February 2008

It’s distressing to see that some of the “Emerging Church” and some Baptists are getting involved with the “Creation Care” movement. From Sierra Club’s website:

In early 2008 the Sierra Club is cosponsoring an eleven-city tour to promote Christian author Brian McLaren's newest book Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crisis and a Revolution of Hope. Focusing on creation care, global justice, and a concern for the poor, this book calls upon its readers to take action in a time of global crisis.

Inspired by our shared values of environmental stewardship, global justice and care for our neighbors, the Sierra Club is proud to partner with Sojourners: Faith & Justice Churches, Emergent Village and others, in promoting this message of responsible stewardship

Although the Bible counsels good stewardship of the Earth, this does not trump care for the neediest on the planet. The early church counseled the Apostle Paul, “Remember the poor,” to which he replied, “the very thing I was eager to do.” But cap-and-trade policies, carbon taxes, mandatory efficiency reductions, and the like place the environment over people. And the effects are already being felt around the world.

In the article “Rising Food Prices Curb Aid to Global Poor,” the World Food Program director Gregory Barrow said, “We've not been put in a position where we’ve had to shut down a program or reduce the rations, but prices have risen to a point where they're going to have an impact … sooner or later.” And the food riots, such as Indonesia’s response to soybean prices doubling because of an ethanol mandate, have already begun.

Energy shortages, often caused by the stone-walling regulations of environmentalists, are now beginning in Africa, which joins Brazil, Cuba, Pakistan, Chile, the Baltic states, Iraq, and Uganda. Faced with energy-rationing resulting from global warming policies, the outlook for the one-quarter of the earth’s population that has no electricity ever getting electricity is bleak.

And for Christian groups to join forces in this way to a group such as the Sierra Club, whose stated goals are “to limit human population numbers” and who take actions promoting abortion, seems contradictory to most Christians’ basic tenets.

Maybe New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is running for higher office. He has gone from tempering media alarmism to, as of today, being the alarmist’s alarmist.

As NewsBusters reported last November:

“On Monday’s CBS ‘Early Show,’ co-host Harry Smith interviewed New York City Mayor, Michael Bloomberg. The liberal mayor has followed in the footsteps of Al Gore and implored the government to take action to address an impending environmental crisis, saying ‘We need to do something now.’ To match Bloomberg’s alarmist rhetoric, Smith added ‘Manhattan will be underwater by 2050.’ Amusingly, even Bloomberg thought that assertion went too far, ‘There’s a — I don’t know that Manhattan will be underwater, but certainly the environment’s going to be a lot worse that we leave our children’.”

Times change, and the New York Sun now cites Bloomberg saying that global warming “has the potential to kill everybody” (conveniently, others today have a quite different view).

Now, it has been quietly suggested that to call the global warming doomsayers alarmists is to engage in name-calling just like them. This episode offers a good pressure test for that position. The tag “alarmist” is simply not in the same solar system as calling anyone who disagrees with you – nay, with your prophesying of the future, no less – akin to a Holocaust denier.

“Alarmist” also is far less tame than this behavior demands. People insisting that catastrophe is ensured – even that quite possibly everyone on the planet will be wiped out – unless you do what they want are hysterics. Be happy with “alarmist”.

Now that Senator John McCain (R-Az.) is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and either Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) or Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is going to be the Democratic nominee, I expect there will be a lot of big companies pleading with Congress to pass a cap-and-trade bill this year.  Their reasoning is that they should negotiate a cap-and-trade scheme that “they can live with” now rather than be faced with a political climate next year that is more favorable to a cap-and-trade bill with much more onerous targets and timetables.

I think this is foolish, and I hope that the opponents of energy rationing and global warming alarmism won’t buy into it.  In my view, a “reasonable” cap-and-trade bill this year will only set the stage for a much bigger bill in the next Congress.  That is the pattern of major environmental legislation.  First, pass a bill that nearly everyone agrees is reasonable and achievable, and then use that agreement as the staging ground to demand much more.  The Endangered Species Act of 1973 was preceded by acts of 1966 and 1970.  The 7.5 billion gallon ethanol mandate enacted in 2005 was replaced by a 36 billion gallon mandate when Congress overwhelmingly passed and President George W. Bush enthusiastically signed the anti-energy bill in December.  That bill also included a significant increase in Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards for new vehicles.  But already environmental pressure groups have announced that CAFÉ was just the beginning of their efforts to force automakers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Rather than pre-emptive capitulation, I think the correct strategy is to resist cap-and-trade legislation while the realities of energy rationing sink in.  It will be more difficult to enact cap-and-trade in the next Congress, even if the new president and more members of Congress support it, because the high costs are becoming ever more apparent in the European Union.  While I think we can win by waiting this one out, there are unfortunately all too many defeatists in the business community who can’t resist the temptation to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.