Global Warming (View 1 of 2): How Should We Respond to Global Warming?
by: E. Calvin Beisner - May 1, 2006 - comment
This is one article of a two-article series representing two views on climate change. For another viewpoint, please read the other article, An Evangelical Call to Action on Climate Change by Jim Ball.
“Human-induced climate change is real. Its consequences will be disastrous, especially for the poor. Christian moral convictions demand that we respond immediately by adopting policies to force reductions in carbon emissions into the atmosphere by consuming less fossil fuel.”
Those points are the thrust of “Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action,” released in February 2006 by the Evangelical Climate Initiative. The statement was fostered by the Evangelical Environmental Network, accompanied by an advertising campaign funded by a $450,000 grant from the Hewlett Foundation, and signed by eighty-six leading evangelical pastors and educators.
But is the ECI statement true? And does it represent a consensus of opinion among evangelical leaders? The answer to both questions is no. I’ll address the second question first.
What they’re not telling you
What the Evangelical Climate Initiative wasn’t telling people was that its backers had tried for a year or more to get the board of directors of the National Association of Evangelicals to adopt a similar statement but failed. Late in 2005, leading Evangelicals including James Dobson, Charles Colson, D. James Kennedy, Richard Land, and Donald Wildmon wrote an appeal to the NAE not to endorse such a statement. Their reasons? First, the science and economics don’t support it. Second, the consensus required for a statement by the NAE, which represents 30 million evangelicals, doesn’t exist. Among this appeal’s signers were three economists–Kenneth Chilton, Tracy Miller, and Timothy Terrell–with expertise on environmental economics. The NAE board responded in January, agreeing that the consensus did not exist and announcing that it would not endorse the statement.
In other words, the real news in February wasn’t that the ECI was able to find eighty-six evangelical leaders to sign its “Call to Action” but that the organization representing 30 million evangelicals refused to endorse it.
Is the thrust of the “Call to Action” true?
No. As co-authors Roy Spencer (senior research scientist on climate change at the University of Alabama-Huntsville), Paul Driessen (senior policy advisor for the Congress of Racial Equality and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death) and I pointed out in “An Examination of the Scientific, Ethical, and Theological Implications of Climate Change Policy,” there are several holes in the ECI argument:
- Climate change has occurred throughout earth’s history. We presently are in an upward cycle, but we have not yet reached the temperatures of the Medieval Climate Optimum. That particular period allowed grape growing and wine making in England, facilitated the settlement of the coasts of Greenland by the Vikings, and brought several centuries of excellent harvests all over the northern hemisphere that made life more certain for people everywhere.
- While increased CO2 in the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning probably has some slight influence on global temperatures, it is almost certainly responsible for only a minute fraction of the warming over the last 150 years.
- The most credible forecasts of warming to be anticipated from a doubling of atmospheric CO2 over the next century call for global average temperature increases within the range of natural variability and would not entail catastrophic consequences.
- The most optimistic estimates of the amount of reduction in forecast global warming to be achieved by a Kyoto Protocol-like carbon reduction program are in the range of 0.2o F–so small as to be undetectable against natural background variation and certainly of no significant benefit to humanity or the rest of the planet.
- The consequence of pursuing the policy promoted by the “Call to Action” would be steep increases in energy prices, which–because energy is a part of all economic production–would cause increases in all other prices as well. For the poor–the very people the ECI purports to want to protect–such increased costs could be truly devastating. For everyone, they would mean a slowing of economic development.
- Economic development is precisely what is most needed to enable us to respond, adapt to, and protect ourselves from a wide variety of problems–environmental, medical, political, and otherwise. Slowing economic development, therefore, hinders our ability to adapt and protect ourselves in the future–exactly the opposite effect of that intended by the ECI.
Adapt and protect through economic development
No one should fault the motivations of the ECI and those who signed the “Call to Action.” But for precisely the same motive–protecting the poor from harm–we should instead repudiate the statement and press for a strategy of preparing for adaptation and protection through economic development.
One example of how this makes better sense arises from a comparison of the cost of fighting global warming with the cost of providing sewage sanitation and water purification for the roughly 2 billion people around the world who lack them. A single year’s cost of compliance with the Kyoto Protocol would be around $1 trillion–and it would have to be repeated annually for over fifty years to achieve the 0.2o F reduction in global warming. For one-fifth that amount, spent just once, we could provide sanitation and pure drinking water for all who lack them. And for a fraction of that amount each year thereafter, we could maintain those, thus preventing 2 to 3 million premature deaths every year from water-borne diseases.
Our Christian moral commitment to the poor should lead us not to the quixotic attempt to fight global warming but to promote economic development to raise people out of poverty. The side benefit will be environmental improvement everywhere, for environmental protection is costly, and wealthier societies can afford it better than poor ones.
E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., is associate professor of social ethics at Knox Theological Seminary, a founder and spokesman of the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, a co-author of the Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship, and the author of three books on environmental ethics and economics, including Where Garden Meets Wilderness: Evangelical Entry Into the Environmental Debate (Eerdmans/Acton Institute, 1997). To read “An Examination of the Scientific, Ethical, and Theological Implications of Climate Change Policy” and other of Dr. Beisner’s works on environmental stewardship, visit_ http://www.interfaithstewardship.org .
This is one article of a two-article series representing two views on climate change. For another viewpoint, please read the other article, An Evangelical Call to Action on Climate Change by Jim Ball.
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