Fire and Knowledge

Yahoo! is going carbon neutral:

Yahoo! has committed to going carbon neutral this year. Essentially, that means we’re going to invest in greenhouse gas reduction projects around the world to neutralize Yahoo!’s impact on the environment. While doing our homework on this, we measured our carbon footprint and discovered that Yahoo! going carbon neutral is equivalent to shutting off the electricity in all San Francisco homes for a month. Or, pulling nearly 25,000 cars off the road for a year….

We know carbon neutrality isn’t without controversy. And it’s honestly deserved if companies and individuals don’t first make an effort to find direct ways to reduce their impact. We’ll continue to be vigilant about cutting ours, looking for creative ways to power our facilities, encourage even more employees to seek alternative commutes, and generally inspire Yahoos around the world to think differently about their energy use. (For example, in honor of Earth Day, we’re challenging Yahoos to decrease their consumption by 20% this week to help build lasting habits.) We’ll also be deliberate about investing in offset projects that can verifiably deliver their expected environmental benefits.

I think it’s great that more companies are getting on the “green” bandwagon. I hope it continues. I wonder when Christian organizations will start doing things like this. It will probably be a long while, unfortunately.

It’s taken a long time for awareness to get this far and to have so many people embrace it — though there are still many critics. (And I’m thankful for critics, as long as they are really trying to figure out what is right instead of just being stubborn and not wanting to change their ways.)

It is my hope that caring for our world will become a standard value of humanity. There is a chance!

I have overcome a fiercely anti-Catholic upbringing in order to attend Mass simply and solely to escape Protestant guitars.

–Anne Dillard, “An Expedition to the Pole,” in Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (1983), 30

According to recent polls, 40% of workers are not saving for retirement and 25% percent of workers say they have no savings at all (source).

That means 1 out of every 4 people in America do not have savings. Solomon has a proverb for this. He tells the sluggard (or "lazy fool" in a paraphrase) to "go to the ant" and watch how "she prepares her bread in summer and gathers her food in harvest" (see Proverbs 6). The wise store up for hard times.

We must plan for the future. Instead of buying gadgets and getting into debt, we should be putting money aside so we do not become a burden on family and society. In fact, if everyone saved responsibly there would be little need for social security. (Perhaps one day I’ll write up my idea for how to eliminate social security and replace it with a stable, decentralized system.)

If you are not saving for emergencies and retirement, it’s simple to remedy. Here are some action steps:

1. Open an IRA with your employer.
   1. Put as much as you can into it with each paycheck. Most employers will match up to a percentage of your income (usually anywhere from 3% to 5%). Did you catch that? You double your money the first day!
   2. Whatever you put into an IRA can be deducted from your income taxes and you don’t pay taxes on gains and dividends. It sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? So why aren’t you doing it?
   3. If you are self-employed or work for an employer that does not offer IRAs, you can open your own and get the tax benefits.
2. Open a high-yield savings account. I use ING Direct.
   1. This is your reserve account and should build up each month. The money is there for when something goes wrong — like your water heater explodes or Rover needs heart surgery.
   2. Setup an automatic monthly transfer from your checking account to your savings account. If you’re working full time, this should be at least $100.
   3. Don’t use your savings account for anything other than (1) emergency purchases or, occasionally, (2) making more money. But if you use it to make more money, always replace what you took out as soon as possible.
   4. The goal is to have — on top of your emergency reserve — six months to a year of living expenses covered in your savings. If you lose your job then there should be enough to live comfortably while you find a new job. (Or to finance that small business you’ve always wanted to start.)

That’s it. Now watch it grow, save on taxes and feel a little more like a wise man than a "lazy fool."

So let’s say baby Sophie has a state-of-the-art gene job: her parents paid for the proteins discovered by, say, 2005 that, on average, yielded 10 extra IQ points. By the time Sophie is five, though, scientists will doubtless have discovered ten more genes linked to intelligence. Now anyone with a platinum card can get 20 IQ points, not to mention a memory boost and a permanent wrinkle-free brow. So by the time Sophie is twenty-five and in the job market, she’s already more or less obsolete—the kids coming out of college just plain have better hardware….

It’s not [, Gregory Stock adds,] “so different from upgraded software. You’ll want the new release.” The vision of one’s child as a nearly worthless copy of Windows 95 should make parents fight like hell to make sure we never get started down this path. But the vision gets lost easily in the gushing excitement about “improving” the opportunities for our kids.

–Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003), 34-35

The media loves massacre. If they don’t, they sure send mixed signals.

I wasn’t planning on saying anything about the Virginia Tech shooting, but then I read what Justin at Radical Congruency wrote about the media’s exploitation of the “Massacre of Virginia Tech.”

Like Justin, I find the media’s handling of such issues appalling, which is why I rarely watch TV news. Everything is made into entertainment. The media does not respect the dead, but rather profit from them and exploit them. It’s like today’s quote from Wendell Berry: “People exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love.” The media sees only value in death, thus exploiting those who have fallen.

Perhaps I am being too harsh. I probably am. But this is not the first time it has happened. Think of Columbine or 9-11 or plane crashes. I first realized this during 9-11, when they played the videos of the towers being hit over and over and over again. It felt like propaganda. I had to turn it off. But, oh, how the media lives for such moments! The world is watching, and they want to see it again and again. They don’t want to think; they want to feel. And feeling is where TV news excels.

(If you are interested in understanding this phenomenon further, the best two books I’ve read on the subject are Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) and Daniel Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961).)

People exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love.

–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), 41

Technology always has unintended consequences. Cell phones have had many — from car accidents to people wearing strange usb-key-looking-things in their ears. Scientists are suggesting another unintended consequence: bee killing. This is significant not only for ecological reasons but for agricultural — bees pollinate our crops so we can eat. An article in The Independent says:

It seems like the plot of a particularly far-fetched horror film. But some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world’s harvests fail.

They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world – the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops. Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon – which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe – was beginning to hit Britain as well.

The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees’ navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up….

The West Coast is thought to have lost 60 per cent of its commercial bee population, with 70 per cent missing on the East Coast…. The implications of the spread are alarming. Most of the world’s crops depend on pollination by bees. Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, “man would have only four years of life left”.

More studies will follow. But let this be a reminder how technology is a bargain — for every advantage, there is a disadvantage that isn’t always obvious. Sometimes “progress” is one step forward, two steps back.

(For further reading on technological consequences, see Neil Postman’s Technopoly.)

Update: Welcome all new visitors! I think Chris, in the comments below, makes great points, so be sure to read that as well. If you like what I have to say, check out the rest of the site and consider subscribing to my feed.

’Tis a dangerous thing to engage the authority of Scripture in disputes about the Natural world … lest Time, which brings all things to light, should discover that to be evidently false which we had made scripture to assert.

–Rev. Thomas Burnet (1635? – 1715) quoted in Stephen Jay Gould, “A Darwin for All Reasons,” in I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History (2002), 221