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REDUCING CO2 EMISSIONS: HARDEST ON THE POOR

Posted on: September 24, 2007

Bryan Fischer, Executive Director, Idaho Values Alliance

(Much of the material in this column is drawn from the Cornwall Alliance’s abundantly footnoted “Call to Truth,” which you can access at the link below.)

In evangelical circles, one of the primary justifications for urging dramatic limitations in greenhouse gas emissions is the supposed harm being done to the poor by environmental degradation.

However, the simple truth is that imposing severe restrictions on carbon emissions, which evangelical environmentalists unfortunately support, would confine the world’s poor to extended poverty, hunger and disease, and therefore such restrictions should be resisted in the name of Christian compassion alone.

Warming due to natural forces

As you’ve read in this space before, there is a growing realization in the scientific community that climate change is a result of cyclical factors which are independent of human activity. The earth has been alternately warming and cooling since its creation, most of these cycles, of course, occurring before the immense industrial growth of the second half of the 20th century and apart from any discernible human impact whatsoever.

In fact, there are studies that strongly suggest that rising CO2 levels follow rather than lead rising temperatures, indicating they may be an effect rather than a cause of global warming.

An ever-growing number of scientists are convinced that fluctuations in global temperatures are driven primarily by solar variability and other natural forces such as the earth’s orbit and tilt rather than by human factors.

Since 1998, over 19,700 scientists have signed a petition which says that there is no convincing evidence that human activity is causing or will cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere. The much-vaunted “scientific consensus” on anthropogenic global warming simply does not exist. It is a figment of the environmental imagination.

Warming and increased CO2 likely to do more good than harm

Further, there are significant questions as to whether increased global warming will in fact be harmful, since the bulk of it would occur mostly in winter, mostly in polar regions, and mostly at night.

This is true even if global warming is due to CO2 emissions. CO2 is not in fact a pollutant – it is plant food. Every doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentrations produces an average 35 percent increase in plant growth efficiency. More CO2 logically will lead to increased agricultural output, which is good news for those who care about the poor and want them to have access to affordable food supplies.

The likely results of increased CO2 are thus shrinking deserts, lower food prices, and reduced demand for agricultural land to feed the world’s poor. This latter outcome should be an environmentalist’s dream come true, for it leads to reduced pressure on habitat and therefore contributes to species survival.

Warming temperatures would mean longer growing seasons, and lower differentials between nighttime low temperature and daytime highs, which again means more food at lower costs for the poor.

And as you have read before in this space, excessive cold is much more lethal to humans than excessive heat. The death rate from severe cold is nearly ten times higher than that from severe heat. The bottom line here is that, if global warming does occur, it will save lives, not destroy them.

Environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg estimates that in Europe, 220,000 people die every year due to heat, but 1.5 million die due to excessive cold. Warming trends, then, should actually be embraced by those who care about human life.

Kyoto costly, ineffective

Experts estimate that even if the draconian Kyoto Protocol were implemented in full we would only manage to reduce global temperatures by a miniscule 0.2 degrees centigrade by mid-century, at a cost of $1 trillion a year. And more restrictive treaties would be needed every year.

Further, several of the world’s fastest growing economies, such as China, India and Brazil, are not signatories to Kyoto, and yet China this year surpassed the U.S. as the world’s largest emitter of CO2. Thus the U.S. would only be harming its economy and its families by limiting its own carbon emissions, while China would more than offset our reduction in carbon emissions and continue merrily growing its way to prosperity.

Environmentalism hurts the world’s poor

The world’s poor face enormous health challenges, many of which can be traced to either a lack of inexpensive energy or misguided environmental policies.

DDT, for instance, was on the verge of eliminating the worldwide scourge of malaria until a combination of junk science and hysteria led to its ban in the 1970s. The resurgence of malaria is responsible for over a million premature deaths every year.

Yet DDT is so harmless that one scientist drank a tablespoonful of the pesticide in every public debate over its safety. It’s so safe that African countries have begun spraying DDT indoors to protect their people from this deadly disease.

Approximately 1.6 million poverty-stricken people (mostly women and children) die every year due to respiratory diseases caused by indoor cooking fires which use wood or, more commonly, dung. The solution? Inexpensive fossil fuel energy. Until alternative technology is developed, decades away at minimum, the only hope these poor have is for the West, out of simple compassion, to help them gain access to sources of energy that will enable them to cook, purify their water, and heat their homes without killing themselves in the process.

In other words, draconian, government-imposed reductions in carbon emissions will be devastating for the poor as well as ineffective in reducing global warming. Higher energy costs will slow economic growth, reduce productivity, and increase the cost of all goods, including the food, shelter, clothing and medical care most essential to the poor.

By denying the poor access to inexpensive energy, we bind them in poverty and to indigenous and traditional lifestyles which turn their communities into little more than “human game preserves,” as Leon Louw puts it.

At this point, there is simply no alternative, other than hydroelectric power, to energy that comes from fossil fuels. As Cornwall’s “Call to Truth” declaration puts it, “It is immoral and harmful to the Earth’s poorest citizens to deny them the benefits of abundant, reliable, affordable electricity merely because it is produced by using fossil fuels,” and to restrict their access to live-saving fossil fuels just because affluent Westerners disapprove of them.

It is unconscionable to deny these people a chance at life and health because we are blindly devoted to a misguided and poorly substantiated view of the environment. The love of Jesus for “the least of these” should drive us to give them the same opportunity for the life and prosperity that we in the West enjoy. It is nothing less than our Christian duty to do so.

For an excellent summary of an evangelical view of global warming:

http://www.cornwallalliance.org/docs/Call_to_Truth.pdf

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