat. Hunters have to love that. Cattails are a high starch plant, so once they’ve done their job cleaning the water, they can be harvested and processed into ethanol just like corn and switch grass. What makes it even better is that it’s a perennial, so farmers wouldn’t have to keep buying seed and replanting it every year.

One of the problems that waste water and runoff is causing is something you may have heard about in the news called “dead zones.” Dead zones are large areas of ocean where plants and fish and other life forms can no longer survive, either from pollution to that area, or from rising average water temperatures. A great solution could be kelp. Kelp is an amazing plant, basically a type of algae that can grow several stories tall under sea.

Like cattails, kelp cleans the water it’s in. Like the rainforest, kelp uses tons of carbon dioxide while producing tons of oxygen. Like corn, switch grass, and cattails, kelp provides incredible habitat for animals, which commercial fishermen would benefit from. Deliberately planted or farmed kelp can bring life back to dead zones. And what very few people realize is that, like corn, switch grass, and cattails, kelp can be made into ethanol.

Republicans are demanding that Congress open more coastlines to off shore oil exploration, but the oil companies already lease 90 million acres to do that and they are not doing it on 70 million of those acres. Why should they be allowed to risk more ecological damage when they refuse to drill where they are?

Could it be because it’s in their best interest to keep supplies low so that prices remain high, insuring their continued record profits? Who would want to scare us into believing that inflation of food prices is the corn farmers fault? People who want us to remain dependant on oil.

Especially when new drilling would only reduce the price of gas by a couple of cents a gallon and not for a decade or more anyway, more off shore drilling is not the answer. Turning to environmentally friendly fuel alternatives including ethanol, geo-thermal, solar and wind would not only be better stewardship of the environment, it would create millions of jobs- just like the New Deal, WWI, the railroads, or the internet all did. That would mean that green fuels would benefit the whole economy for at least twenty to forty years. Most importantly it would reduce our reliance on foreign oil, making Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Venezuela far less important. Best of all, it would benefit Iowa agriculture if we’re smart enough to pursue it aggressively.

Even if you think that global warming and climate change are nothing more than Chicken Little panicking about the sky caving in, “green energy” like corn ethanol is still a great idea.