Nearly thirty years ago I published my first book on Christian economics, Prosperity and Poverty: The Compassionate Use of Resources in a World of Scarcity. The last three chapters dealt with the nature and causes of poverty and how churches and individuals can help the poor. I said some fairly controversial things then about how ineffective many methods are, whether by governments, private organizations, or individuals. Since then I’ve seen nothing to change my mind. But I have learned some … [Read more...]
Caring for Creation: A Book of Good Intentions but Poor Science
As an evangelical Christian, I believe we should be good stewards of God’s planet. We should strive to reduce pollution to protect human health and the natural environment. We should explore new alternative energy sources, always seeking to maximize benefits and minimize harms. We should prioritize providing electricity for the 1.2 billion people who don’t have it—and consequently suffer high rates of disease and premature death. For these and many other reasons I applaud Mitch Hescox and … [Read more...]
Climate Change, Caring for Creation, and Evangelicals
Last year Mitchell Hescox, CEO of the Evangelical Environmental Network, teamed up with television meteorologist Paul Douglas to write Caring for Creation: The Evangelical’s Guide to Climate Change and a Healthy Environment (Bethany House). Their hearts are in the right place, but their understanding of global climate-change science is seriously deficient, and the result could be a cure worse than the disease—especially for the billions of poor around the world. Anthony Sadar, a veteran … [Read more...]
The Trump Climate Dump: Why It Doesn’t Matter if Even 100% of Scientists Agree on Global Warming
Given current technologies, it makes no sense to destroy $100 Trillion in wealth this century for an unmeasurable reduction in warming. The more efficiently we can do those things, the greater humanity prospers. Affordable energy is part of that efficiency. Everything humans do requires energy. Everything. But when human prosperity suffers, people die. So, can it really be called “anti-science” that the moment Trump was inaugurated, the White House deleted all references to climate … [Read more...]
Pope Francis and Climate Politics
Reuters reports, “Pope Francis urged national leaders on Monday to implement global environmental agreements without delay, a message that looked to be squarely aimed at U.S. President-elect Donald Trump. “Addressing a group of scientists that included theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, the pope gave his strongest speech on the environment since the election of Trump, who has threatened to pull out of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. ‘The ‘distraction’ or delay in … [Read more...]
Why Trump Should Fire the Paris Climate Treaty
Oh, the delight of knowing we’ve probably just endured the last salvo in the Obama Administration’s climate-change propaganda campaign! On November 16, U.S. delegates to COP-21 in Marrakech, Morocco—the twenty-first Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change—unveiled the United States Mid-Century Strategy for Deep Decarbonization. The document sets forth how the U.S. Obama Administration intends intended to achieve its “Intended Nationally Determined … [Read more...]
Walking from Calcutta to California: Poverty in Perspective
Walk in the streets of Calcutta (now Kolkata) and you will barely find space to move. Walk in the streets of some cities in California and you will barely meet a soul on the road. Two completely different worlds, with a simple reason for the difference—poverty and wealth. My first week in San Jose, CA was rather amusing. Unlike the cities of Vancouver and Norwich, in which I previously lived, the outskirts of San Jose had limited public transportation, which is understandable given the high … [Read more...]
Mother Theresa, the Environment, and the Poor in India
"Early this month, Mother Theresa was canonized as Saint Theresa by Pope Francis in a celebrated canonization ceremony in Vatican City. At this juncture, the same poor people in Calcutta (now Kolkata), whom she served with her life, face a different kind of threat to their lives—energy poverty caused by radical environmental policies. Sadly, these policies are supported by Pope Francis himself..." Read the full article at the Earth Rising Blog. … [Read more...]
What Would the Precautionary Principle Imply for Ethanol?
In 2007 Congress passed a law requiring the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to study and report every three years to Congress on the environmental impact of EPA’s ethanol mandate. And in the intervening nine years, EPA has complied with the law once—in 2011. Now it says it’ll be 2024 before it can manage it again. So by the time it should have filed five such reports and be working on its sixth, EPA expects to file its second. Meanwhile, multiple studies not done by EPA have … [Read more...]
Climate Science, Energy Policy, Poverty, and Christian Faith: How do they Connect?
(Editors Note: Click graphs to enlarge) In the March 16, 2016, issue of Forbes astrophysicist Ethan Siegel’s article "The Next Great Global Warming ‘Hiatus’ is Coming!" sought to refute skeptics of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) by arguing that the apparent lack of statistically significant global warming over roughly the last 18 or 19 years is just one in a series of lulls in a long-term warming trend for which human action is responsible. His article, deftly argued and … [Read more...]
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