Dr. Roy Spencer at T…

Dr. Roy Spencer at TCS Daily asks “How Green is Your Church?” and hits points about global warming and the different way that Christians can react to it that we’ve covered here before. But I wanted to highlight his concluding paragraphs.

Bjorn Lomborg, a self-proclaimed environmentalist, assembled a panel of experts in economics who were charged with determining — given a fixed amount of money to be dedicated to improving the human conditions — what actions give the biggest returns for the least money. The result was the “Copenhagen Consensus“, with over a dozen policy approaches prioritized in terms of bang-for-the-buck. Fighting climate change was at the bottom of the list. Fighting malaria, AIDS, provision of clean water and other sanitation measures were a few that were at or near the top of the list.

As has often been the case where economics and policy intersect, good intentions are not enough. The lesson for the church is, while it is one thing to agree to “help the world’s poor”, it is another thing entirely to determine how to best spend limited financial resources. Unless we examine the consequences of our charitable efforts, it is entirely possible to inadvertently make matters worse, rather than better.

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