QuoflectionsTM on Spirituality & Ethics
Global warming is a moral issue
Rev. Harry Rix
“Saving civilization is
not a spectator sport.”
Lester Brown
With 4% of the world’s population, the United States consumes 25% of the world’s oil and discharges 25% of the world’s carbon emissions.
President Bush pledged to regulate these emissions and support the Kyoto treaty, but broke both promises 53 days after his first inauguration. For seven years, the administration has opposed legislation addressing climate change. Now Bush says global warming is real, but threatens to veto the Lieberman-Warner bill unless this already weak legislation is weakened further.
Despite extraordinary oil profits, led by Exxon-Mobil’s $40.6 billion last year, Bush states he will not allow global-warming legislation to affect the economy. This inaction is alarming: the cost of doing nothing vastly exceeds the short-term costs for effective action.
Envision the Antarctic and Greenland ice shelves tumbling into their oceans, a 39 foot rise in sea level, the world’s coastland under water, and 600 million refugees seeking food, water and shelter—many beyond their nation’s borders—with severely impoverished nations waging war for scarce resources amidst an unprecedented global depression.
We may have only five years to save our planet from passing a “tipping point” that leads to this unimaginable catastrophe. This crisis requires immediate action.
Global warming is—by far—the most crucial issue of the 21st century. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse met with Rhode Island and national representatives of Interfaith Power & Light this week. I stated my passionate concerns regarding world hunger, global poverty and war: If the U.S. fails to significantly cut greenhouse gases in the next five years, all of these disasters will increase substantially in coming decades.
I was preaching to the choir. Whitehouse is aware of the many complexities of the Lieberman-Warner bill. This cap-and-trade legislation will place a value on carbon which rewards corporations for limiting emissions.
Unfortunately, the bill also provides billion of dollars in giveaways to coal and oil companies. Even so, it is not expected to survive a veto this year but—with a new president—some form of this legislation should be enacted next year.
Should historic polluters be rewarded with windfall profits? Obviously not. Should low and middle income families bear the brunt of this transition? Of course not. Neither should we seek a bill with emissions greater than levels recommended by the scientific community.
Politics, however, is the art of the possible. As Senator Whitehouse indicates, those who insist on a perfect bill are shooting themselves in the foot: A cap-and-trade bill must pass next year so the structures for reducing carbon emissions are in place. Otherwise, we will lose yet another critical year—after eight successive years of inaction.
Global warming is a moral issue. It increases the number and severity of hurricanes and cyclones, wreaking havoc from Katrina in this country to Bangladesh and Burma on the other side of the world. It expands drought in our own southwest as well as northern Africa—where Lake Chad has shrunk 95%, leaving boats mired in a wasteland of sand as fisherman, farmers and herders fight for the little water remaining.
Global warming is a moral issue. Without decisive action, we will bequeath to our children and grandchildren a world with substantially more poverty and less economic opportunity; more deserts and less rainforests; more warfare and less security.
Global warming is a moral issue. We cannot continue consuming so much of the world’s resources, especially when our avarice significantly increases the population and suffering of the severely impoverished.
We have barely begun to reap the consequences for the pollution we have seeded in our atmosphere. Still, there is hope. Nations around the world are mobilizing to convert to clean, renewable energy. A new U.S. President in 2009 will surely sign a cap-and-trade bill that begins reducing our greenhouse gases.
May our nation be transformed from the leading producer of greenhouse gases to the leading climate-change reformer. May this prayer to the Creator be accompanied by our care for the creation.
Comments on this column may be sent to Rev. Rix at
hrix1@cox.net. ©2008 Harry Rix. All rights reserved.
