89 Evangelicals have 'seen the light', so what's up with Jerry Falwell and company?
Jerry Falwell and other American evangelical heavy-weights like Pat Robertson and James Dobson have refused to sign on with other Christian leaders in their recent endorsement of efforts to address the problem of global climate change.
Falwell's reason? He's still not convinced of the science, but more importantly, he sees any initiative to combat it on America's part as playing into the hands of foreign economic and military powers. So reports the Lynchburg News Advance.
"We must not forget that China, India and other major nations that comprise over half the world's population have clearly stated that they will not participate in any such agreement," he said.
That is, of course, not entirely true. Both India and China have signed the Kyoto Protocol and India has ratified it, but as developing nations -- whose per capita energy use is paled by U.S. and Canadian citizens -- neither are required to meet it's emission reduction targets. The United States, which has signed the protocol but refused to ratify it, argues that this gives these rapidly developing countries an unfair economic advantage.
Instead, the United States, Australia, India, China, Japan and South Korea formed the Asia-Pacific Partnership for Clean Development and Climate in 2005, the purpose of which -- ostensibly -- is to use technology to reduce the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions emitted by each partner while fighting poverty through continued economic expansion.
Where Kyoto sets targets for wealthy nations to limit greenhouse gas emissions utilizing a cap and trade system first successfully employed to reduce power plant sulfur dioxide emissions in the U.S, the APP is founded on the concept that only continued development and trade expansion can provide governments and industry with sufficient revenues needed to tackle the twin problems of pollution and poverty.
There is certainly some merit in both approaches, but as the nations of Europe are discovering, achieving their targets is proving difficult. As for APP, since it's a purely voluntary organization with no real goals or teeth, it's even less likely to achieve its aspirations. Critics have dismissed it as simply the anti-Kyoto accord in which none of the members have any intention of cutting their climate-changing emissions.
Rev. Falwell and other conservatives contend that doing something about climate change will weaken America and that complying with Kyoto will negatively impact economic growth and therefore create even more poverty. These are often the same people who see devastating hurricanes like those that hit the American Gulf Coast in 2004 and 2005 as either natural, cyclical events or as instruments of God's wrath, but certainly not as nature's way of dissipating excess heat from the atmosphere and oceans, heat caused by global warming.
The economic cost of Hurricane Katrina alone is estimated at some $200 billion dollars. Tens of thousands of homes, businesses, schools, government facilities, hospitals, all were either completely destroyed to severely damaged and it's likely to take decades for the American Gulf Coast to be rebuilt, if ever. One estimate placed the energy cost of reconstruction -- the amount of energy it will take to replace and restore destroyed infrastructure -- equivalent to one-third of America's remaining oil reserves.
There is no way to assess the human cost of such disasters. That estimate is incalculable.
Writing recently for the Associate Baptist Press Robert Marus filed an illuminating report contrasting the views of various evangelical church leaders on global warming. He quotes Calvin Beisner of Knox Theological Seminary and Peter van Walsum from Baylor University.
Beisner said another potential economic cost associated with combating climate change is the government or private funding allocated to paying for the anti-warming measures themselves. "The money we spend on that cannot be spent on other efforts to help the poor," he noted.
But one Christian expert on renewable energy sources said those economic arguments ring hollow. "This is probably the single biggest fallacy of renewable energy," Peter van Walsum, an environmental studies professor at Baylor University, told Associated Baptist Press. "The best way to preserve energy is efficiency. And efficiency is not an economic cost; it's an economic benefit."
Because a fossil fuel-based economy will not be viable in the future -- since oil and natural gas are finite resources -- van Walsum said, conserving fossil fuels and using renewable energy sources will also end up helping poor people in the long run.
"You're basically taking money that you would have spent on one sector of the economy and spending it on another, and you're getting benefits," he said.
For example, the money spent on infrastructure for constructing solar energy plants or wind-energy plants would provide short-term economic gain. And maintenance of the plants would provide long-term jobs.
Relying on such resources would also reduce costs, domestically, associated with dependency on fossil fuels. "The amount of money we spend on importing oil is huge," van Walsum noted. "The economic argument [against combating climate change], I think, is heavily lobbied by the fossil-fuel industry."
Two years ago, the Apollo Alliance issued a 44-page report entitled, New Energy For America in which they forecast that a $300 billion investment of federal dollars over 10 years to revitalize our manufacturing capacity, rebuild neglected public infrastructure, close the growing technology gap with our foreign competitors, preserve the environment, and generate good jobs for America's working families would add 3.3 million jobs to the economy and generate a dramatic $1.4 trillion new gross domestic product. Energy efficiency and renewable energy play a key role in that growth.
Clearly, the current path America is on can't be sustained. Between 1999 and 2004 the median household income fell 4 percent, while in hard-hit Michigan, it dropped 18 percent, this despite $840 billion in tax cuts meant to stimulate the economy. Citing numbers from the Economic Policy Institute , the Socialist Worker web site reports:
The number of people living in poverty has increased by 5.4 million since 2000. The U.S. poverty rate is up from 11.3 percent in 2000 to 12.7 percent in 2004--the child poverty rate is similarly up from 16.2 percent in 2000 to 17.8 percent in 2004.
Not only are there more people living in poverty in America -- and worldwide, half of the planet lives on less than $2 a day -- but the gap between rich and poor continues to grow, sowing the seeds of resentment and despair that we see now being channeled into radical religious fervor and political oppression.
America faces a choice. We either continue down the path we're on relying more and more on dirtier forms of energy and fighting wars over the last drops of oil -- all of which just adds more CO2 and pollution to the atmosphere -- or we take the Apollo Alliance's advice and shift to a more sustainable future of greater energy efficiency, conservation, renewable energy, and less conspicuous consumption.
Here's where churches and religious organizations can play a significant role, which I'll write about in a future blog.
In the meantime, Mister Falwell's assertion that addressing global warming is bad for America is ill-informed, terribly myopic, and just a little xenophobic. And in my view, it is certainly un-Christian