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