USA: Oil Addiction: Environment, economy, religion & Fed policy
Suddenly, after President George Bush launched the expression "addiction to oil" in his State of the Union message, Evangelical leaders have joined other religious spokespeople in speaking out for environmental care. The mainstream media (MSM) have tried to spin this move as an attack and distancing from Bush; but on Fox News Channel TV one of the very prominent signers of the Evnglcl statement forcefully said it was neither pro-Bush nor anti-Bush, only a sincere effort to underscore the signers' longtime-coming understanding of human responsiblity to care for the creation, and thus with the environment of humanity, to care better for humanity itself for which our earthly environoment is our God-given home along with all the other critters. I'm delited with this position, and I believe it is entirely within sphere of responsiblity of churches in our particular times. Not all evangelicals necessarily agree, of course.
But there being no all-spheres hegemonic teaching as in Catholicism, Evnglcls in the public-legal order where the focal God-given task is public justice for all, an Evangelical in politics is completely free to take a justice-stance that factors in several political factors at once, and need not speak in faith-language at all.
This is exactly what President Bush was about in finally moving after 6 years to hammer down the concept of "the USA is addicted to oil," and to factor into his move favourable in a whole new way the current dependency of the American people, corporations, government operations and military transport upon oil purchased on the international market from the oil cartel - which includes several Arab countries, some of whom are enemies of the USA, Venezuela, and others that hate us. We cannot be dependent on these forces.
Bush with Vice President Cheney are oilmen. They are intimate with that industry above all others. At the same time, for six years Bush has been meeting in major unpublicized conferences with explorative and innovative interests desirous of developing new industries that are working on the development of biofuels (like corn, switch grass, and as Bush said in his SothU speech, woodchips - all of which produce methane that hopeufully can be converted to ethanol which can be burned in alternatively-fuelled vehicles producing only a byproduct of a bit of water).
Bush didn't stop there either. He had more in mind that vehicle fuels that don't pollute. He considered wind, solar, and nuclear energy for other industries, homes, and buildings.
This is an extremely important initiative, and sets out an agenda for years to come, one that will meet many as-yet-unanticipated obstcles to overcome. It will have to be handed off to others, whether Republicans or Democrats; and it will meet fierce resistance from the oil industry, car manufacturers, consumers, and labour unions - politically from some liberals and some conservatives.
But it's the way to go.
In yet another societal sphere besides the churches and the government, Evangelicals (along with many of other faiths) are strongly represented in the sciences, college and graduate teaching and research in biological sciences and environomental studies (an aspect I can only mention in passing, in part because it doesn't fit the MSM-spindoctored stereotype that we Evangelicals are only intersted Intelligent Design theory (some of us are, some of us aren't, some of us are theistic evolutionists + ID-interested + strongly into the reformational philosophical perspective in biology that emphasizes creational biotic laws and the research to ever better formulate them and improvingly revise them as new evidence becomes available (here's my niche of concern and interest in the scientific sphere). - Owlb
Bush's plan to wean US off oil: ambitious enough?
To reduce oil intake, Bush's energy plan can only do so much
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