Our dear friend, Floyd Whitley, former Chairman of the Constitution Party of Idaho, shared this article with me. He has given me permission to share with CPTX.

A satellite image of Prague, Czech Republic (June 2022) shows the effect of simple low-tech measures to combat urban heat islands. Measures like greenbelts.  These beautify the cityscape, make places more livable and ultimately enhance real property values. 

 Something so simple can be effective in cooling down the urban solar furnaces (concrete, asphalt, glass, steel and parking lots).  Yet to hear the extreme rightists tell it, you’d think it was a communist plot.  Narrowminded litmus test ideas support a mutant form of rapine capitalism, a clear prescription for hell-on-earth.  The Prague map speaks to that.  Judas Iscariot, I remind, was also a capitalist.  Albeit one willing to trade salvation and honor for geld.  That world view has been condemned many times over by Christ.

In fairness, the far left’s ideas to fix things like global warming always seem to involve multi-departmental, enormous and endless public funded schemes that involve more and more bureaucrats and less and less achievements.  Whereas simple solutions, such as greenbelts, go a long way in resolving some of the immediate problems of our archaic urban land use development.  So I get it. 

But we nevertheless have those heat maps that must be dealt with somehow.  They serve to demonstrate the outcome of careless land use, sacrificing all before an idol built by greed.  Mankind’s honor is offered up to Ba’al as we sacrifice our children and theirs, and those yet to be for nothing but greed...a cardinal sin to be sure.  To have honor, one must be honorable.  Selling souls and indenturing the future to a hot hell-on-earth is anything but honorable. 

Cliché arguments by rightists that zoning ordinances are communist plots widely miss the mark.  And they do nothing to resolve what is becoming more and more an existential threat.  Nor does ideology-by-rote truly fix most any issue.  True conservatives must also be conservationists.  As Ross Perot once said, “The activist is not the person who says the river is dirty. The activist is the person who cleans up the river.”   

The minds of our ideologues are made up, however.  Quoting John Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost:  “A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time. Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n. To reign is worth ambition though in Hell: Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n.”  

Milton’s key phrase summarizes the all too common ideology of America’s extreme right.  To reign is worth ambition though in hell?  Better to reign in Hell, than serve in heaven?  God forbid!  But this is what we have been reduced to today.

In challenging the extreme right’s ideology, note:  three types of land exist—state, private, and commons.  Thank God, for the commons.  And the Prague June 2022 heat map shows as much. 

Whether we accept it or not, all of us are charged under Scriptures to be good stewards of this earth.  We have been given dominion over it, yes.  And therefore, we are liable for heedless damage done while Mother Nature is under our care.  It is not so much that “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor Hell a fury like a woman scorned.” [William Congreve, 1697].  It’s more a matter of our respective honor, our obligations.  To him whom much has been given, much is required, the Apostle Luke wrote. As for Nero fiddling some ideological tune while Rome burns?...not so much. 

The heatmap of Prague visually explains quite a lot of a more complicated science on this subject.  Greenbelts in Prague lowered June 18, 2022 ambient temperatures inside the urban area by as much as 7°C (~12.6°F) versus concurrent heat from fully built over locations.  If a net reduction of 12.6°F can be gotten simply by grass athletic fields, greenways and parks, this is one of the quickest immediate and cost effective means to ameliorate the urban heat pump.