Month: October 2009

Having absorbed the details of the Vatican's surprise move to invite more disaffected Anglicans into the Catholic communion, it's clear that this is much more than merely allowing more married Anglican  clergy to become Catholic priests.

It also allows them a kind of church within the Church, and an Anglo-Catholic liturgy, including the Book of Common Prayer, inside the Roman tent. The biggest impact may well be in England and Wales, where the more traditionalist Anglicans will now have almost no pastoral or liturgical reasons not to join Rome (although the theological and doctrinal reasons remain). The move was clearly sprung on the Archbishop of Canterbury – he tried to be as graceful as possible and was almost convincing – and essentially junks an entire tradition of ecumenical dialogue in favor of a quick and sudden merger and acquisition.

Rocco's take is the best, as usual. I presume it means full inclusion within the Catholic church (papal authority and transubstantiation included), which might have raised Thomas Cranmer's eyebrow a half inch or so.

The structure has yet to be formulated. In America, I doubt this will have a huge impact on anti-gay and anti-feminist Episcopalians, who have already had their own structure within the Anglican church and now outside it. In fact, I bet you the bigger impact could be a bunch of liturgically traumatized Catholics in England and America moving en masse to those sublime Anglican liturgies, if there are sufficient bells, smells, incense, and King James.

For now, however, it seems an almost baldly political move, made at a pace more reminiscent of modern politics and public relations than the traditional ecclesiastical creaking of the wheels. That is troubling to me. Churches are supposed to be about eternal truths and freedom of conscience, not what amounts to an unfriendly take-over bid for a franchise.

And it does not seem to have occurred because of some deep resolution of the theological disputes between Anglicans and Catholics, but merely by a shared abhorrence of women priests and openly gay ones. If you want to switch churches, prejudice seems a pretty poor reason for doing so. But this is so sudden it will take some time to absorb and it's a little hard to take in. Stay tuned.

(Photo: You Know Who by Joe Klamar/Getty Images.)

He’s telling a New York Times reporter to off himself. It’s nothing new. But it’s a reminder of just how unhinged the most influential man in the GOP remains. And until someone in the Republican party stands up to him, he will become the GOP in the eyes of independents. And 20 percent may seem a ceiling not a floor for national GOP i.d.

Nathan Myhrvold defends the solar section of Superfreakonomics:

The point I was making to Dubner and Levitt is the following: when you build a solar plant it costs you energy. Lots of energy. Pacca and Horvath, in a 2002 study, found that the greenhouse gas emissions necessary to build a solar plant are about 2.75 times larger than the emissions from a coal plant of the same net power output (1.1 * 1010 kg of CO2 to build the solar plant versus 4 * 109 kg of CO2 per year for coal). The numbers vary depending on the specific technology, but there are dozens of “Life Cycle Assessment” papers on solar photovoltaic cells that document a similar effect.

So building the solar plant hurts global warming, at least during the construction period. Once you turn it on and are able to throttle back a coal plant because you get electricity from the solar cells, you gradually earn back the deficit through CO2 emissions that are saved. You need to operate the solar plant for at least 2.75 years before you break even versus the coal plant — at least versus CO2 emissions. This is very much like the old adage “you need to spend money to make money.” You need to “spend” some carbon emissions in order to create a carbon-free infrastructure which will ultimately yield a carbon emission “profit.”

Solar cells pretty much have to be “black” in the energetic side of the solar spectrum because they absorb sunlight! Of course no material is a perfect absorber, so when I say “black,” what I mean is very high absorption of light — 90 percemt [sic] or more. Solar cells often have a bluish tint to them because they reflect a tiny bit more blue light than other colors, but that is small enough that it doesn’t matter for our purposes here.

Unfortunately, solar cells are not very efficient. Efficiencies of 9 percent to 13 percent are typical for current widely deployed technology. In the future that will change, and some laboratory examples are better, but this is what people deploy now. So for every watt of electricity they generate, current solar cells throw about 10 watts into the climate as heat. Some of this heat would have occurred anyway when the light was absorbed by the ground, but the most effective solar cell installations are in deserts where the albedo is pretty high (.4 to .5) and there is little cloud cover, so the solar cells cause a bunch of heating that would not have otherwise occurred. A typical coal power plant gives off about 2 watts of thermal heat for each watt generated, so the direct thermal heating from solar plants is likely to be as large or larger than that from coal plants.

His point:

[W]e need to build out lots of renewable energy if it is going to make a difference. If we finish one plant today, it takes it three years to break even. Three years may not be the exact number, but let’s use it for simplicity…the three-year break-even times start to overlap and pile up as we build more and more plants.

The net result is that we may not get much CO2 benefit from the solar plants until we are past the rapid-growth phase of building out new plants. If we go hell-bent for leather in building solar plants for the next 50 years or so, it is entirely possible that we won’t see much small benefit for 30 to 50 years. In the long run, we still get benefit from the solar plants — lots of benefit (hence the “great carbon-free infrastructure”) — but in the near term, we may get little or no benefit. I say “may” because the details matter, and it is beyond the scope of what I can do here to calculate and explain them all; but the basic effect is that the time to get real benefit is delayed. A large part of this is due to the energy it takes to make them, and some is due to their blackness.

Richard Florida does some number crunching to determine which factors correlate with multiple marriage:

Multiple marriage was significantly less likely in states with high immigrant concentrations (-.38). Multiple marriage was also less likely in states with high bohemian concentrations (-.49). So much for the libertine bohemian lifestyle – at least when it comes to multiple marriage that is. There was no correlation between multiple marriage and the share of the gay population.

(Sign from the Equality March)

Hot Air rounds up reaction and video of Bill Maher's anti-vaccination nonsense.

Today on the Dish we discovered that the US caught an alleged spy for Israel, Karzai acquiesced to a runoff, Iran and the West actually seemed to compromise, the Vatican welcomed married Anglican priests, and the GOP was still comatose.

In commentary, Goldstone defended himself, Andrew supported a federalist public option, Steve Coll addressed Afghanistan, Kristol continued his chutzpah, Weigel pwned Mike Steele, Reihan discussed Ron Paul, and Bill Donohue was just awful.

Another servicemember offered more great insight on DADT. The latest coverage of Maine can be found here, here, and here. And if you watch anything today, watch this.

— C.B.

A reader writes:

The beauty of the video you posted showing the WW2 vet calling for marriage equality in Maine lies in the paradox it reveals. This father may never have had the opportunity of standing up so beautifully for his four children were it not for the ignorance and fear that surrounds us at this moment in time. It is a painful reality that we must have the dark in order to reveal the light. The two sides of the coin, the opacity of ignorance and the translucence of truth, can only be revealed in the presence of each other. For every moment of exasperation I feel in hearing Carrie Prejean chatter or the sycophants at FOX News yammer on, is the knowledge that in their darkness they enable the light of truth to shine ever brighter.

This is, indeed, the dynamic of civil rights movements. By standing up for real equality, we actually provoke more and more vocal hostility among some. What matters is the response to this hostility. Do we return it in kind – as we can often do? Or do we respond with the truth of our lives?

Sometimes, you have to bring the fear out in the open to dispel it. And that demands courage.

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing is launching a publishing experiment. The project has a lot of moving parts but here is the bottom line:

I have set out to produce a book that can be had in a range of packages and at a range of price points from $0.00 to $10,000.

James Joyner parses the latest Gallup poll:

A sizable percentage of those who will privately tell a pollster that they think marijuana should be legal would be unwilling to make that statement publicly, owing to pressure from their church group, social circle, and so forth.  Conversely, those who favor criminalization are likely to be quite vocal and highly organized. We’ll need more than a slight majority supporting decriminalization to actually achieve it.