How Christians should confront climate change

Climate change and climate policy are among the most complex, multifaceted issues humanity encounters. No group of people—not even climate scientists—should have a monopoly on advising policymakers about them. Instead, this multifaceted challenge requires input from thinkers of many backgrounds.

I submit that theologians and philosophers have a unique message to bring to the climate change debate.

{mosads}To that end, the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, which I lead, has issued a declaration, “Protect the Poor: Ten Reasons to Oppose Harmful Climate Change Policies,” signed by over 140 leaders, including 21 climate scientists, 28 other scientists, 21 economists (including specialists in environmental economics); 48 theologians, philosophers, and pastors; 29 ministry leaders; and 10 media figures who believe that today’s proposed climate change policies will hurt society’s most vulnerable.

The declaration is backed by a new study, A Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor 2014: The Case against Harmful Climate Change Policies Gets Stronger, written by two outstanding climate-change scholars, Dr. David R. Legates, Professor of Climatology at the University of Delaware, and Dr. G. Cornelis van Kooten, Professor of Economics and Research Chair in Environmental Studies and Climate at the University of Victoria. I provided an introduction as a theologian and ethicist concerned about the impact of policies on the poor.

Both the declaration and the study are at www.CornwallAlliance.org.

The declaration uses the most up-to-date climate evidence to show that Earth’s climate system is robust, resilient, and self-correcting. Our planet’s climate naturally reduces rather than magnifies the impact of additional greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This natural cycle outweighs human influence on global temperature.

This directly refutes the conventional wisdom repeated so often today. Many climate scientists’ computer models have been shown to be incorrect by real-world observations, which show carbon dioxide-driven warming to be far less than expected.

Moreover, carbon dioxide increases may actually benefit the global government. The declaration states: “Rising atmospheric CO₂ benefits all life on Earth by improving plant growth and crop yields, making food more abundant and affordable, helping the poor most of all.”

This is the same reason that energy policy must continue to rely on fossil fuels. Compared to renewable energy sources, fossil fuels are abundant, affordable, and reliable energy. They are thus indispensable to lifting and keeping people out of poverty. Given this fact, mandatory reductions in CO₂ emissions would actually harm the poor by increasing the price of energy, and therefore everything else.

“Such policies would put more people at greater risk than the warming they are intended to prevent,” the declaration says, “because they would slow, stop, or even reverse the economic growth that enables people to adapt to all climates. They would also harm the poor more than the wealthy, and would harm them more than the small amount of warming they might prevent.”

Billions of the poor desperately need to replace dirty, inefficient cooking and heating fuels, pollution from which causes hundreds of millions of illnesses and about 4 million premature deaths every year, mostly among women and young children. To demand that they forgo the use of inexpensive fossil fuels and depend on expensive wind, solar, and other “Green” fuels to meet that need is to condemn them to more generations of poverty and the high rates of disease and premature death that accompany it.

In light of this evidence, the declaration’s signers call for three things to happen in the climate change debate.

First, Christians must practice creation stewardship out of love for God and love for our neighbors—especially the poor.

Second, Christian leaders must study the issues and embrace sound scientific, economic, and ethical thinking on creation stewardship, particularly climate change.

Finally, political leaders must abandon fruitless and harmful policies to control global temperature and instead adopt policies that simultaneously reflect responsible environmental stewardship, make energy and all its benefits more affordable, and so free the poor to rise out of poverty.

The war on fossil fuels is, in the end, a war on the poor. It’s time to end it.

Beisner is founder and national spokesman of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, a conservative Christian public policy organization, and is the author of Where Garden Meets Wilderness: Evangelical Entry into the Environmental Debate and two other books on environmental theology, ethics, and economics.