June 8, 2007 – 5:54 a.m.
A Senate committee looked into the religious aspects of combating global warming Thursday, with witnesses on both sides of the issue championing the need to protect the world’s poor.
Sen.
The hearing was the latest in a long series that Boxer has held on climate issues.
Ranking Republican
Testifying were representatives of the Episcopalians, Catholics, Southern Baptists, Reform Jews and the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN).
The Rev. Jim Ball, President and CEO of the EEN, testified as a signatory to the Evangelical Climate Initiative in which more than 100 evangelical leaders, in a break with other evangelists, called last year for action to combat global warming.
Ball told the committee that the world’s poor would be hardest hit by the effects of climate change, with a possible decline in agricultural output, water scarcity and spreading disease.
He called for an economy-wide federal climate policy including mandatory targets for cutting greenhouse gases, saying an 80 percent reduction in emissions by 2050 would be necessary.
But Russell D. Moore, dean of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary’s School of Theology, said a significant number of American evangelical Christians were concerned about the use of biblical texts and theological rhetoric to pursue specific policies on climate change.
He said the Southern Baptists and other evangelicals acknowledged that climate change was occurring but many were not yet convinced that the extent of human responsibility is as great as portrayed “by some global warming activists.”
He said evangelicals found statements that the Garden of Eden could be restored by government action on climate change to be “problematic.”
He said they also questioned the effect of global warming legislation on the world’s poor, asking, “What will global warming measures do to men, woman and children in these countries?”
“What will government regulation on this issue do for the economic development of poor countries in providing electrification, water purification and sanitation for the world’s poor?”
The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church and a former oceanographer, called on Congress to make the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions a national priority.
She said climate change and global poverty were intimately related, each one propelling the other.
“Inaction on our part is the most costly of all courses of action for those living in poverty,” she said.
John L. Carr, secretary of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ department of social development and world peace, said it was time to act on climate change.
The United States should lead in addressing the disproportionate burdens of poorer countries and vulnerable people, he said.
Rabbi David Saperstein, director and counsel of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, said there was a rare degree of unity between Jewish and Christian denominations on the urgent need to address global warming and its impact on the poor.
“This is not simply an issue of the environment,” he said. “It is at the core of the religious community’s passion for economic justice.”
James Tonkowich, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, an alliance of American Christians, said that for many Americans climate control was inextricably linked to population control.
He accused “some evangelical Christians” of refusing to engage in thoughtful debate about global warming, and making “dubious assertions about the debate being over or all scientists agreeing.”
This, he said, “is not a Christian approach to the issue — particularly when the livelihood and lives of the global poor are at stake.”