They Get It

A group of evangelical Christians is trying to get the point across that the science isn’t settled on global warming, and indeed that the "cure" may be worse than the disease.

While it may seem like everyone believes in global warming and the impending catastrophe it will bring, a group of conservative Christians countered that message Thursday by launching a national campaign to gather one million signatures for a statement that says Christians must not believe in all the hype about global warming.

The “We Get It!” declaration, which currently has nearly 100 signers, is backed by prominent Christians including Tony Perkins of Family Research Council, Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family, award-winning radio host Janet Parshall, and U.S. Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma.

What supporters of the statement seek is to inform Christians about the biblical perspective on the environment and the poor, and to encourage them to look at the hard evidence, which they say does not support the devastating degree of climate change claimed by mainstream society.

The point is that there’s more to global warming than carbon offsets and fluorescent light bulbs.  There are people to be considered.

[Dr. Barrett Duke, vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission] called it an “unbiblical” response to make policies based on unsettled data that would push the poor further into starvation and poverty.

But the SBC leader made sure to clarify that he and other signers are not “anti-earth.”

“It isn’t as though we think that the earth is here to be abused. It is not,” he said. “It is God’s creation and we have a responsibility to care for it and to do all that we can to help it be the place that God wants it to be.”

Yet at the same time, policies should not be made to sacrifice the needs of the most needy in order to “reach some kind of standard” that may not even be reachable, Duke argued.

“If humans are not causing the problem then it doesn’t matter how much we reduce CO2 emissions. It won’t make any difference,” he said.

Dr. E. Calvin Beisner, founder and spokesman for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, brought the point home. 

“The number of premature deaths, number of diseases, and the harm to the human economy that can be predicted from the policies used to fight the warming” is more destructive than even if all the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)-predicted global warming-caused disasters came true, Beisner said emotionally to The Christian Post.

“You try to cap emissions and you kill more people than die if you don’t cap emissions,” Beisner said, referring to those who would die from lack of access to energy, higher food prices, and the halt in their country’s economic development.

“We will have killed people,” he added solemnly. “We care about this issue the same way why we care about abortion. It kills people.”

This is explained in the Cornwall Alliance’s declaration itself.

Public policies to combat exaggerated risks can dangerously delay or reverse the economic development necessary to improve not only human life but also human stewardship of the environment. The poor, who are most often citizens of developing nations, are often forced to suffer longer in poverty with its attendant high rates of malnutrition, disease, and mortality; as a consequence, they are often the most injured by such misguided, though well-intended, policies.

The old joke goes that, finding out that the world was to end tomorrow, the mainstream media would blare out headlines, "WORLD ENDS TOMORROW – POOR, MINORITIES HARDEST HIT!"  Interestingly, in this case, and in the case of so many causes that the press is on board with, that effect is only examined long after they’ve done their persuading, if at all. 

The idea that Christians don’t worry themselves about science is, of course, completely wrong.  Indeed, what needs to be done in the case of global warming is an examination, not just of the science of climate and our globe’s history, but of the proposed solutions and how they relate to our charge as children of God.

Technorati Tags: environment, global warming, Christianity, climate change, we get it, Tony Perkins, Dr. James Dobson, Senator James Inhofe, Dr. E. Calvin Beisner, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation

Filed under: Christianity • Energy • Ethics & Morality • Global Warming • Media • Religion

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