You are the Carbon They Want to Reduce | (Ep. 418)

In this episode, Douglas Wilson celebrates the Trump EPA’s rollback of the greenhouse-gas endangerment finding as a blow against economic overreach, then turns to hamartiology and the New Testament word miasma to reflect on moral pollution, false conversion, and the danger of falling back into sin. He closes with a warm recommendation of A Gentleman in Moscow as a deeply engaging novel about life in captivity under communism.

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What is Plodcast?

In the Plodcast, pastor Douglas Wilson covers anything related to theology and culture with his usual entertaining style. Whether it involves talking about Chestertonian Calvinism (not an oxymoron), the benefits of a Classical Christian education (not in that order), or the latest pomosexuality farce, the plodcast aims to apply all of Christ to all of life, for all the world. Douglas Wilson is an evangelical, postmill, Calvinist, Reformed, and Presbyterian (pretty much in that order) and is politically to the right of Jeb Stuart.

Yeah, it's God. God don't ever change. Welcome to the podcast. This is episode 418, 418. So under Trump, the EPA Environmental Protection Agency just revoked what's called its endangerment finding regarding greenhouse gases. Now this is a, I'll put it this way, this is totally, completely entirely what I voted for. One of the worst things that the environmentalists did was they managed to get everybody to think that what we breathe out, what human beings breathe out, is a pollutant. Right. Now, we all understand how if you're walking by the factory upstream from your town and you notice the pipe sticking out from the factory and something that is bright neon green is flowing out of the pipe and into the river, everybody will say, yeah, you got a point. When you object to that, you've got a point. There is such a thing as toxic pollution. There is such a thing as making the water unsafe to swim in, unsafe to drink, unsafe to deal with. There is such a thing as killing the fish, etc. Yeah, there is such a thing as pollution. But the environmentalists didn't know one to quit or they, they knew what they were about actually because when they managed to get this endangerment finding, it was called. This gave them authority over, I think it's like six greenhouse gases. And what we breathe out is one of those, one of those greenhouse gases, CO2. Now what this means is that the EPA has authority over you and your mouth. Okay. If you're endangering the planet just by breathing. If you're endangering the planet just by breathing, then they have, they would like to take you aside and have some words with you. And what this means, well, it all down, is that you are the carbon that they want to reduce. You are the carbon that they want to reduce. And what happened, what just happened is Trump's EPA just rescinded that ruling, that endangerment finding, which means that a bunch of other regulations are going to be done. And fall down, clatter on the ground. This is wonderful. And part of the reason it's wonderful is that things like this will juice the economy without giving money away or what, you know, basically all you have to do, what this kind of thing does is stimulates the economy by the simple expedient of getting out of the way. Maybe the patient might do a better job getting up and walking around his hospital room if the nurses weren't standing on his hose, on his oxygen hose. So our government's hostility to private enterprise on things like the acquisition of energy, drill baby drill, natural gas, coal, nuclear power, all the, you know, the hostility to those things that keep us warm, their hostility to the gas that you breathe out that makes your yard so green. I mean, plants, we don't need the CO2, but the plants do. And God in his mercy made the plants breathe in a photo negative way to us, right? And they breathe in the CO2 and they release oxygen. And we do the opposite. It's that we scratch their back and they scratch our back. And what they're doing is not a pollutant and what we're doing is not a pollutant. And this deregulation, this stepping out of the way on the part of the Trump administration is just simply glorious. There's no other, there's no other way to describe it. Answer to prayer. This is a wonderful thing. Now, this doesn't mean that everything Trump does is wonderful. It doesn't mean that everything he tweets is wonderful. It doesn't mean that I'm going to applaud everything with equal zest. But I do applaud this one. This is a blow against one of the essential engines of tyranny that God established over the last few decades. So thank God, thank God, thank God. Always will be God. Continuing on with episode 418, it may be hard for some to believe, but the study of sin can really be edifying. And we're calling it a martylogy. And here's our next installment. Our word this week is miasma. And this is a word in English too, but it means something different. M-I-A-S-M-A miasma. And it means pollution. It's a hotbox, meaning that it has only one use in the New Testament. It occurs only once. And here that occasion is second-peter 220. For if after they've escaped the pollutions of the world, there's our word miasma. For if after they have escaped the miasma of the world, through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, they are again entangled therein and overcome. The latter end is worse with them than the beginning. So this passage is talking about false converts who looked like true converts for a time. Jesus talks about them in the parable of the sower. There are certain people that it says that spring up quickly. They're really responsive to the message. They spring up quickly because why? Because the soil is shallow. So if you have a thin film of dirt over rocks, then the shallowness of the soil will mean that the plant germinates quickly, springs up quickly, but then it's going to run into trouble because it can't send it. And roots down deep. So this is talking about false converts who look like extraordinarily robust converts. The conversions seem genuine enough that we had really good hopes for them. They believed in Christ and for a time it appeared that they had attained escape velocity from the planet of their pollutions. But they went up like a rocket and came down like a stick. They had an intellectual knowledge of Christ and that was sufficient for them for a time, but only for a time. So notice it says they escaped the pollutions of this world and then they're tangled up in them again. So what we're talking about is someone who is a drunk and he's converted and he sober for two years. And then he's pulled back into a life of drunkenness or a drug addict or someone with a sexual problem. They escape the pollutions and they walk clean for a time and they can walk clean for a time on the on the strength of nothing more than head knowledge of Jesus Christ. But this intellectual knowledge of Christ is merely intellectual and that was only sufficient for a time. Peter tells us that this is a far worse situation than to simply remain in the moral pollution. He says it would be, it would have been far better for them to stay where they were. Basically if you come into the Christian faith and you walk clean for a few years and then you are hauled back in, that's a worse state. That's a worse condition. Jesus tells the parable of the demon possessed man who demon is cast out of him and his room is swept and empty. But the demon goes off and gets seven other demons worse, is bad as himself and comes back and that person's condition is far, far worse. It's the same kind of thing here. God don't ever change these guys. So book review time. Book review time. I'd like to review of a novel called a gentleman in Moscow, a gentleman in Moscow and the author as a funny first name, which I didn't write down, but the last name is towels, T-O-W-L-E-S, towels, a gentleman in Moscow. I'll give you the setup and there may be some things that are spoiler-ish in what I am about to say. I won't give you any spoilers, but there may be some spoiler-ish things. The setup is this. There's a count Alexander, a Russian count young man who is in Russia at the time of the Russian Revolution. He had earlier in his youth written a poem that was critical of the czar and had for other reasons we find out later, had fled the country for a time. Then when the revolution set off, when the revolution began, he came back to Russia. Because he's an aristocrat, he is hauled up before the authorities. It was a time when he easily could have been summarily executed. But because he had written that poem earlier and been critical of the czar, there were some among the revolutionaries who wanted to spare him or show him some kind of mercy, some level of mercy. He was living, he'd been living in posh quarters. He was a wealthy man. He was living in posh quarters in the Metropolitan Hotel in Moscow. What they do is they sentence him to stay in that hotel. If he leaves the hotel, his life is forfeit. He has to spend the rest of his life in the hotel. Then he is sort of summarily evicted from his nice rooms and put in a tiny little attic room. So he's living in this little tiny attic in the Metropolitan Hotel. The book describes the rest of his life over decades. That's the setup. And you think, well, man, how can you make a novel out of this? Well, Tulls does it. It's truly an engaging novel. I'll jump over to another novel, Peace Like a River by Lee Fanger. Lee Fanger wrote some other books too. I don't think his other books are nearly as good as Peace Like a River. But Peace Like a River is the kind of book where if you've read 10 pages in, you care what happens to absolutely everybody. You're just invested in what's going to happen to these people. Well, that's what this book is like. You care what is going to happen to this man. And you think, what kind of adventures or what kind of, how can you maintain your interest? What? How is this possible? Well, he really manages to do it. So tell people come there is he can't go out. He can't go out anywhere. Although he does go out one time, gets away with it, comes back, gets away with it. I won't tell you the circumstances of that. But he does spend decades there in the hotel and then it builds up to what you're hoping will be an escape. All right. There are many observations about the nature of communism. This book gave me a really good glimpse at how people could be loyal Russians who loved their country and their people and their ways who saw communism for what it was. And that did not diminish their love for Russia. That, you know, so you have that kind of tension going on is this the author and the count is very clear headed, very clear eyed about the nature of communism. But he rubbed shoulders with communist officials who come to the hotel. The rubbed shoulders with an American diplomat who comes to the hotel. I do want to put one caution in it. There is a sexual situation that occurs in the book, but no sex scenes. There's nothing there's nothing objectionable that way. But there is a sexual situation and even that lands well. So a gentleman in Moscow, really, I just really enjoyed it.