Conundrums We All Face
Mary Vole asked a question about the EU continuing to import Russian gas. If she turns on her heater, would she be supporting the Russian war effort.
I have a similar conundrum when it comes to using fossil fuels in my car or even heating my house. Am I adding to the CO2 causes of global warming?
Or am I contributing to the genocide of Palestinians and Lebanese when I pay taxes to my government which is supplying bombs to the IFD?
How do you resolve such questions?
I have a similar conundrum when it comes to using fossil fuels in my car or even heating my house. Am I adding to the CO2 causes of global warming?
Or am I contributing to the genocide of Palestinians and Lebanese when I pay taxes to my government which is supplying bombs to the IFD?
How do you resolve such questions?
Comments
That really bothers me. It bothers me even more how powerless I feel about the lack of options to do something about it.
AFZ
*Unless you're using a desktop machine.
Possibly, but likewise. Note and take seriously what @Caissa and @Ruth have said.
No. The government collects taxes off you whether you like it or not. You have no choice, neither in whether you pay them nor in what the government does with the money it collects off you. My advice would always be to concentrate on the moral issues over which you have direct agency, e.g. whether you love and care for your children, your neighbour - and your parents if still alive -, whether you are faithful to your spouse, whether you are honest etc. etc. etc. Unless you are fulfilling all those, it is a distraction to agonise about the high-minded and abstract sorts of issues you've mentioned. All too often such are the excuses people use to avoid addressing the things that should be taking priority in their lives.
Agreed!
Doublethink, Admin
(For everyone’s reference, this is the legal definition of genocide.)
If we can boycott an area of expenditure by choice - for me an example would be to only buy free range dairy and meat or to go without - then we are empowered in that way.
We are empowered to make our voices known to those making decisions on the collective issues we care about through the ballot box and by lobbying and backing organisations who take up the cause, eg The Clewer Initiative which tackles modern day slavery.
We are empowered to use less of those fossil fuels we believe are harmful, in any way we can so that we can take a bus or train, wear extra layers, etc.
We are all empowered to demonstrate the values we hold dear, so that others might do the same.
And we can keep on praying, because God can join up our collective prayers in extraordinary ways.
If prayer makes you feel better or shores up your personal efforts, great. I doubt it does a damn thing for children in cobalt mines.
As a quick side note rather than starting an unrelated side discussion, do you believe God responds to prayer at all, or just not in cases like this? (I personally believe He does, though I also believe we should try to make a difference with our actions in the world.)
Is the real problem for the children and others mining cobalt in deeply dangerous conditions that not enough people are praying for them? Or that God doesn't care to answer these prayers? Or is it that they are poor people in a poor country, the Democratic Republic of Congo, nowhere near the center of power in their own country and even farther removed from the centers of global power?
It makes me feel ever so slightly better about my gasoline-powered car, as it's the demand for electric vehicles that's driving the market for cobalt:
https://earth.org/cobalt-mining/
Lithium iron phosphate batteries largely eliminate cobalt. Cobalt is, however, essential to refining petroleum.
(For everyone’s reference, this is the legal definition of genocide.)
For history buff's the term was first coined by Raphael Lemkin. I remember reading his 1944 book as an undergraduate student in a seminar course on the Holocaust.
When it's finished our house will have an air source heat pump, with the power consumption offset by 40(!) solar panels and managed with the aid of a battery. It will also, of course, have 6"+ of insulation all round. We're extremely fortunate to be able to do this, but it's the sort of setup most people in the UK will be needing to move towards.
Simply put they rely on the fact that if you compress air you raise its temperature and that heat can then be transferred to water by conduction. When the air is decompressed it is cooler than when it went in. The energy required to compress the air and pump it through a heat exchanger is a lot less than that required to heat the water directly so it's more efficient than conventional electric heating.
So if you have gas heating or resistive electric heating, then you are converting energy in the gas, or electricity directly to heat. With a heat pump, you are using the electricity that your heat pump uses to move heat from the outside (or from underground, depending on whether you have an air-source or ground-source heat pump) to the inside of your home. Because you're moving heat from a colder place to a hotter place, this takes energy to do - but not as much energy as directly creating the heat. Heat Pumps are characterized by a coefficient of performance (COP).
The UK currently has energy price caps at 24.5 p per kWh for electricity and 6.24 p per kWh for natural gas.
Burning gas for heat is >90% efficient (some heat escapes up the flue), so you're paying 6.93 p per usable kWh of heat.
For a heat pump, if you achieve a COP of 4 (which is possible in reasonably mild weather), you'd be paying 6.125 p per usable kWh of heat. If you can make a substantial portion of that electricity through domestic generation, you can effectively spend less per kWh.
But unless you're going all-in on domestic solar or wind, then a heat pump isn't a huge money saver. I suspect that the Feet household might not have natural gas available to it, however. Heating your home with a tanked-in supply of oil or propane is generally more expensive.