Faith Leaders Debate Effects Of Limits on Emissions

As President Bush resisted mandatory limits on carbon emissions at a G-8 summit in Germany yesterday, several U.S. religious leaders urged Congress to speedily enact such limits to avoid a catastrophic rise in global temperatures that would particularly hurt the poor.

But in sharply divided testimony before the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works, some evangelical Protestant leaders took the opposite tack, also citing concern for the poor.

Trading the same admonitions from Jesus to protect “the least of these,” the climate-change activists said the poor would suffer most from extreme weather; skeptics of climate change said the poor would be hit hardest by the cost of shifting to cleaner energy sources.

Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church and a former oceanographer, argued that “global poverty and climate change are intimately related.”

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Posted in * Culture-Watch, Climate Change, Weather, Religion & Culture

7 comments on “Faith Leaders Debate Effects Of Limits on Emissions

  1. Katherine says:

    So, Ms. Schori would claim that before the alleged human-caused climate change, there was no global poverty? She should get out more. Having humiliated her Church by claiming on PBS that David and Jonathan were gay lovers, she now proceeds to claim being an expert on global poverty and climatology.

  2. Mike Bertaut says:

    Again, just remember all the “climate change” hacks are the same guys who can’t tell you with any degree of certainty whether its going to rain tomorrow or not. Not that I’m cynical, but climatology is clearly an emerging science with a long way to go. Not solid enough data to bet the house on.

    KTF…mrb

  3. libraryjim says:

    And Global Warming restrictions are also going to KEEP a large number of people in poverty as they will keep needed industries, power plants, argicultural innovations (such as fertilizers and pesticides that will increase crop yields), etc out of areas that desperately need them.

  4. CRUX SANCTI PATRIS BENEDICTI says:

    Nobody expresses the situation with greater clarity than Czech President Václav Klaus, who, in an answers to questions from the House of Representatives of the U.S. Congress, Committee on Energy and Commerce, stated:

    “The environmentalist paradigm of thinking is absolutely static. They neglect the fact that both nature and human society are in a process of permanent change, that there is and has been no ideal state of the world as regards natural conditions, climate, distribution of species on earth, etc. They neglect the fact that the climate has been changing fundamentally throughout the existence of our planet and that there are proofs of substantial climate fluctuations even in known and documented history. Their reasoning is based on historically short and incomplete observations and data series which cannot justify the catastrophic conclusions they draw. They neglect the complexity of factors that determine the evolution of the climate and blame contemporary mankind and the whole industrial civilization for being the decisive factors responsible for climate change and other environmental risks”

  5. libraryjim says:

    Hey, KJS, how about observing the same separation of Church and State that you want conservatives to observe in regards to governmental policies?

  6. ann r says:

    As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, the medieval warm period was a time of greater prosperity especially for those on the bottom of society. If that was true then, it should be true again. Better crops, more reliable harvest, no late freezes, etc. Perhaps the marginal places that would suffer really should be encouraging folks to move to less marginal places. Would love to see Los Angeles shrink!

  7. libraryjim says:

    One thing not mentioned in most news services reports is that the Kyoto Protocol (KP) was dealt a death blow at the G-8 Summit: All member nations agreed to put off requirements called for in KP until 2050.