Does Climate Change Debate Carry Religious Command?

Does Climate Change Debate Carry Religious Command? Dr. Robert Nelson. USA Today February 14, 2013

On Tuesday, President Obama once again brought up climate change in his State of the Union Address, just as he did in his inaugural address last month. This week, he spoke in the cold voice of science, but in that first address the president took a different approach, one in which the seeds of a broader environmental coalition can be found.

On his second inauguration, Obama said the U.S. must reduce its greenhouse gas emissions in order to "preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God. That's what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared."

Climate activists have argued that science, not God, requires urgent greenhouse gas reductions. Now, as a Slate headline put it, "Obama Brings God Into the Climate Change Fight."

Some environmentalists speculated that Obama might be hoping to reach out to devout Christians — many of them Republicans — in the hope of building a wider consensus.

Role of Christianity

This is a long way from the 1967 declaration of American historian Lynn White, inScience magazine, that Christianity bears primary responsibility for raping the earth. Indeed, Obama's inaugural remarks appear to have been an allusion to the book of Genesis, which tells us that God gave the world to human beings for their sustenance and enjoyment, but requires us to be good stewards of his creation.

The president also might have been acknowledging the fact that among the political problems of our time, climate change could be the most "wicked" of all. Voters are being asked to bear large burdens now in order to create practical benefits that might not be realized until many of them are dead. If the case for climate change is not deeply moral, capable of invoking powerful altruistic motives, it will be politically hopeless.

Many of Obama's environmental supporters admittedly have in mind a different message of the Christian God. If human beings alter the climate radically, they will be "playing God," challenging God's authority over his own creation. In the Old Testament, we learn that those who challenge God's authority will surely be punished, typically with flood, famine, pestilence, drought, earthquake or other environmental calamity.

Today, new prophets tell us that our modern sins will lead to rising seas, stronger hurricanes and longer droughts. If we don't reform our sinful ways, global catastrophe on a biblical scale looms. Billy Graham could hardly have said it better.

Please See the whole text in: http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/02/13/god-and-climate-change-column/1917975/

Climate Policy Holy Wars: Clashing Secular Religions and Stubborn Economic Realities

Here I am giving a talk about climate change as a religious disagreement, at the Hudson Institute, December 13

Here's some coverage in Climate Wire (part of the Greenwire newsletter group):

9. ADVOCACY:
Some scholars compare climate change to a religion
Evan Lehmann, E&E reporter
Published: Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Can a green crusader working to ease Arctic melting and a calculating economist who looks at the polar bear's extinction as a small financial loss both be on the side of angels?
It depends upon which expert who appeared yesterday at a Hudson Institute forum you choose to believe.
"Environmentalists really implicitly think of it [as] we're playing God with the Earth. And that's morally and religiously objectionable," asserted Robert Nelson, a professor at the University of Maryland's School of Public Policy.
His view that environmentalism is a "secular religion" might be shrugged off as a generalization by some climate advocates who base their policy decisions on a raft of scientific studies indicating that rising temperatures are attributable to human activity.
But Nelson doesn't save his assertions of religiousness for just greens. Morality also colors the viewpoints of strict economists, he says, adding that sea level rise is "no big deal" because it might increase trade and expand access to oil and gas reserves.
"The most obvious thing is that polar bears could be adversely affected, or go extinct," he added. "But how does that bear on human welfare? Well, there are about 400 polar bears a year that are hunted. So we could be looking at the loss of 400 successful hunts of polar bears."
"It would obviously be a no-brainer," Nelson said of the preference for increased Arctic access over the bears. "The economic costs would be trivial relative to the economic gains."
The offbeat discussion came two days after the Durban Platform extended Kyoto Protocol goals for emission reductions in Europe and advanced the notion that all nations, economically established and rising ones, would eventually address their carbon output.
Reverence for the Earth -- good or bad?
But Nelson and another speaker, Lee Lane, described the outcome as a failure.
"It's nearly bankrupt," Lane said of the international climate effort. "In effect, they said exactly nothing [and] committed to exactly nothing."
Lane, a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute, also suggests that environmentalism is steered by a passion akin to religious conviction in a new paper, "History, Ideology, and U.S. Climate Policy: Beyond the Orthodoxies of the Left and Right."
"Clearly, the appeal of [greenhouse gas] controls does not rest on utilitarian grounds," the paper says. "Instead, it largely stems from the quasi-religious reverence for preservation of pristine nature."
Then there was Joel Garreau, an author and fellow at the New America Foundation. He found the religious connection to be an asset. "Many of those making the case that environmentalism has become religion throw around the word 'religion' pejoratively," said Garreau. "I'm not going to disparage environmentalism as a religion any more than I would spit on Mormonism or Judaism or the Southern Baptist Convention. Decrying another person's religion is just uncivilized and rude."
It's also pointless, he says. People are passionate about things that they believe in, and trying to change those views is "a waste of time." Besides, those beliefs might help motivate a large segment of people to address, say, climate change, he suggested.
"The good news about making public policy an alliance with faith is that it could furiously work," Garreau said. "Humans respond much more wholeheartedly to faith than they do to reason. If you want people to quickly and thoroughly do the right thing, go for faith."