Mr. Chairman, Mr. Upton, members of the Committee, thank you for inviting me to testify today about the ethics of climate change policy, particularly as it affects energy costs and their impact on the poor. I speak to you as a theologian and pastor, a former professor of social ethics, and the national spokesman ofthe Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, a network of religious leaders, scientists, and economists dedicated to bringing Biblical world view, theology, and ethics together with excellent science and excellent economics to address simultaneously the challenges of economic development for the very poor and effective stewardship of creation. Sadly, we often find that our dual aims require us to warn of unintended negative consequences for the poor of policies touted to protect the environment.
In Job 24, Job mourned the fact that often in his day the powerful pushed the poor aside, making them hide themselves because of their nakedness. Psalm 72 describes a just king, one like the coming Messiah, as having compassion on the poor and needy and saving them. When the Apostle Paul wrote to the Galatians about meeting with the other apostles early in his ministry, he said, “They only asked us to remember the poor–the very thing I also was eager to do” (Galatians 2:10). That has been my motivation for over twenty-five years of study and writing on developmental and environmental economics, demonstrated in four published books, many articles and conference presentations, and fifteen years of teaching at the collegiate and graduate levels. Both the Old and the New Testaments insist that rulers protect the poor from harm, following the example of Jahweh, who, Psalm 140:12 tells us, “will maintain the cause of the afflicted and justice for the poor.”
Yet often the very people who are responsible to protect the poor make laws that, whether intentionally or not, harm them. “Woe to those who enact evil statutes and to those who constantly record unjust decisions,” God said through the Prophet Isaiah, “so as to deprive the needy of justice and rob the poor of My people of their rights . . .” (Isaiah 10:1–2). The God of Scripture is not surprised by a “throne of destruction” that “devises mischief by decree” (Psalm 94:20). I am convinced that policies meant to reduce alleged carbon dioxide-induced global warming will be destructive, devising mischief by decree. The best, most recent empirical scientific discoveries have shown that even the mid-range scenarios of the IPCC exaggerate the warming effect of increased CO2 by at least seven times; atmospheric CO2 concentration is rising at a fraction of the rate forecast by the IPCC; and Earth has been cooling for the last seven years at a rate of 3.5EF per century.
These findings, opposite the expectations of the IPCC, are consistent with the Biblical world view. The naturalist, atheistic world view sees Earth and all its ecosystems as the result of chance processes and therefore inherently unstable and fragile, vulnerable to enormous harm from tiny causes. The Biblical world view sees Earth and its ecosystems as the effect of a wise God’s creation and providential preservation and therefore robust, resilient, and self-regulating–like the product of any good engineer who ensures that the systems he designs have positive and negative feedback mechanisms to balance each other and prevent small perturbations from setting off a catastrophic cascade of reactions.
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