Beatitudes Blog

This Week's Work

Submitted by Jeff Gottlieb on June 9, 2007 - 5:43pm.

This final entry is to give you all an idea of what’s been going on during my fellowship this week. Because of the close affiliation between The Regeneration Project and California Interfaith Power and Light (CIPL), I’ve been helping out here at the CIPL office. CIPL has written a letter to Toyota asking them to withdraw their lawsuit against AB 1493, a bill which passed in 2002, but was has been blocked from being enacted due to lawsuits from automakers. (The bill offers rebates for fuel efficient cars by adding surcharges to fuel inefficient vehicles. For more info click here for a .pdf fact sheet.)

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Global Warming and Michael Griffin

Submitted by Jeff Gottlieb on June 8, 2007 - 1:41am.

If you haven’t been following the news lately on global warming and NASA’s Michael Griffin, here’s a short update: Last week, after NASA issued a report claiming that we had 10 years before we passed the tipping point of global warming, NASA administrator Michael Griffin said on NPR "I have no doubt that ... a trend of global warming exists…I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with."

His comments received wide coverage because they challenged the findings of the report. After all, it’s one thing to deny that global warming is a threat, but it’s pretty remarkable when you undercut your own organization and colleagues on national radio. Once he realized this about a week later (I wonder if the glares around the office had anything to do with it), he apologized for voicing his personal opinions on global warming.

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Green Music

Submitted by Jeff Gottlieb on June 6, 2007 - 2:44am.

If you’re like me then now is the time of the year when you start planning your summer concert schedule. But thanks to the latest issue of Rolling Stone (#1028), you can now factor in which bands are going green, and which aren’t.

According to Music Matters, each year about 1,200 tour buses and trucks drive more than 60 million miles using 13 million gallons of fuel, about the same as 30,000 cars in a year. Some artists, like Coldplay, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jack Johnson and Pearl Jam, have started carbon offsetting by paying for renewable energy while some have taken a more proactive approach by using biodiesel buses.

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The Torch Passes

Submitted by Jeff Gottlieb on June 4, 2007 - 5:39pm.

Welcome to the next segment in the Beatitudes summer fellows' blog. I’ll be your host for this week and am excited about sharing what’s going on over here at The Regeneration Project in San Francisco. But first of all I’d like to thank Audrey for kicking off this blog with such fantastic posts. Thanks for sharing about yourself, your work and your faith – I really enjoyed reading about what was going on across the bay at CIPL and the work they do with the faith community.

And so the blog torch passes to me. A little bit about myself: I just finished the first year of my MA at the the Graduate Theological Union, a consortium of 9 theological schools and seminaries in Berkeley, CA. I’m affiliated with the the Jesuit School of Theology (JSTB) due to the strength of their faculty in my particular area of study, ethics. Because I’m not Catholic, sometimes I feel like a Protestant fish out of water, but my experience at the JSTB has been stellar and extraordinarily valuable.

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