Killing off King Coal

An internet search using a phrase such as “coal power plant cancel” usually turns up a lot of hits.  Any developer with the chutzpah to try and build a coal fired plant will need a lot of lawyers.  For example, plants in Kansas, New Mexico, Arkansas, and Georgia have stayed tied up in court proceedings for years.

Energy Luddites have concluded that they don’t have to win the suits in order to win the battle.  Big capital projects of any kind — ports, harbors, highways, bridges, power plants — require an enormously long time for planning, engineering, getting environmental studies and government permits, training the future staff, developing operating procedures, and so on.  As a result, a coal-fired or nuclear power plant can easily have a billion dollars invested in it before the first shovel ever breaks the ground.  All you have to do to kill off a  project is lengthen the investment phase until the costs become unrecoverable.  That seems to be the game:  Exploit the court system to delay, delay, delay, and let the cost of money do the dirty work.  As a result, very few coal plants are being proposed or built in the United States.  The environmentalists are winning this part of the battle.

The Faltering Nuclear Renaissance

There is little need to remind you that no new nuclear plant has been begun in the United States in decades.  The existing fleet is aging.  Many plants have managed to get their licenses extended, but that provides no new power source.  The nuclear industry is struggling mightily to build a handful of new reactors in Florida, Georgia, Texas, and a couple of other places.  Some of these will probably succeed, but the price of the first new plants threatens to be enormous.  Once a nuclear plant is in production, it provides the cheapest electricity you can buy.  But nuclear power is particularly vulnerable to the delay-of-game strategy of environmental radicals.  Progress Energy of Florida has already slowed down its efforts on the two proposed plants in Florida’s Levy County.  Look for more of this to follow as utilities try to manage the costs of delay by slowing the spending rate to match the litigation rate.

Shifting to gas

The only politically viable energy source for baseload-sized electrical generation is natural gas.  The new extraction methods have increased supplies while the economic recession has actually reduced total gas consumption.

In addition, natural gas fired power plants are easier and faster to build than either coal or nuclear, and the environmental footprint is much smaller.  Litigation is reduced, and this combination of factors makes gas the obvious choice for utilities needing to add baseload capacity.  The problem is that if this trend continues for a long time, the energy mix will shift too heavily to a single kind of fuel.  A power grid too heavily dependent on that one fuel, natural gas, becomes highly vulnerable to any sort of disruption in supply.

And disruptions of supply are planned.  Environmental radicals and ordinary citizens are already in court challenging the new methods of gas extraction, charging that these methods contaminate ground water supplies.  If their efforts result in restricting supplies, gas prices will spike and electricity prices will spike along with them because the grid is too heavily dependent on gas for baseload generation.  In the most extreme case, one can imagine a scenario where there might not be enough gas to meet seasonal peaks.  Older readers will recall that this actually happened in the early 1980s, leading to a temporary ban on construction of plants that use natural gas for electric generation.

Environmental Cannibalism

Nowhere is the demented influence of environmental extremism more on display than in their reactions to the energy supplies they formerly advocated as replacements for fossil fuels.  Solar projects and wind projects are getting tied up in court just as if they were coal-fired plants!  When I refer to this group of people as energy Luddites, it’s not just idle blogger name-calling.  The “banana” acronym really does fit, “Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.”

What’s Needed

Let us hope that America will eventually emerge from its current recession.  If and when it does, electric demand will rise steeply along with it.  If electric cars become popular, the demand on the electric grid will rise even more steeply.  The grid is already strained to its maximum capacity on the days of highest peak demand.  It’s conceivable that a robust recovery coupled with a large uptick in the use of electric transportation could push things past the critical point.

So America needs new power plant construction, and we need it now.  Not only would plant construction projects provide a genuine boost to the economy, but they could help sustain a future recovery by providing low cost energy and permanent employment for the people who operate the plants.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

Hawking’s statement is an astonishing blunder in this regard.  He’s assuming more than he can properly claim to know, because no physics-based “theory of everything” has been devised.  Second, even if there is a math path to some ultimate set of equations describing matter and energy, the next obvious question is where the equations came from and what set them all a-whirring.  It won’t do to say that that’s just how things are, especially if this is your argument against God.  Third, a human being is more than a specialized assortment of atoms.  There’s a moral dimension to life, and I am still waiting for somebody like Hawking to explain how the Schrödinger equation means rape is evil and a mother’s love is good.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

Hassle come-lately

Now the controversy concerns an issue that goes generally under the name of “worship style.”  If you could see me just now, you’d see me doing a bit of squirming and hand-wringing about my next statement.  What unsettles people about the new contemporary worship style is whether it is worship at all.

Here are the necessary disclaimers, typed with deep breathing and eye rolling.  Obviously, just because liturgy adopts an ancient style doesn’t guarantee it’s genuine.  Yes, yes, yes, let us all together recite the Great Canticle that hypocrites and fakes come in every age, size, condition, race, and worship style, blah, blah, blah.  I get that.

What I don’t get is why worship now must feature all the degraded, shoddy trappings of show business.  Is it certain this is even trying to be worship?  No… wait a minute.  Is that worded too harshly?  I just can’t think of a sweet way to say that it looks like the new worship style has been taken over by (many, some, a few) people who are exploiting church to get an audience for their performances.  If fame is your goal, any stage will do for a place to start.  Some start in the subway in New York.  Others start in a Baptist church in Alabama.

I look at a typical stage show from a hip new musical group and what do I see?  Stage?  Check.  Sound system with enough watts to pulverize concrete?  Check.  Auditorium darkened?  Check.  Performer with spotlight on himself?  Check.  Performer in hobo costume with Yasser Arafat beard and just-got-outta-bed hair?  Check.

Two questions: Have I just described a typical church service or a hate-fest production from Green Day?  Trouble is, you can’t really tell.  And that is the trouble for those of us who have this notion that church should be a city of light set on a hill, not a mud village lost in the jungle of contemporary life.

Second question: Why are we doing this?  An aphorism with growing currency is doubtless true, that every culture has an underlying cult.  An implacable, malevolent antichristian cult underlies much of the modern music and entertainment culture.   It looks and acts a certain way as an expression of the cult that animates it.  So to rephrase Question 2, why are Christians mimicking its dress, manners, and musical expressions?

Till he comes

As I said, such controversies will all come to surcease when Jesus breaks the eastern sky.  Even so, come, Lord Jesus!

Until then, let us note that we are in a controversy.  This one pits generations against one another in a strange new way.  Among secular people, the children of the Baby Boomers are the first generation in living memory to actually like the music of their parents’ generation.  And just about the time the older generation has come around to the wisdom of their forefathers, their churches are casting it aside to gain popularity with the very culture of youthful rebellion they were belatedly trying to leave.  It is a grief to them.  Want to see an old rock-and-roller get misty-eyed?  Let the pipe organ and piano lead the congregation in an old and lofty hymn like Crown Him with Many Crowns.

Churches are splitting up over this.  People are forsaking old loyalties because they feel their churches have forsaken righteousness in an unseemly pursuit of being cool.  Many are dropping out of church altogether.  Maybe the rock and rollers such as myself must be blamed for insufficiently repenting of our own days of teen rebellion. We came around too late, too clumsily, without a clean break, and with a moral leadership that was compromised.

But even if that is true, the generation of fifty-somethings and sixty-somethings has begun its decline.  The grave isn’t so far away any more.  A new generation is taking its place, and the current controversy too-benignly referred to as “worship style” threatens to undo them before they get started.  If God’s people do not worship well, if they grow estranged from him because their adoration is vapid and carnal, if their leaders exploit the church as a platform for their show-biz vanity, then the springs will run dry and the glory will depart, for God will inhabit the praises of his people.

As a matter of wisdom and not legality, may I ask music and worship leaders to consider their ways?  It’s popular in Reformed circles to say that worship is the highest thing people do.  If this is true, why would we dress heaven’s noblest calling in earth’s vulgar rags?

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

The alternate view goes under the tongue-twisting name of dispensationalism.  The root word, to dispense, has to do with how things are administrated.  In Christianity, this refers to the rules, terms, and conditions of a covenant between God and men.  In brief, dispensationalism is the view that God deals with men through various covenants, each one further revealing himself and establishing the rules for the people that covenant addresses.

Those who hold the dispensational view say that when Christ died and rose again, the covenant called the law of Moses abruptly ended and the age of the New Testament abruptly commenced.  The Hebrew writer quotes from Jeremiah 31 noting that a new covenant has been foretold which is different from the old one and (Heb 8:6) established upon better promises:

In that He says, “A new covenant,” He has made the first obsolete. Now what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away.  (Heb 8:13)

The Gospel, which is eternal (2 Tim 1:9), never changes in any respect.    But the writer of Hebrews explains that the administration of man’s affairs has changed.  The old covenant is “obsolete,” he says, and a new covenant has been put in place.

This has the effect of clarifying matters as man relates to God.  The writings of the New Testament explain what God expects of us.  The Old Testament, which is no less the word of God, reveals God’s character, remembers the history of God’s people, illumines God’s dealings with us, and provides us with reasons for our hope in God.  (Rom 15:4)

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

In the field of mathematics there are certain basic truths called axioms.  An axiom is a truth so basic that it cannot be derived from anything else.  It’s a truth that stands alone, isn’t supported by other truths, and serves as the starting point for other truths.  For example, Euclid stated that it’s possible to draw a straight line from any point to another point.  This is true yet can’t be derived from some other truth.  It is what some call a brute fact.

For the Christian, the righteousness of God is the most basic statement of all that is right.  Whatever conforms to the character of Christ is right, and whatever contradicts it is wrong.  We don’t derive this from more basic principles because there is nothing more basic than God.  Without him was not anything made that was made.  (Jn 1:3)  God isn’t declared righteous by some third party that judges him against a preexisting law and credits him with reaching the standard.  Rather, God is the standard, and the law is just an expression of what he is like.  He isn’t just a righteous individual.  He is the King of Righteousness.

If there’s any essential ingredient missing from the human condition, righteousness is it.  Try to imagine a world where everyone just did what was right, and you’ll be imagining heaven and the eternal state.

Kings have authority to grant things within their kingdom.  Jesus told his disciples, “Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”  (Luke 12:32)  Note: this is not half the kingdom, like Herod giddy with lust over a belly dancer.   This is the entire scope of his kingdom — good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over, and he who overcomes will inherit all things.  Among the chief treasures of God’s kingdom is righteousness, and that is granted to us by his grace, given freely, abundantly, overflowing to his children.  Happy are the ones who hunger and thirst for it, for they will be filled.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

Do you suppose America would have allowed that?  Would we have let liberals beguile us with oily words about the first amendment?  Or would Americans have had the good sense to recognize the Hirohito cult for what it was, a fifth column intent on doing the enemy’s bidding?

Just asking.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

Revelation 19:11 ascribes two names to Jesus, Faithful and True.  To say that Christ is faithful combines the divine virtues of honesty and love.  If God has promised a thing, will he not make good on it?  (Nu 23:19)  His word is an immutable thing.  Once he has spoken, heaven and earth may pass away, but his word never shall.

And further, God loves his children with a perfect, pure, holy, and eternal love.  Every human love, no matter how sweet, is tainted by sin and has flecks of evil stirred in.  But God’s love for us seeks only our good, seeks it forever, seeks it with the ardor that is willing to sacrifice the Son for us, and seeks it with a loyalty that can never be dissuaded.  Christ loved us while we were still sinners (Ro 5:8) and gave himself for us foreknowing every transgression we would ever commit.  And having loved his own, he loved them unto the end. (Jn 13:1)

It is a grief for many people in this world that they never have a friend who is faithful.  But Christ Jesus is faithful.  The Bible says to receive him, and he will receive you, and you will discover that he is faithful who has promised never to leave you nor forsake you.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

No, to get the better of aggressive Moslems, you need to fight transcendent claims with the transcendent truth of the Gospel, and you need to compare Mohammed the false prophet with Jesus Christ the Redeemer.  Secularism simply has no weapons with which to resist the Islamic menace.  It’s about time the Christians started deploying ours, yes?

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

It’s increasingly popular among non-evangelical Christians to say that Zionism equals racism and is therefore just another form of organized evil.  On that basis, they would categorize Israel as an apartheid state to be punished into conformity with the pluralistic West.  If I were to judge Israel on Gospel principles alone, I could almost see that.  I wish everybody were born again, washed in the blood, Bible taught, and Spirit-led.  And I wish everyone could cheerfully hop aboard the Gospel train where there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave or free, male or female, Israeli or Arab.  That’s how I wish things were.

Facts

Fact is, the Israeli-Arab conflict affects us.  Harry Truman immediately extended formal recognition to Israel upon their founding as a nation, putting the USA front and center in this conflict.  America has financially supported Israel and defended her militarily and diplomatically for the last six decades.  That represents a considerable investment of American prestige.  It not only weights our history but strongly guides our trajectory going forward.  The anti-Israel doctrine being peddled by Pat Buchanan and other self-described American nationalists is blind on this point.  The doctrine borrows heavily from Ayn Rand’s acrid philosophy of self-interest which doesn’t work for nations any better than it works for individuals.  Israel, despite problems, errors, setbacks and (some may argue) even crimes, is an ally in whose fortunes we share.  Anger can’t change that.

Domestic American Politics

Why America continues to side with Israel is a matter of dispute.  There is much paranoia out there about a Jewish lobby pulling strings in Washington and making America do things against her own interests.  Personally, I think that’s ridiculous.  Every country lobbies foreign governments on its own behalf.  Of course Israel does this too, so denouncing this as the plot of a sinister Jewish cabal is to mix malice with ignorance of how nations conduct affairs with each other.

Besides, from my little window that faces the American South, conservative, evangelical Christianity looks like the bigger political influence. These folks point to the promises in Genesis 12 of God’s blessing on America if we bless Israel, and a curse if we don’t.  Their reading of world events tends to confirm that in their minds.  So they support Israel strongly, and they vote that way.  It’d be hard to find a successful politician in the American South who is vociferous in his rejection of Israel.

Beyond the evangelical South, there are huge numbers of Americans with a purely secular outlook who also tend to favor Israel.  They do so because Israel is a democracy reflecting, however faintly, our sort of society.  Israelis elect their governments and even allow Moslem citizens to participate in elections.  Secular Americans see Islam damning and warring with all of Western civilization including Europe, Israel, and the United States.  Thus they see Israel as our natural ally and fellow soldier resisting Islam’s long war against the West.  They may not know jack about biblical end time stuff, but they know that if Moslems destroy Israel as they have sworn to do, it’ll be a victory for an enemy that is coming after us too.

Yet there remains this small but growing sect of people who view our involvement with Israel as inimical to American interests.  These folks have their reasons, not all of them bad, for thinking that America would be better off with an isolationist stance, especially when it comes to Israel.    The danger for Christians in this category is that they have to operate in close political proximity to people who just hate Jews.  No, I’m not saying post-millennial folks are anti-Semitic, just that they’re standing in the same political queue with people who are.  It’s an ugly fact of life that you’ll get known for the company you keep.  And standing that queue also puts them in the company of people who would like to destroy America for the same reasons they’d like to destroy Israel.  I should not be necessary to say that this does not make them anti-American.  I should also not have to add that anti-Americans will not pause to absorb the nuances.  They’ll just look at proponents of replacement theology, shout Allahu Akhbar, and that will be that.

Finally, make no mistake: There’s an anti-Israel lobby in Washington, too.  No word yet on whether that is an anti-cabal cabal.

And then there are the Palestinians

Who could fail to feel sorry for the Palestinians?  In 1948 their leaders persuaded them to flee Israel under the false promise of a successful re-invasion and conquest.  Successful re-invasion never happened.  Then they were kicked out of Jordan.  They’ve been refused entry into other Moslem states.  The Lebanese have confined them to settlers’ camps.  Gaza itself is not far from the condition of Mogadishu, a squalid failure with a collapsed economy dominated by armed gangs, Islamic fanatics, drug lords, war lords, smugglers, terrorists, and assassins.  Much of the aid sent to Palestine has been stolen by leaders such as Yasser Arafat who socked away billions in secret Swiss bank accounts.  Palestine has had a very long, very raw deal.

But most Americans honestly feel that a lot of that is their own fault and that of their Moslem allies.  There’s a sense that the Palestinians are trying to operate an Al Sharpton style grievance racket in a market where there are no buyers.  If they’d get over it and start building their own fortunes as others have done (think Taiwan, for example), they’d have a chance at building a decent state.  I wish they’d do that.  I’m confident they won’t.  Shifting blame and nursing resentment are just too sweet to sinners.  Besides, it merges with the general sense of wounded pride among Moslem nations.  Islam is more than a religion.  It’s also a political and economic system.  So where is there a Moslem nation that’s keeping up with Asia or the West in terms of liberty, lifestyle, and how the general populace shares in the national prosperity?

Where to Go from Here?

You may wish that America could step into the Middle East and settle it all in a way the Palestinians and Israelis could accept.  But we cannot.  The Jews will not stop existing, and the Palestinians will never stop trying to get them to.  You tell me: where is there a space for compromise in there?  Trying to fix this with words on paper is a fool’s errand for sure.

Getting back to facts rather than wishes, it’s a fact that America has no vital, secular interest in what happens to Gaza or the West Bank area.  If Israel conquered all of it and circumcised every Moslem male, this would have no harmful effect on America’s vital secular interests.  We’re talking about what would happen if the fighting went red hot and Israel won it all, which they would (at least until Iran goes nuclear).  Mostly nothing bad would happen to America.  Pro-Palestinian terror groups would threaten us, but they already do that anyhow.  They would bomb our stuff, but they already do that, too.  OPEC might cut off our oil for a while, but oil company execs are watching their backs and have been reducing their dependence on Middle Eastern oil for a long time.  We get much of our oil from non Middle East suppliers like Canada, Mexico, Nigeria, and so on.  If Middle Eastern countries cut us off entirely, it’d require some belt tightening, and that’d be it, I suspect.

Those whose sentiments run with the Palestinians may wish the United States had a vested interest in helping their side, but we don’t.  Ditto that for the considerable number of people who just hate Jews and wish they’d all drop dead.  But again, we’re talking about how things are versus how people wish they were.  And how they are is like this: The Palestinians have a quasi-nation with hopelessly crooked leadership and holds nothing of vital interest to the USA.  By contrast, Israel is a legitimate nation for the most part representing Western values, has been a reliable American ally, and is invested with considerable US prestige and treasure.

All that leaves us pretty much where we are today.  More than with most allies, Israel’s friendship costs us.  But it’s a cost we should pay because the alternatives – either neutrality or joining the Moslems – are very much worse.  With either one, we abandon an important ally with deep historical connections, and that would leave us with no allies anywhere who would grant us a speck of credibility.  The latter option, siding with the Moslems, compounds dishonor with folly, for there is no arrangement the United States could make short of dhimmitude that would satisfy them.