Land urges defeat of climate-change bill
- Jun 3, 2008 - comment
Southern Baptist ethics leader Richard Land is calling for opposition to climate-change legislation before the U.S. Senate.
The president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission sent an e-mail letter to Southern Baptists and other ERLC constituents June 2 urging them to ask their senators to oppose the Climate Security Act, S. 3036. The Senate voted 74-14 on the same day to begin debate on the measure.
The legislation would require cuts in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions that many scientists believe contribute to global warming. It would establish an annual cap on emissions through the year 2050 and allow a trading system among energy companies and other organizations, permitting those that produce more emissions to purchase credits from those producing fewer.
The measure calls for reducing emissions by 19 percent in 2020 and by 71 percent in 2050, according to Congressional Quarterly.
Land said in his letter, however, the bill is a “vain attempt to reduce the unfounded threat of cataclysmic global warming.”
The proposal would deal a strong blow to the U.S. economy, especially harming the poor, and would produce “an almost immeasurable reduction in global climate temperatures,” he said. “This is a price too high for a policy based on science disputed more and more” by scientists.
“Christians have a responsibility to practice environmental stewardship,” Land said. “But any action should first consider its impact on God’s most prized creation, human beings.”
The bill’s prospects do not appear favorable. The proposal may not escape the Senate, and the White House promised in a June 2 policy statement President Bush would veto it if it reached his desk.
In his letter, Land cited predictions of the bill’s impact that estimate home electricity costs would increase 40 percent by 2020, American job losses would reach four million in 2050 and gross domestic product losses might be $4.8 trillion by 2030.
Those in poverty in the United States and other countries “would suffer the most as the rising costs of all goods make mere subsistence increasingly burdensome and millions of people in underdeveloped regions of the world would find it even more difficult to have the cheap and abundant energy they need to escape their desperate circumstances,” Land said.
Sen. John Warner, R.-Va., one of the bill’s cosponsors, said in a June 2 floor speech, “[W]e simply cannot do nothing; we cannot constantly postpone.”
The bill represents a “middle-of-the-road position,” Warner said. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut and the bill’s sponsor, and he “could not satisfy all those who want stronger controls put in, more immediate corrections, nor could we satisfy those who sort of say, ‘Let’s wait and see,’” Warner said.
Their bill would reduce global warming without harming the American economy or consumers, Lieberman and Warner contend. They have cited an Environmental Protection Agency analysis that reported electricity costs would rise only 18 percent after 40 years and the gross domestic product would increase by only one percent less than without the legislation.
The original bill from Lieberman and Warner now exists in the form of a substitute amendment by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D.-Calif. The ERLC’s Land and Barrett Duke, the entity’s vice president for public policy, had previously signed onto a March letter opposing an earlier version of the legislation.
The division over global warming, its causes and the proper governmental response exists in the evangelical Christian community as well as in, to some extent, the society at large.
The position of the ERLC’s Land is reflected in the approach of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, a coalition of primarily evangelicals and scientists who say the cause of global warming remains uncertain. It has expressed concerns about the effects the policies proposed by those who believe in human-induced climate change would have on the poor.
An alternative evangelical coalition, the Evangelical Climate Initiative (ECI), contends human beings are the primary cause of global warming, which it says will have the greatest impact on those in poverty. ECI’s Jim Ball endorsed the latest version of the Lieberman-Warner legislation in a May 21 news conference.
The ERLC is among the supporting organizations for the “We Get It!” campaign introduced in mid-May. The campaign is an effort to gain the endorsements of a million evangelicals to a brief document that follows Cornwall’s approach in espousing biblical responsibility for the environment and the poor.
Messengers to the 2007 Southern Baptist Convention adopted a resolution affirming humanity’s responsibility to protect the environment. It called for government policies that strike a balance among environmental stewardship, economic effects and care for the poor most likely to be affected by such decisions, while urging caution in the debate over the human role in global warming.
Land’s letter is available at the ERLC’s website, www.erlc.com.
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