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Advanced Worldview Analysis - Lesson 21

Environmentalism Overview

A balanced approach toward environmentalism is needed because it can be a serious threat to individual liberty.

Ronald Nash
Advanced Worldview Analysis
Lesson 21
Watching Now
Environmentalism Overview

The Christian Worldview and Environmentalism
Part 1
 

I.  Introduction

A.  Environmentalism can be a serious danger to individual liberty.

B.  A balanced approach is needed.

 

II.  Facts to Remember

A.  The environment is cleaner than at any time in the past half-century.

B.  The environment is safer than at any other time in recent history.

C.  Life expectancy, as a whole, has never been longer or higher than it is now.

D.  Cancer rates are falling, not rising.

 

III.  Impending Global Ecological Disasters?

A.  Disproven theories, never a problem

1.  Acid Rain

2.  Plastics

B.  Unproven theories, not problems

1.  Global Warming

2.  Ozone Depletion

3.  Electromagnetic Fields

C.  Past problems, now nearly solved

1.  Automobile emissions

2.  Nuclear power

3.  Oil Spills

D.  Persistent but manageable problems

1.  Pesticides

2.  Toxic Chemicals

E.  Problems mainly in the Third World

1.  Deforestation

2.  Resource Depletion

 

IV.  Further Considerations

A.  We can never completely eliminate risk.

B.  Common sense vs. Al Gore's approach

 

V.  Representatives of Radical Environmentalism

A.  The Greens

B.  The Deep Ecologists

C.  The Animal Rights Movement

 

VI..  Pollution

A.  Volcanoes and Air Pollution

B.  Termites

C.  Ants

D.  Cows

E.  Carbon Dioxide

 

VII.  The Ozone Problem

A.  There is no ozone hole.

B.  Skin cancer has many causes.

C..  Chlorine and Ozone

1.  Evaporating sea water

2.  CFCs


Lessons
About
Transcript
  • Discussion of the content of a worldview and the criteria used to evaluate worldviews.

  • Discussion of liberalism and conservatism, and statism and anti-statism.

  • Political systems fall along a continuum between the extremes of anarchism and totalitarianism.

  • People favoring statism support extensive government involvement in education and social programs.

  • From a biblical point of view, statism is evil.

  • Discussion of justice on an individual and corporate level.

  • An economy based on capitalism has much less government involvement than an economy based on socialism.

  • Interventionism is a capitalistic economic system in which government gets involved to allow free exchange within a framework of laws.

  • Discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of capitalism.

  • Two basic concepts of economics are limited resources and the choices we make that reflect our values.

  • Marxism is an economic system based on the idea of a class struggle with the goal of a classless society.

  • Article from The Free Market

  • The Bible and Socialism, Moral Defense of Capitalism

  • We are responsible to be a good steward of the wealth God gives us to manage.

  • Some of the root causes of poverty are government, social and religious systems.

  • Liberation theology is an ideology promoted by people trained in Marxism. True liberation theology delivers people from tyranny, poverty and sin.

  • Christians ought to care about poverty and oppression. People who hold differing economic and social theories propose very different approaches and solutions to these problems.

  • Discussion of the differences between evangelical liberals and conservatives.

  • Guest Lecturer, Alejandro Moreno-Morrison discussing the inflation of rights.

  • Guest Lecturer, Alejandro Moreno-Morrison discusses legal positivism.

  • A balanced approach toward environmentalism is needed because it can be a serious threat to individual liberty.

  • Discussion of how people work in a capitalistic system to address environmental concerns.

  • The public school system in the United States has fostered functional illiteracy, cultural illiteracy, and moral/spiritual illiteracy.

  • Discussion of the pros and cons of setting up a voucher system to fund the education system.

In this class, you will gain a comprehensive understanding of advanced worldview analysis, starting with an introduction to the concept of a worldview and its importance. You will explore the various components that make up a worldview, including epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and anthropology. The course delves into analyzing different worldviews such as theism, deism, naturalism, nihilism, and existentialism. Finally, you will learn about the role of the church and individual believers in engaging with culture and responding to worldview challenges, as well as strategies for effective communication of your own worldview.

Dr. Ronald Nash

Advanced Worldview Analysis

th710-21

Environmentalism Overview

Lesson Transcript

[00:00:03] Our subject tonight is environmentalism. Most of you realize, I think, that environmentalism has become a serious danger on a whole lot of fronts. One of the major reasons why it is a danger is because false beliefs about the environment or unproven beliefs about the environment have been used in the last 1520 years to promote statism. In fact, some people have suggested that when Marxism fell apart in the years between 1989 and 1991, it really didn't matter because the true statist, the Marxists, really had the environmentalist movement to turn to. And I will be saying a lot about the environmentalist movement. It is probably not an accident. It certainly is not irrelevant that one of the candidates for president in the last election was the author of an environmentalist book called Earth in the Balance. I refer in a non pejorative way. You know, I have nothing but affection for Vice President Al Gore. Al Gore. Former Vice President Al Gore. I ran across this interesting piece of news, and it's true. And I just want to share it with you, to show you my lack of prejudice here. This is a news clip from a magazine that I will not name, but it is the epitome of unvarnished objectivity. Here's what it says. FBI agents on the scene are telling colleagues they were amused when while tearing apart the shack of suspected Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski. Well, now we know he was the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski. They came upon a copy of Al Gore's book, Earth in the Balance. They did. Many sections were underlined in pencil, and there were copious notes in the margins. Though he was getting his ammunition from Earth in the balance. Now, this totally objective news magazine that I'm quoting from here asks this question Why wasn't Al Gore's book among the handful of titles listed in the press, references to the 80 or so books found in the cabin? That book was never mentioned.

 

[00:02:39] The FBI and Justice Departments haven't commented publicly, but some agents assume these are FBI and Justice Department agents assume that the title was clearly suppressed to avoid embarrassing Al Gore and the administration. So I just mention that if ever you're on Jeopardy, and one of the questions or one of the statements is the author of the most widely read book and Ted Kaczynski. Shaq, the the Jeopardy question would be, who is Al Gore? So I just mentioned that to you. Let me share with you the title of the best book I have ever read on environmentalism. I have it in here in my formerly natural stained fingers. Here it is. It's called Eco Sanity, A Common Sense Guide to Environmentalism. And it has three authors, and I think it's still in print. It was published by Madison Books, which is a branch of the University Press of America, which, of course, is one of my publishers. One of the three authors is an economics professor at Wheaton College. His name is Peter Hill, PJ Hill. In fact, I opened it this afternoon and there's a signed autographed first edition copy, man. Will this be worth something? This will be worth more than all the ozone left in the sky in a few years. Know what that means? And I'm certainly not being sarcastic about that, because, listen, the environment, one of the things you got to understand about environmentalists is they think they're the only people in the whole universe who care about our environment. Of course, for almost all of them, the only cure for problems with the environment happened to be more government action and bigger government statism. One of the nice things about eco sanity is that it provides a strong argument against the liberal or the statist version of environmentalism.

 

[00:04:58] If you can find a copy of this book, I certainly recommend it to you. If you don't find a copy, almost everything I'd tell you today will come from this book. This is just a great book, and I'm pleased to state that Wheaton College has at least one conservative teaching economics there. PJ Hill is a great guy. I have great admiration for him. All right. Now, the first point I want to make and as you can tell, I've got paperwork scattered all over the table here. Let me begin with a little section called Facts to Remember. I often give this at the end, but it doesn't hurt for you to hear these at the beginning. Thanks to remember almost any one of the next eight sentences I utter will bring some people to almost a state of hysteria because they will doubt that any of these things are true. Point number one the environment is cleaner today. The environment in the United States, Western Europe is clearer today than at any time in the past half century. That runs against the grain of almost every environmentalist movement and their proclamations. Second sentence The environment is safer than at any time in recorded history. Really? I thought this was the most dangerous time in the history of the world's environment. Number three, life expectancy has never been longer. If all of the cries of the radical environmentalist extremists were true, it would seem unlikely that any human being alive today would ever live past the age of 21. Cancer rates are falling, not rising. Now, there might be an exception with senior citizens. But the reason for that is better rates of discovery and diagnosis. If you go back 30 or 40 years, there were just tons of senior citizens who had terminal cases of cancer or they were on their way to that.

 

[00:07:16] But nobody knew it because we didn't have the kinds of techniques to identify this and diagnosis that we have today. Predictions of impending global ecological disasters are untrue. Most environmental problems have been or are being solved. Let me come back to that one in just about 30 seconds and I'll give you some more information about that. Next, ideas are more important than things. And finally, prosperity is good for the environment. And one of the nice things about Peter Hill's book is that it provides documentation and support and argumentation for all of these points. Now, with respect to this claim right here, most environmental problems have been or are being solved. Let me put this on the screen. The title for this overhead is not crises and sometimes not even problems. And what we have here is a little chart, and I'll just go through it for the listeners. The first line of the chart discusses what are called disproven theories about the environment that were never really problems. And the two examples here would be acid rain. That was just a fraudulent problem. And I'll say more about acid rain later on. And also plastics. I can remember when all kinds of publications were predicting terrible consequences from all of the plastics that we were dumping into landfills and so on. But we now know that there never really were problems there. So those are disproven theories, acid rain and plastic, and I'll say more about acid rain later. Secondly, unproven theories that are not really problems today. And notice here. Global warming. Kind of warm today on my car thermometer. It was over 100 degrees on Saturday down here. Global warming, ozone depletion. Oh, you can't mean that. Every intelligent person, every unbiased, every open minded, intelligent person knows that the history of Earth is threatened by ozone depletion and we know what causes it, and we're going to get rid of that cause.

 

[00:09:46] And then electromagnetic fields. Now, I'm not as completely objective as I am here, even though I believe this. I'm not going to live underneath a power tower. It said to make your hair fall out or other things. I mean, look at all the pretty birds that sit on those power lines. They don't get hurt. Past problems. Now we know that these problems existed, but they are now nearly solved. And the solution of these problems is not something for which Al Gore deserves any credit. And for the listeners here, I'm sure this is just an internal joke here. We all have the highest respect for Al Gore. But as the past problems include automobiles there exhaust nuclear power and oil spills, as in the oceans and so on. Now, here are persistent problems, but they are manageable. Pesticides and toxic chemicals. We don't want DDT in our milk or in our breakfast cereal. Those are serious problems. But we have come a long way in eliminating or managing those problems and now problems that exist mainly in third world countries. And these are this is serious. I don't want people to burn down the rainforest in Brazil. That makes me mad. I have a theory that the people who are doing that are all communists myself, but I. That's wrong. Resource depletion is also a problem. Now, let me read a quote here from PJ Hill and the other authors. The authors of the book, Eco Sanity, recognize that real environmental problems exist. Population growth and deforestation plagues some third world countries. Forestry practices in the United States could be improved. The residues of persistent pesticides continue to injure wildlife and slow the recovery of some species of birds and mammals. Further progress should be made in many areas, including protecting the air and the water.

 

[00:12:03] Just because you're a conservative doesn't mean that you are an enemy of the environment. We encourage action in these and other areas, and in a later chapter we will describe more specifically the actions that should be taken. We need to understand that we can never completely eliminate risk. Everything we do carries with it some risk. Even common activities, such as taking a bath where the danger would be drowning or crossing the street where the danger might be. Being hit by a car, seemingly harmless things like balloons and toothpicks sometimes kill people. There is no such thing as a product decision or action that carries no risk whatsoever. So when someone tells us there may be a risk that a chemical nuclear power plant or landfill will endanger our health, we should not be frightened. Instead, we should calmly ask, how much risk is there? Now, what I have in this little chart is, of course, a line. And then, of course, I've got well, what actually are parentheses that separate extremism on both ends? Extremism where we are afraid to take action because we go overboard in our fear of some supposed risk. Let's see. What was I thinking about the other day? Getting on an airplane. Airplane? Yeah. There are risks there. And that's just the security people that I'm talking about. That's just the security people. But there are extremes at the other end where people don't take sufficient care the way they should. Now, let me read here from this line. Lots of people reject a common sense approach to the environment. What I want to do in this lecture today is suggest a common sense approach to the environment. According to Al Gore in his book Earth in the Balance Our Nation, and this is a quotation from Al Gore, our nation should embark, quote, on an all out effort to use every policy and program, every law and institution, every treaty and alliance.

 

[00:14:25] Every tactic and strategy, every plan and course of action to use, in short, every means to halt the destruction of the environment and to preserve and nurture our ecological system. One might almost think from listening to those extreme statements that Al Gore's God may be the environment. Author Robert Hahn describes Gore's approach as the kitchen sink approach to the environment. Do everything all at once, regardless of cost or necessity. Hmm. Later on, we will take a look at Al Gore's claim that the internal combustion engine is the most dangerous weapon the human mind has ever conceived. The internal combustion engine. All right. Now, the law of diminishing returns. Now, this is a follow up on this chart that we must be careful of. Two kinds of extremism with regard to risk and extremism that over exaggerates the risk or an extremism that under emphasizes the danger of risk, as always. And no one knows this better than the 500 people in this class. I am the consummate centrist. I want to avoid extremism on both sides. Now, in that connection, here is a little chart that's called the Law of Diminishing Returns. And it's a typical kind of graph in which the two variables are on the up side units of pollution and on the horizontal, the amount of spending that would be necessary to get rid of this pollution. It is a simple fact that we can get rid of the vast majority of pollution for a rather small amount of expense. But the closer we try to eliminate the quantities of pollution to a zero quantity, the more expensive things become. We can get rid of 90% of the pollution in our air for a relatively modest cost. But if we try to go the next 10%, the cost becomes astronomical.

 

[00:16:59] That's basically the chart here. So the closer we get to the goal of zero emissions of a pollutant that is from an internal combustion engine, the more costly it becomes to eliminate each additional unit. The reason is that the first control methods used will usually be the most cost effective that is the cheapest and the easiest to implement and will produce the larger benefits. Continued progress, however, requires using methods that are more and more expensive and remove smaller and smaller amounts of pollutants. And at some point the costs simply outweigh the benefits. And one feature of environmental extremists is they don't care what the costs are. They just don't want to eliminate the vast majority of pollutants. They want to try and get as close to zero pollutants as we can now. What I have on this next overhead is information about the three most dangerous forms of environmentalism. The first group of radical environmentalists are called the Greens. They're also called the watermelon environmentalists because they're green on the outside and their red on the inside. You get that picture. There are really Marxists, statists, totalitarians who didn't succeed with the first versions of communism. So now they're using the environment as their road into this. These people are, for the most part, that is the Greens. They are politically sophisticated. These are not buffoons. These are people who know how to achieve their objectives. Secondly, they are socialists or worse. And the only thing that would be worse than a socialist would be a hardcore communist. And a lot of these people are. This is where Gorbachev works now. He works with the Greens. His movement is called the Green Cross, I think. Thirdly, they present a less radical public face. They appear more pragmatic, more practical.

 

[00:19:13] They're not necessarily in-your-face sort of people, and they are not. This is somewhat helpful to learn this. They are not anti human as the other kinds of extremists are. They're rather happy. They're humans. Now, the second group are called the Deep Ecologists. These are troublemakers. They are often pantheistic. And if pantheistic pantheism takes either a Hindu or a Buddhist flavor to it, they favor radical confrontation. They are not pragmatic. They will attempt to sink ships or do harm to ships there. The two major names for these movements would be Greenpeace and Earth First. They rely on mysticism and intuition. Thirdly is the animal rights movement. These people, too, are pantheistic. All of life is one. There is no form of life that is better than any other. I don't believe that all these people have a name. Here it is. Here's the spellings. Speciesism. Speciesism. Here's the definition. Let's move it up a little higher. Speciesism is a bias for one's own species against others. It is kind of like racism, only it is worse. Now, I am ashamed to tell you that there is only one species in the universe that can be guilty of speciesism. And it is the race that you belong to. I guess I belong to it. To bias. For only humans can have a bias for their own species against others. Only humans can be guilty of speciesism. And if only we believed in a personal god, you people ought to confess your sins. But since he's not a personal God, I guess you can't. The major movement for these people is PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Now you got to understand these people. They don't care about the murder of human infants. They don't care about abortion.

 

[00:21:48] You can do whatever you want to do to human beings. But don't you dare touch that tadpole that's crossing your yard right now. They're pantheism. Well, those are the three major kinds of environmentalism. Now, I'm now going to give you some insights about pollution on this planet that many of you have never heard. First of all, I have an overhead here that's titled Volcanoes and Pollution. You will never hear this from NBC, CBS or ABC or from Public television or from CNN or from MSNBC. All of the air pollution by humans since the start of the industrial Revolution falls short of just three volcanic explosions. We're talking about all human produced pollution since the year 1800. Let's say it really didn't get going until about the 1830s or 1840s. Here are the three volcanoes that by themselves produced more air pollution than the entire human race since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Mount Krakatoa in Indonesia, 1883. Mount Katmai in Alaska, 1912 and Mount Hecla in Iceland, 1947. Just those three volcanoes alone. Now, here's some other information about volcanoes. Mount St Helens. I've flown over the old peak of Mount St Helens, looked at the big hole. 1980 910,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide came out of just Mount Helens. El-Sheikh cone. 100 million tons of sulfur. 1982. Mount Pinatubo, Philippines. 30 million tons. Mount Saint Augustine, Alaska 1976 injected 289 billion kilograms. Now, let me stop right here. How do they how do they know that? How do they know that you got somebody up there measuring? Well, there's another kilogram, I don't know, 289 billion kilograms of hydrochloric acid. Can you see some guy measuring this? He's going to die in 30 seconds. 289 billion kilograms of hydrochloric acid into the stratosphere.

 

[00:24:31] This is 570 times the total world production of chlorine and floral carbons in 1975. Are you getting a picture here? Now we're not through. I now have an overhead titled Termites and Pollution. And here I'm not talking about the environmentalists. I'm talking about real termites. Termites generate 50 billion tons of carbon dioxide. And that's just in Oviedo. That's where we live here, folks. Termites generate 50 billion tons of carbon dioxide and methane each year. This is several times more than the world production of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuel. No one talks about this. A particular aunt. I do not know the species. And I have no prejudice against the species in particular and produces an estimated 600,000 metric tons of formic acid, a quantity that could be responsible for much acid rain if there were acid rain now cows and pollution. American cows because we don't count British cows anymore. We don't get within spitting distance of a British cow. But American cows produce an estimated 50 million tons of hydrocarbons and methane each year. Do you know how that gets into the atmosphere? Now, some of you are smiling because you think you know the answer to that. But this stuff gets from the inside of the cow to the environment outside the cow through belching. You didn't know that. You were all thinking of something different. I guess you've got environmentalists who just walk around these cows and listen. And then the level of CO2 is rising, but it has been higher by 25. Now, this is kind of an initial reply to some of this stuff. Yes, the level of carbon dioxide in the world is rising, but it has been higher by 25% than what it is now in the past.

 

[00:27:02] The increase of carbon dioxide and other gases should have raised the temperature of the planet to two four degrees, but it has not. There's no necessary connection between global warming and this increase in carbon dioxide. The ozone problem. Now, the print here is kind of small, but I'll read it to you. Ozone is thickest between six and 25 miles up in the stratosphere. It is thinly diffused, for example. This is how thinly diffused ozone is. Only one out of every 100,000 molecules in the ozone layer is ozone. There is no hole in the ozone layer. It waxes and wanes. There's no hole. It's just in certain places at certain times, the amount of ozone, which is always thinly diffused, is even more thinly diffused. So ozone and the depletion of the ozone layer is alleged to be a contributor to global warming or to an increase in ultraviolet radiation. Now, with respect to ultraviolet radiation, there are three wavelengths. There is UVA, UVB, and you've see Ultraviolet A, B, and C, UVA has the longest wavelength and reaches the Earth's surface unimpeded. We could have nothing but ozone up there and the UVA would still reach the surface of the earth. Uv-c has the shortest wavelengths and is largely expended in the atmosphere by striking oxygen molecules and breaking them into oxygen atoms. These atoms then may combine to form new ozone. Now, I draw your picture here, but I don't know that. Well, just picture molecules of oxygen, then getting bombarded by uv-c rays and they break up into oxygen atoms and then these combine and form ozone. So ozone is being formed every minute and being destroyed every minute. And what's destroying the ozone would be uv-c ultraviolet radiation. Now, UVB, that's the middle wavelength is expended by striking ozone and breaking ozone molecules, which is, oh, three into atoms of oxygen and molecules of O2.

 

[00:30:00] And so the same UV light that destroys ozone breaks down oxygen to create more ozone. Now the kind of skin cancer that is caused by UV light. We're all told this is gospel truth. We're told that when the ozone layer is diminished and diffused, then that's going to cause a lot of skin cancers. I just had a lot of skin cancers burned off the top of my scalp. You know, I showed up here one day and I had. Takes about three weeks for that stuff to heal and go away. When the doctor looked at my scalp, he said, You know what's up there, don't you? I said, Sure I do. Those are pre-cancerous lesions. He said, When's the last time you had them treated? I said, Oh, about ten years ago. He said, Well, we're going to treat them today and you're going to come back and see me every year because like a dumbbell, as bald as I am, I walked around. This planet without a cap. If you see me these days, I've always got a hat on because I want those pre-cancerous lesions to go away. But the problem is, the typical skin cancer takes a long time to develop and is seldom fatal unless the person who has it is utterly stupid. The skin cancer that ought to frighten everybody is melanoma. But melanomas cause is unknown. Now, I know there is a common belief in the world caused by American movies and American television that says that melanoma is caused by too much exposure to ultraviolet radiation. But that is not a proven conclusion. A whole lot of melanoma shows up on parts of the human body that have never received heavy doses of ultraviolet radiation. Nobody ever tells us that.

 

[00:32:12] So as far as I know, don't jump. If somebody diagnosed with somebody around here, I think had melanoma. Ricky Kidd Yeah, Ricky was diagnosed with it. Now in his case, it was a place where he did get a lot of sun exposure, but you often get it on the part of your body where there is seldom exposure to its causes unknown. All right. Even though even a lot of skin doctors say that the cause is overexposure to ultraviolet radiation. Now, while chlorine can destroy ozone, we're now moving into one of these environmentalist claims. We already know that one thing that can destroy ozone is ultraviolet radiation of the right wavelength. But we've also learned that one of the things that causes new ozone to come into existence is the same kind of radiation, ultraviolet radiation. But now we're being told that chlorine can destroy ozone and the origin of stratospheric chloride is a matter of dispute. Now, the theory that is most widely taught is that stratospheric chloride is due to chloride that escapes from close to the earth. And then and there's no proof for this. It then just slowly climbs into the stratosphere. But the fact is that when chlorine escapes from something like Freon, which used to be the major refrigerant in the United States, and we call that CFC chlorofluorocarbons, when that stuff escapes from, let's say, the air conditioning unit in an automobile or the air conditioning unit for your house. That stuff tends to stay close to the earth. I can imagine someone chasing it around and saying, well, it climbed three inches yesterday, but the stratosphere is pretty high up. There are many more plentiful and natural sources of stratospheric chloride than escaping CFC from freon and the old yeah, the sprays aerosols for deodorants and so on.

 

[00:34:39] For example, seawater evaporation produces 600 million tonnes of chloride a year. Now I've had somebody tell me that there's some kind of tracer on chloride that comes from seawater and that this claim is contrary to certain evidence. Well, put a question mark by that if you wish. But volcanic eruptions produce millions of tons of chloride which do reach. I mean, if you've seen the pictures of Mount St Helens, volcanic eruptions produce millions of tons a year at most CFC. Chlorofluorocarbons could only produce about 750,000 tons of chloride a year each year. Mount Erebus in Antarctica pumps out 50 tons times this amount. One last point here. The ozone hole was thinner in 1958 than it is now. And that was before the widespread use of chlorofluorocarbons. So obviously something was thinning the ozone before the massive use of CFC. All right. Now more on ozone. Where is the increase of UVB radiation reaching the Earth's surface? The truth is, it's actually been decreasing at the same time that we've heard all of these warnings about the decrease of the ozone layer, the amount of UVB radiation that reaches the earth. It's been decreasing. Listen to this. For every six miles, we move closer to the equator, ultraviolet exposure increases 1%. If we did have a 5% reduction in ozone during the coming century, during the whole of the year 2002, that would be equivalent to moving 60 miles south. Where would that put us? Oh, somewhere towards Melbourne on the coast. So the panic here. Is this really justified? Now, I don't know if I should talk about the Freon ban. That's the next thing on the overhead, because Freon technically is, I understand, not supposed to be legally available anymore. It is illegally available because a lot of the countries from the third World are shipping it into the United States, where small automobile service places are still installing the air conditioners on old cars with freon.

 

[00:37:33] But here, over the next 12 years, the likely cost of the CFC ban will be $5 trillion. Experts also warn of 20 to 40 million deaths each year from starvation and disease because of loss of or increased cost of adequate refrigeration, affecting the integrity of medicines, vaccines and blood supply. I'm not sure to what extent all of those warnings are relevant, but let us keep going here. Before Freon, there were many deaths from other forms of refrigeration. I remember when I was a 12 year old kid and we had a little grocery store in our neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio. And one day I came walking past that grocery store and the rescue squad was there carrying people out. That place had refrigerated itself through ammonia and the ammonia leaked. As far as I know, some of those people may have died through their exposure to ammonia. So there were previously used refrigerants that were far more dangerous than freon. Here are some of the advantages of Freon and other CFC. They are nontoxic. They are non carcinogenic. There's no evidence that they cause cancer. They are nonvolatile. That is, they won't blow up. They are non corrosive. That is, they won't corrode your automobile's air conditioning unit. They are inexpensive while substitutes. And when all of this was written, the major slang substitute was something called Suba, which I think is the stuff that's in the air conditioning units in my cars. But Suba is expensive. It is toxic. It is flammable. It is corrosive and it is relatively inefficient. So authorities say the ban on freon for refrigeration will cost each person $800 a year. Suba is toxic and cannot be used with existing equipment and tools. If you've got an old air conditioner in your automobile or in your home and you have to go in the direction of silver or whatever the current replacement for Freon is, you're going to have to have a whole new unit.

 

[00:39:51] And who's the cause of that expensive investment? It will be the environmentalists. Suva is ten times more expensive and is itself subject to ban. By 2000 A.D.. Oh, I forgot that Suva compressors may only last 3 to 4 years. Thank you for listening to this lecture. Brought to you by biblical training, dawg. Your prayers and financial support enable us to provide a biblical and theological education that all people around the world can access. Blessings. As you continue to study and live out your faith and as you grow in your relationship with the Lord.