Stewardship/ xian

see andy szasz on possible coalition

swap out cross for target icon?

===

rubber inverse projection

an 4 23

Lauren Boebert (R) celebrated Earth Day Saturday by attacking climate change and calling out liberals for trying "to divide us."

Boebert, who warned last year against hosting drag queen "storytime" events in her Colorado district only to see them do it anyway and achieve enormous success, made exactly one tweet about Earth Day. At the end of the day, Boebert posted on Twitter that we should celebrate the day by remembering "to appreciate this incredible world God has given us."

She further insisted that liberals are trying to change the purpose of the holiday.

"Liberals will try to make this day about climate change to divide us," the congresswoman wrote. "Let’s focus on being appreciative, good stewards of what God has given us instead."

Contrary to Boebert's message, the origins of Earth Day are secular. According to National Geographic, Earth Day was first celebrated in 1970 by a US Senator from Wisconsin sought to raise awareness about environmental issues like climate change.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

AOC hits back at Republican House member who told her to 'educate herself' ›

'What happened to these people?' Illinois Republican scolded for claiming 'we're not having a climate crisis' ›

Watch: House Republican told to 'search your heart' during contentious climate change hearing ›

Earth Day demonstrators demand Joe Biden 'end the era of fossil fuels!' - Alternet.org ›

Understanding conservative religious resistance to climate science

Posted on :{December 20, 2010:(style="border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;outline:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}: by curryja | 851 Comments

This post is a Q&A with Dr. David Gushee, who is Distinguished Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University, his personal web site is here and Wikipedia bio is here.

Dr. Gushee is an internationally recognized Holocaust scholar and ethicist. His current research interests focus on issues emerging at the intersection between Christian faith, ethics and public policy. He has written or edited 12 books, including:

Dr. Gushee has engaged as an activist and public intellectual on a number of controversial issues. Of particular relevance here, Dr. Gushee was the principal drafter of the 2006 Evangelical Climate Initiative and remains deeply involved in efforts to address climate change and other environmental issues.During the 2008 presidential campaign, he was contacted by candidate Barack Obama and he spoke at the 2008 Democratic Convention.

There is an interesting story behind how I met Dr. Gushee. In December 2006, the Center for Health and Global Environment at Harvard Medical School and the National Association of Evangelicals held a first-of-its-kind retreat to unite 30 faith leaders and scientists on issues of climate change and global warming. Among the scientists attending were E.O. Wilson, Jim Hansen, and Gus Spaeth. The retreat was held at an old plantation in Malvern, GA, and I was privileged to attend. Not knowing much about evangelicals, I had no idea what to expect of this meeting. One thing that I did not expect was to encounter such a deep and profound thinker as Dr. David Gushee. When Dr. Gushee moved to to Mercer University (in Atlanta), we reconnected and we have participated in events at each other’s institution.

One thing that I learned from this retreat was that many evangelicals view their religion as being consistent with evolution, and one of the participants, Reverend Ken Wilson, send me the book by Francis Collins entitled The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.

Without further ado, lets hear from Dr. Gushee.

JC: Can you characterize evangelicalism, and give us some demographics (both in the U.S. and if relevant world wide)

DG: Evangelicalism is a term generally used to describe theologically conservative Protestant Christians. There are a variety of more technical definitions of the characteristics of evangelicalism. In my book, The Future of Faith in American Politics (http://tinyurl.com/29tm6gj), I name three possible approaches for defining evangelicals: one is by denominations (ex. Southern Baptists), one is by the specific content of religious beliefs (ex: high view of the authority of the Bible, belief that Christ died for the salvation of all), and one is by self-definition (ex: when asked what they believe, the person says that they are “evangelical”). Combining these measures and various surveys, it is estimated that some 25% of the US population is evangelical. Ninety percent of these evangelicals are white, but there are also a very large number of black and Hispanic evangelicals. Globally, it is estimated that there are 420,000,000 evangelicals, over half of them non-white. Evangelicalism, especially the highly emotive and Spirit-oriented version of evnagelicalism known as Pentecostalism, is the fastest growing form of Christianity in the world by far. Evangelicalism should not be confused with fundamentalism, which is a rigidly conservative version of religion that surfaces in every religious tradition, including Protestantism.

JC: Give us some history on the involvement of evangelicals in the climate change debate (and politics).

DG: Evangelicals are politically divided even if one can broadly describe a shared religious paradigm. In the popular mind, most associate American evangelicalism with conservative politics, and this has been largely the case since the emergence of the Christian Right in the 1970s. But even during the headiest days of the Christian Right, there were always alternative and dissenting voices. This is a reminder that evangelical theology doesn’t have to mean conservative politics; indeed, there is quite a ferocious debate within evangelicalism over what kind of politics is best read off of the witness of the Bible whose authority we all believe in.

In my book on faith and politics, I suggest that as of 2008 roughly half of white evangelicals remained politically conservative, perhaps 15% liberal, and 35% centrist. Recent conservative gains would probably shrink the center category in favor of the conservative. I think it is predictable that no matter who runs in the 2012 presidential election against Barack Obama, around 70% of white evangelicals will vote for the Republican. Latino evangelicals are more fluid in their voting patterns at this stage and black voters are more liberal in their voting even while theologically conservative.

So a strong majority of white evangelicals in the United States (every term there is significant–this is a white, US pattern) tend to vote Republican and to hold to a politically conservative ideology. Therefore it is not a surprise (sadly) that going back to the emergence of environmentalism in the 1960s-1970s, most white evangelicals were either disinterested or opposed to environmentalism. Sometimes this was due to (in my view, spurious) religious reasons, such as the fear that environmentalism as a whole was characterized by non-Christian or anti-Christian religious beliefs or presuppositions. Other times it was clearly related to a generalized anti-“left” politics, with environmentalism being treated as a cause of the left.

The climate change debate didn’t really surface in evangelicalism until the early part of the 21st century. Few American evangelicals knew much about the ongoing development of climate science and the growing consensus that the climate was changing primarily due to human activity. Few of us had even heard of the IPCC and a UN process to study the climate and to trigger policy responses as the science solidified.

The climate issue was brought to my attention through the work of the Evangelical Environmental Network, led by Rev. Jim Ball. This small evangelical group had been around since the early ’90s and was indeed paying attention to climate science. EEN played a convening role in 2004 in getting some leading evangelicals together to listen to the findings of climate scientists like the evangelical Briton Sir John Houghton, who played a key role in the IPCC. Many of us found Dr. Houghton and others quite convincing. We agreed together to try to mobilize the evangelical community from what was, at the time, mainly a stance of apathy and disinterest.

JC: Tell us about your own involvement in the climate change debate

DG: The 2004 creation care conference that I just mentioned was followed by an effort to draft a simple but significant statement on climate change. It came to be known as the Evangelical Climate Initiative, and I was the principal drafter of the statement. See http://christiansandclimate.org/. The statement, which was released in 2006, basically says: 1) human-induced climate change is real, 2) the consequences of climate change will be significant, and will hit the poor the hardest, 3) Christian moral convictions demand our response to the climate change problem, and 4) We need to act now–governments, businesses, churches, and individuals all have a role to play. It should be noted that the IPCC was treated as foundational for the claims of this document, though the statements of the various national scientific academies were also cited.

About six dozen key evangelical leaders signed the original statement, and it made a major media splash. But then the pushback came, and it was fierce. A newly organized group, eventually known as the Cornwall Alliance (http://www.cornwallalliance.org/), offered a counter-statement and now exists as a counter-voice to the Evangelical Environmental Network. This group questions mainstream climate science, questions the seriousness of the impact of climate change, expresses worry that the major policy responses under consideration will actually hurt the poor, and is especially negative about government regulation of business activity in the name of climate. I read them as being motivated by a strongly libertarian, laissez-faire economic ideology and a strongly Calvinist theology which leads them to doubt that God would permit human beings to have any serious impact on the climate.

It seems to me that the general turn toward climate skepticism in the US setting over the last couple of years has been influenced by the efforts of this group and others like it. The economic downturn has everyone concerned about doing anything that might negatively affect business and prosperity, and American evangelicalism has tended to revert toward its instinctive political conservatism. For now at least, the ECI looks to have been a high water mark of evangelical environmental activism as it relates to climate change.

JC: What are the ingredients of evangelical climate skepticism? How does creationism play into this?

DG: I have suggested in some public lectures that there are several ingredients of evangelical climate skepticism:

*1) Disdain for the environmental movement

2) Distrust of mainstream science in general (evolution vs. creationism is indeed a factor here for some)

3) Distrust of the mainstream media (nicely captured by Sarah Palin’s derisive term “lamestream media”)

4) Loyalty to the Republican Party

5) Libertarian economics as God’s will–God is opposed to government regulation or taxation

6)Misunderstandings of divine sovereignty–God won’t let us ruin creation

7) Unreconstructed Dominion theology–Genesis 1–God calls human beings to subdue and rule creation*

To summarize, then: God is sovereign over creation and therefore humans can do no permanent damage. God entrusted the earth to human dominion and we should not be afraid of economic development or other uses of human creativity. God established government for very limited purposes such as providing for the common defense–government should not intervene much in the workings of a free market economy. The Republican Party has taken a skeptical posture toward climate and we support that posture and that party. The media is overplaying climate change worries, at the behest of scientists who cannot be trusted anyway; it may all be a conspiracy to limit our personal and business freedoms and tax us even more. The environmental movement is secular/pagan and has always been a threat to American liberties and has always been anti-business and exaggerated environmental problems.

Nice worldview, huh? I disagree with just about every word of it.

JC: Tell us about Creation Care and the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good.

DG: My one-year-old activist organization, the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good (www.nepcg.org ) includes commitment to care of God’s creation as one of its core planks. We never thought that climate change was the only environmental concern worth caring about but we do believe that climate remains at risk and that the broad patterns identified by the IPCC and others are indisputable. We are looking for creative ways to reach the hearts and minds of evangelicals in a time when many remain highly skeptical of the entire climate issue.

Can I say one thing for the scientists who read this? Laypeople like us (in terms of science) need good science from your side. We depend on the accuracy and credibility of your findings. To the extent, for example, that ECI’s claims were based on IPCC, and to the extent that IPCC got a little sloppy or a little carried away with advocacy, our own efforts to work within our community have been damaged.

*I am the son of an MIT-trained chemical engineer who did environmental policy analysis for the Congressional Research Service. I am among those evangelicals who can handle the push and pull, ebb and flow, and constantly unfinished nature of real scientific research. I trust this kind of science and need to be able to trust it to do good teaching and advocacy. So let’s agree on a division of labor in which climatologists and other scientists offer the unvarnished truth about where your research stands at any given moment, what is both known and unknown, and we can craft our advocacy claims realistically based on what you are finding. I fear that in the white-hot spotlight of climate science sometimes this care has been lost on all sides. It has to some extent set back progress toward the shared human task of environmental stewardship and responsibility. But I remain at least tentatively confident that human beings will get their act together on climate change before it is too late.

Moderation note: moderation on this thread will be strictly enforced for relevance and civility.

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851 RESPONSES TO “UNDERSTANDING CONSERVATIVE RELIGIOUS RESISTANCE TO CLIMATE SCIENCE”

===

https://thinkprogress.org/faith-groups-epa-toxix-chemical-regulations-power-plants-5da1991f1969/

3/19

Faith groups and a bipartisan alliance of lawmakers are coming out hard against the Trump administration’s efforts to rollback rules overseeing toxic chemicals at power plants.

During a hearing on Monday, representatives from a number of religious and spiritual organizations, including evangelical Christian, Catholic, and Jewish groups, spoke out against the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) plans to weaken the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) rule.

The MATS rule aims to limit the amount of mercury and other toxic gases emitted from power plants as a byproduct of burning coal or oil. The Trump administration has moved to weaken the rule in a boon to the fossil fuel industry that could see human health severely impacted, worrying a number of religious organizations in the process.

And they aren’t alone in their objections. Also on Monday, a bipartisan group of senators wrote to EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler opposing “any action that could lead to the undoing” of the MATS rule.The outpouring of objection from religious organizations coupled with emerging opposition from some Republicans marks a hard break with President Donald Trump, who will likely rely on groups including conservative Christians to maintain the presidency in 2020.

"When I hear the words ‘protect human health’ I think of Jesus,” said Melody Zhang, a member of Young Evangelicals for Climate Action (YECA), at the public hearing Monday. “Jesus always acted out of compassion for the under-heard. I challenge you to live out this EPA mission by upholding the Mercury Rule.”

Zhang was among more than a dozen speakers associated with a faith group that spoke out against the MATS rollback during the hearing. They were joined by many others; the all-day event saw speakers ranging from medical professionals opposing the rule change to hardline supporters of the rollback like representatives from Murray Energy, the coal company that once hired Wheeler as a lobbyist.

The number of religious groups opposing the administration’s anti-environment agenda is far from a monolith and many people of faith have supported the president’s mass rollback of environmental regulations more generally. But for the speakers on Monday, the connection between faith and upholding rules like MATS is clear.

“We start with the concept that we care for God’s creation,” Jose Aguto, associate director for theCatholic Climate Covenant, told ThinkProgress. “Especially the poor and vulnerable … we find that the measure of every institution is life and dignity.”

Established in 2011, the Obama-era MATS rule limits hazardous pollution at both coal and oil-burning power plants. The standards have been credited with saving up to 17,000 lives per year, even as the energy industry and other stakeholders have sought to block MATS through litigation.

The EPA, however, isn’t moving to get rid of MATS entirely. Instead, the agency would reduce the emphasis the rule places on public health data, which justifies costs to power plants by prioritizing the well-being of people. The EPA would subsequently place emphasis on the costs to fossil fuel interests, which can be steep. That new approach would greatly reduce the effectiveness of MATS, likely threatening thousands of lives in the process.

Weakening the MATS rule, Aguto said, “threatens life and dignity.” As a Catholic, he emphasized concern for the health of fetuses; mercury is a toxin that can have severe impacts in utero, causing brain damage along with potential hearing and vision problems.

“We feel that this is a real threat,” Aguto continued, calling any MATS rollback a “renunciation of the EPA’s very mission.”

EPA to roll back mercury rule in a boon to coal industry and blow to human health

Speakers associated with faith groups on Monday talked about the role religion has played in their opposition to the Trump administration’s environmental regulation rollbacks, with an emphasis on health concerns.

“As I read the Scriptures of my own faith, we are called to follow the example of Jesus Christ, who protected the poor, the marginalized, and the vulnerable — and advised the mighty and the powerful to do the same,” said Rev. Susan Hendershot, president of the organizationInterfaith Power and Light, during her testimony, later shared with ThinkProgress.

Rolling back MATS, Hendershot argued, would be “morally unacceptable” and at odds with “Christian tradition.”

Mirele B. Goldsmith, who spoke on behalf of the Jewish Climate Action Network (JCAN) on Monday, relayed similar concerns about health and the environment to ThinkProgress.

“We are seeing a surge in activism by Jews across the country who want to see more, not less, protection for people and nature,” said Goldsmith. “We feel compelled to take action in our homes and synagogues, and to speak up for our values in public.”

The faith groups’ opposition comes as bipartisan concern grows over efforts to weaken MATS. The letter sent on Monday to Wheeler included among its signatories Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Thom Tillis (R-NC), Susan Collins (R-ME), Tom Carper (D-DE),Sherrod Brown (D-OH), and Joe Manchin (D-WV). Collectively, the lawmakers argue, “cleaner air means better health, a better economy, and better jobs for residents of our states.”

Tillis and Collins are both eyeing re-election in 2020, while Alexander is retiring. Their show of support for the MATS rule indicates that, along with issues like offshore drilling, clean air could become a bipartisan rallying point during the election.

For the faith groups that testified Monday, that line in the sand has already been cemented. Aguto pointed to MATS as a “shining example” of the wider federal assault on environmental regulations.

“When we talk about mercury, it’s been recognized for decades as being damaging to human health,” he said. “So to see a reversal of those protections, given decades of medical understanding … [it] is beyond troubling.”

Generation Climate: Can Young Evangelicals Change the Climate Debate?

For students at this top evangelical college, loving God means protecting creation. That includes dealing with the human sources of climate change. Meet Diego, Chelsey and Sean, three members of a growing movement to change the evangelical community's views on climate change.

READ THE STORY

// bridge to pro-life on mercury?

https://www.ecowatch.com/air-pollution-placentas-pregnancy-2605967194.html

Air Pollution Particles Discovered in Placentas

*:{:{

Researchers have found the first evidence that soot from polluted air can travel from a pregnant woman's lungs and reach the placenta via the bloodstream, according to a press release from Queen Mary University of London.

The study examined the placentas of five women living in London after they gave birth. The women were all non-smokers, had uncomplicated pregnancies and delivered healthy babies.

For the study, the research team examined 3,500 macrophage cells from the five placentas. Macrophages, which are white blood cells that reside all over the human body, protect the immune system as they work to engulf harmful particles, such as bacteria and pollution particles.

Using a high-powered microscope, the researchers detected 72 small, black particles among the placental macrophages, which the scientists believe are tiny carbon particles typically created by burning fossil fuels, the press release noted.

"We can't think of anything else they could be. It is very evident to us they are black sooty particles,"

...

Church of England to Divest From Companies That Neglect Paris Agreement Goals 7/18

https://www.alternet.org/environment/how-group-nuns-taking-lead-climate-action

moral mondays NC EJ

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/06/29/woe-unto-those-who-legislate-evil-rev-william-barber-builds-a-moral-movement/

https://www.systemchangenotclimatechange.org/article/diary-peoples-climate-train-day-one-seven

Brentin Mock, “Black church leaders rev up for climate justice” 16 Sep 2014, http://grist.org/climate-energy/black-church-leaders-rev-it-up-for-clima...

It’s a common misconception that churches haven’t been doing their part in the green fight — and black churches in particular. Your John Birch and Alan Keyes Christians notwithstanding, that’s not entirely true.

Katharine Hayhoe, a leading climate scientist, works with evangelical Christians on the issue. Rev. William Barber’s Moral Movement counts promoting environmental justice among its 14-point agenda. Ditto for the Faith Leaders for Environmental Justice in New York, who’ve been working on food, energy, and climate issues for years now. In fact, the environmental justice movement was initiated by a 1987 report commissioned by the United Church of Christ religious denomination.

The tradition continues. In D.C., Rev. Lennox Yearwood has been leading flocks to the climate change struggle through his work not only as a minister, but also as president of the Hip Hop Caucus, which uses the culture to spur youth into political activism. Rolling Stone called him one of the “New Green Heroes” last year. He co-authored a Huffington Post op-ed last with Climate Crisis Solutions President Tom Weis last week calling for a “Zero Emissions Manifesto for the Climate Justice Movement,” challenging world leaders to commit to complete carbon neutrality at the upcoming UN Climate Summit.

Out of Chicago, where city leaders are trying to shake the “Chi-raq” label bestowed upon their city because of all the gun violence, there’s Rev. Otis Moss III, a newcomer to the climate struggles, but fully committed. He heads Trinity United Church of Christ, one of Chicago’s largest churches (and President Obama’s former faith home), which hails from the aforementioned United Church of Christ denomination that helped birth the EJ movement. Over the weekend, Rev. Moss assembled his congregation for the Faith in Place to educate members of the community on local climate change impacts and to whip up support for the EPA’s Clean Power Plan.

Rev. Yearwood on climate justice and racial equality:

“Once you get how serious [climate justice] is, you know it’s not just about equality but about existence. There are other issues to deal with concerning equality, like how you are treated by the police, racial profiling, and that’s all important, but the deal with climate change is whether we exist or not. This is why the People’s Climate March will be a game changer for the climate movement. It will change how we talk about the issue.

“Like with you, I would read your blogs and think, ‘You know what, the climate movement is not as diverse as we’d like.’ But at the same time, why are we waiting for anybody to invite us to the table? This is our planet, our water, our air, why are we waiting for anybody to say we that we can be a part of this?”

Rev. Yearwood on the upcoming People’s Climate March and whether marches matter:

“Marches definitely matter. They’re critical for us to come together for organizing and networking, but the more important part is when people stay in touch after the march. It gets people to continue to push things forward, either through direct action or creating new public policy. They also help people to connect the dots between various issues. We have to use this march strategically, and we’re doing that by shining a spotlight on the UN Climate Summit, to bring awareness to the world about this problem, and I believe that will help the long-term goals. I hope this march will spawn other marches.”

Rev. Moss on the role of black churches in the climate fight:

“We believe that this is part and parcel with our relationship and our commitment to Jesus Christ. Our ‘creation care’ ministry says that God has deemed us stewards of the earth — not to have dominion over the earth, but to be stewards. We are leasing space on earth, and God has entrusted us to care for his creation. Issues of climate change and environmental justice directly impact the African-American community. We are adversely affected, with higher rates of asthma, and the dumping of chemical waste in our communities, so developing sustainable communities with low carbon impacts is important to us.”

Rev. Yearwood on how Hip Hop and black churches arrived at the climate conversation:

“We have come into the climate movement not to be the black people’s representation for the climate movement. We are sharing this planet with everybody else. We have a stake to keep this planet running the way it should run for the next generation, and in some respects we have more of a stake, because we’re the worst and first hit when disaster comes through. We appreciate what the people at Sierra Club, NRDC and 350 do, but if they weren’t having this conversation, we’d still be having this conversation.”

[JF: bit of humor here] Rev. Moss on renewable energy within the church:

“Here at Trinity, we are integrating solar power into our church so that we can not only be saved by the Son, but also powered by the sun.

JF: Test quote of the day. Who said we need to see “pollution for what it is--war against nature, war against people, against the race itself, against the unborn.” Was it a) Bill McKibben, b) George Bush, c) Vandana Shiva, d) Huey Newton, e) Rebecca Solnit, f) Naomi Klein? If you said d) Huey Newton, you are right. As Chris Williams points out: “Huey P. Newton, a leader of the Black Panther Party of the 1960s, firmly believed--following Karl Marx--that environmental problems were an outgrowth of capitalist economics and, as such, had to be taken up as a central part of the Panthers’ program.”

milbank wapo 2007

Guess Who Came to the Evangelicals' Dinner

The Rev. Richard Cizik, right, with Mr. Global Warming and One-World Government himself.

The Rev. Richard Cizik, right, with Mr. Global Warming and One-World Government himself. (By Linda Davidson -- The Washington Post)

By Dana Milbank

Friday, October 12, 2007

In the wildly popular "Left Behind" series of evangelical Christian novels, the Antichrist takes the form of the secretary general of the United Nations, sets up an abortion-promoting world government and becomes the Global Community Supreme Potentate.

Last night, the National Association of Evangelicals met for dinner at the Sheraton in Crystal City. The keynote speaker? Why, the Antichrist himself.

Actually, the NAE, the umbrella group for the nation's evangelical denominations, brought in the real U.N. secretary general, Ban Ki-moon of South Korea, not his fictional satanic equivalent, Nicolae Carpathia of Romania. But for the Rev. Richard Cizik, the NAE official who invited Ban, it was just about as daring. Evangelical Christians regard the United Nations' blue helmets with about as much enthusiasm as Satan's red horns.

"My joke is, some people will say the evangelical Christians have invited the Antichrist to the Last Supper," Cizik said, enjoying a chuckle before the Author of All Evil arrived.

Lest anybody miss the humor, Cizik paused. "Let's clarify the record," he said. "We're inviting a Christian man."

It was a sensible precaution. Pat Robertson, speaking for many religious conservatives, has warned of the menace of a "one-world government controlled by the United Nations." In a Fox News poll last month, Republicans (including the vast majority of evangelicals) took a dim view of the United Nations by 2 to 1.

So how do the NAE's members feel about the Global Community Supreme Potentate being invited to dinner? "I haven't heard anything," Cizik reported last night. On reflection, he added: "Maybe they don't know about it yet."

Cizik, a lean and demonstrative figure with a ready smile, has been down this path before. He drew the ire of many conservatives for speaking favorably of population control. A photo of him in Vanity Fair magazine, in which he looked like Jesus walking on water, further aggravated his critics.And his outspokenness on climate change led Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) to brand him "a global-warming alarmist" who "does not represent the views of most evangelicals."

Two dozen prominent evangelical leaders, including Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, wrote a letter earlier this year demanding that the NAE silence Cizik's "relentless campaign" on climate change or force him to resign.

But Cizik, neither silenced nor fired, offers no apologies for his view that Christians must be as serious about healing as they are about preaching if they are to follow Jesus's words. "Jerry Falwell . . . said the only people who believe in this climate-change business are the blue-state Democrats, the U.N. types and misinformed evangelicals," Cizik recalled last night. "Well, Jerry Falwell can ask the Lord now himself about this matter of climate change."

Cizik believes that evangelicals are warming to climate change and to those "U.N. types" Falwell derided. "Evangelicals are not what people think they are," he said. "We aren't the Hummer-driving, Wall Street-Journal-reading armchair armageddonists that we're characterized as."

To prove that, Cizik invited Eric Chivian, a Nobel laureate and Harvard scientist, to address the NAE's board of directors before dinner. Chivian told the directors about how global warming is driving polar bears to extinction. "These majestic animals have been on Earth for probably 100,000 years," he said.

The listeners were sympathetic. "We just finished a 122-page audit of our church to lower our carbon footprint," one pastor told the crowd. Another minister, Joel Hunter, rose to recommend his booklet, "Creation Care: An Introduction for Busy Pastors."

After the session, Cizik took on his critics with confidence. Sen. Inhofe? "God bless him," he said. And those who would have similar criticism about the dinner with Ban? "I would appeal to them to listen to his speech," Cizik said.

NAE President Leith Anderson has supported Cizik throughout, but he seemed a bit defensive when asked before the speech about the Ban invitation. "We're not here for the secretary general -- we're here for the people who are poor and hurting and war-torn."

After exposing the secretary general to some deafening Christian rock music ("I am a friend of God -- He calls me 'friend' "), Anderson gave him a brief and neutral introduction as "arguably the most visible leader of the world today." The 400 in attendance climbed slowly to their feet.

Ban may have confirmed some of his hosts' fears at the start of his speech, when he reminded the gathering that "the United Nations is a secular institution." He continued: "We have six official languages but no official religion. We do not have a chapel -- though we do have a meditation room."

Ban devoted himself at length to Cizik's pet subject: protecting "God's creation" from global warming. He urged the evangelicals to call for "local and national policies that will help solve our global problem."

But the secretary general knew his audience, and the bulk of his words were about what he called the "common cause" of his organization and evangelicals. "The United Nations is dedicated to ending war and building peace -- to making swords into plowshares, if you will. We are dedicated to helping the poor, to aiding the victims of conflict, famine, disease and disaster."

Ban then quoted from Isaiah: "If you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then shall your light rise in the darkness and your gloom be as the noonday."

Strange words, coming from the Antichrist.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/11/AR2007101102537_2.html

note hope convergence/leverage:

tied w/ shell

http://www.desmog.uk/2016/01/20/exxonmobil-spent-least-8m-european-lobbying-and-corporate-donations-2014

exxonMobil has spent at least £5.6m($8.08 million) on lobbying the European Commission and in donations to European universities and organisations in 2014 according to the most recent figures available.

A DeSmog UK investigation into the oil giant’s European activities reveals much of this was spent lobbying on energy and environment issues in addition to donations to organisations such as the United Nations Environment Programme and the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.

Last September, *Inside Climate News* revealed that ExxonMobil knew about the impacts of manmade climate change in the 1970s’ and ‘80s yet went on to fund numerous climate denial efforts. This prompted theNew York Attorney General to subpoena ExxonMobil to “determine whether the company lied to the public about the risks of climate change or to investors about how those risks might hurt the oil business.”

And now, the Church of England’s Commissioners (who run its £6.7bn endowment fund) has co-filed a shareholders’ resolution this week with the New York State Common Retirement Fund calling on ExxonMobil to publish an assessment of how its business portfolio would be affected by a 2C target as agreed in the Paris Agreement in December. Together, the group of investors hold more than $1bn in ExxonMobil shares.

7/15

Sometimes the path to a life of purpose isn’t straight or narrow.

Like many Climate Reality Leaders out talking to all kinds of audiences about climate change, the Reverend Terry Gallagher is used to hearing people just dismiss the subject as alarmist hype. But when it happens, he can also afford to smile a little more than most leaders would. Why? Because he used to do the exact same thing.

So how does a climate change denier wind up an ordained minister and a Climate Reality Leader? The story starts when he was growing up on the west side of Cleveland and first felt called to a life of purpose. As a young Irish American, Terry heard the call as an invitation to join the Catholic ministry and become a priest. But as powerful as the call the priesthood was, he found—like a lot of teenage boys before and after him—there was something even more powerful standing in the way of a life of celibacy. Namely, his attraction to girls.

So instead, Terry went to college and studied mechanical technology. When he graduated, a large chemical company offered him $25 per month more than a large steel company did, and the choice was obvious.

It was a choice that set Terry on the path to a 32-year career in the chemical industry, one that would see him rise from floor worker to workaholic plant manager overseeing two facilities. During that time he began to hear about climate change, but refused to listen. After all, he reasoned, there was no way human behavior could affect the Earth in such a profound way. The notion, he admits, “didn’t fit my worldview at the time,” and so his attitude was simply, “I ain’t gonna engage with you alarmists, so take your green and go away.” And when yet more environmental regulations came down to dictate what kind of emissions the plants could produce or how they could process chemicals, he did what everyone else did: grumble loudly—and comply.

Having to deal with these regulations, however, was the first step down the road to becoming a climate activist. At first, it was just a practical matter: being plant manager meant his neck was on the line when it came to compliance and he wasn’t about to risk it. So, he says, the first rule became that “Gallagher ain’t going to jail, so we’re going to operate these plants within the law or these plants ain’t going to operate.”

Before long, though, he began to see that running his plants this way, controlling their emissions and the kinds of processes they used, wasn’t just better for the environment. It was also leading to better product quality, safety and yields.And it got him thinking.

Meanwhile, just as Terry’s career as a chemical executive was lining up before him, life intervened and he once again heard the calling to a life of purpose and Christian ministry that had sounded decades earlier. Only this time he answered,entering the seminary to study and train as a priestand ultimately leaving his career in industry behind.

But as he found, becoming a priest wasn’t the concluding chapter in his life’s story, but the starting point for a new book entirely. Most important, he still had questions about his purpose. His work as a local church pastor was deeply rewarding, but there was still something missing in his ministry. He needed a direction.

Which is how he began working with oppressed peoples around the world and how, six years after joining the priesthood, he found himself in a remote Colombian village up in the Andes.

Terry was there as part of a Christian Peacemaker team standing in solidarity with gold miners protesting the threat of eviction by the Colombian army, an eviction, they suspected, motivated by plans for an international company to seize their mine. When his team arrived, they were taken on a tour to see the mine and the process of refining gold there. The rest of the team saw a community scratching a living out of the hillside and was awestruck. Terry, having run chemical plants for decades, saw the chemicals they were using and saw a community poisoning themselves, their children, and their land for generations to come, all without realizing it. Horrified, he began talking to the villagers about how running this mine was devastating their health and destroying the environment all around them. But as he did, he realized that this kind of practice—and the selective blindness that went with it—was far from limited to a village in the Andes. He knew he had to do something.

When Terry returned from Colombia, his first step was to return to the seminary to study. He knew the direction his ministry would take, focusing on ecological justice and waking faith and secular communities to the environmental crisis unfolding all around the world, and he needed to prepare.

Emerging from the seminary, Terry knew his ministry would mean reaching out to all kinds of audiences to tell the story of climate change and environmental degradation, and he began looking for tools and resources to help. So when he learned about the Climate Reality Leadership Corps and heard about an upcoming training, he jumped at the opportunity.

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Terry found in the Climate Reality Leadership Corps a “great source of positive energy and hope”and a community that shared his many of his values and concerns for ecological justice. And while much of his outreach since training has focused on engaging the Christian community, he encounters many of the same challenges other Leaders do speaking to secular audiences. As he says, “Christians, like most people, are trying their best to avoid this issue. I believe that this avoidance response is because people suspect that if this is a true crisis, then everything must change.”

Even still, he remains hopeful that things will change. In part, because when he talks to Christians about what climate change means for their children and for millions suffering around the world, the message begins to sink in. And once people understand the urgency of the situation, they want to know what they can do.

As for what Terry will do, he’s nothing if not ambitious, especially for a self-confessed introvert.After doing 40 presentations and other acts of outreach in 2014, he’s working to double that number this year. And with the UN climate talks beginning in November, he’s not thinking small either.

“My ministry of ecological justice is a ministry of education, advocacy and action,” he says, “So with that in mind, I already have purchased tickets and hotel to be there for the Paris [climate] talks. Now I just need to find a way to get invited to the discussion table.”

To learn more about how you can train with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and leading scientists and communicators to become a Climate Reality Leader, visit the Climate Reality Leadership Corps site. Applications for our next training in Miami from Sept. 28 – 30 are now open.

http://ecowatch.com/2015/07/06/climate-denier-to-climate-reality-leader

5/15

Recently, there has been a growing discussion of climate change as a moral issue, both in academia and in religious communities. This past fall I spoke at three religion and climate change conferences in as many months, including a conference at Harvard Divinity School, “Spiritual and Sustainable: Religion Responds to Climate Change,” and in June 2015 I will join many global thinkers at a process theology conference on climate change in Claremont, California.

The highly anticipated encyclical from Pope Francis on climate change will undoubtedly contribute and bring attention to this discourse. Frequently, however, the acknowledgment that climate change is a moral issue on which religious people should engage is the end of the conversation. There has not been nearly enough discussion about what it means to engage with this moral challenge. We have not yet answered how and where we should be taking our stand in response to climate change. I argue that when religious people answer the call of the climate crisis, we must bring real moral leadership to the climate justice movement.

The first kind of engagement with the climate crisis is usually a change in consumer behavior, reducing one’s personal carbon footprint. In our consumer-focused society, it is not surprising that the first obvious role to which we turn is that of a consumer. We see thousands of advertisements a day that remind us we are consumers. So when we seek to make an impact, we immediately think of our power as consumers. After first changing our personal carbon footprints, we then turn to our collective consumption and try to impact our organizational carbon footprint. In the buildup to the pope’s encyclical, I’ve already heard some talk about getting Catholic churches to weatherize their buildings and put solar panels on their roofs.

This is useful and important work, but, as the history of the climate movement demonstrates, this obsession over consumer behavior has limited benefit and tends to reinforce the mindset that created the problem in the first place. We got to this point of environmental crisis by “buying” into the notion that our value as people lies in our role as consumers. Furthermore, this focus on consumer activism naturally becomes a rich person’s movement. The mantra of “vote with your dollars” means that those without many votes (dollars) don’t matter very much.

Part of the role of the church is to remind us that we are more than consumers. Like many organizations, churches can bring to life our role as citizens, community members and family members. In addition, churches are uniquely suited to develop our identities as children of God, pieces of an interdependent web of existence, or bearers of divine sparks of creativity. Connecting with these nonconsumer ways of being in the world is an adequate definition of empowerment, which is the basis of any social movement. A movement empowered by the elevation of these nonconsumer identities is a necessity for the revolutionary change that the climate crisis demands of our energy, political and social systems.

Thus far, religious communities have primarily engaged with climate activism by getting behind the climate movement. When 350.org launches a divestment campaign, churches and denominations get on board to divest their endowments. When Bill McKibben asks clergy to participate in civil disobedience, they show up with their collars on. But waiting to be told what to do is not moral leadership. As a veteran of the climate movement, I suggest that we don’t need religious communities merely to join the climate movement. We need religious communities to lead, challenge and deepen the climate movement.

The first imperative of moral leadership in the climate movement is to speak the hard truths about the nature of our challenge. Implicit in the idea of climate justice is the goal of keeping most fossil fuel reserves in the ground. There may be a way to do that while still ensuring the profits of the corporations that expect to extract those fossil fuels, and certain misguided initiatives like the United States Climate Action Partnership have pursued that agenda. But what separates the climate justice movement from other climate-related players is the mission of keeping those fossil fuels in the ground without guaranteeing future profits to the corporations who have already profited from exploitation.

http://ecowatch.com/2015/04/08/tim-dechrisopher-climate-change/

The highest ranking woman in the Anglican communion has said climate denial is a “blind” and immoral position which rejects God’s gift of knowledge.

Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church and one of the most powerful women in Christianity, said that climate change was a moral imperative akin to that of the civil rights movement.

http://www.alternet.org/environment/climate-denial-immoral-says-head-us-episcopal-church

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/church-of-england-divests-from-coal-and-tar-sands-citing-moral-responsibility/

A reverend quietly walked on stage at the Brookhaven College Sustainability Summit early April. Reverend Lennox Yearwood, Jr. wore the obligatory black suit with the bright white clerical collar, but his converse sneakers and flat-billed baseball cap sparked the interest of the crowd. His Keynote Address started off calm, cool and soft spoken. He hit his stride a few minutes in, and the crowd responded to his rhythmic spoken words with clapping and cheers of “Yes!” throughout his hour-long speech.

:{ :(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;display:block;max-width:650px;max-height:653px"):}:Reverend Yearwood and I after his Keynote Speech at Brookhaven College’s Sustainability Summit.

Reverend Yearwood is the president and CEO of the Hip Hop Caucus, a civil and human rights organization based out of Washington, DC that works with musicians to engage people and influence people to use their political and social voice. Reverend Yearwood’s phone rang in the media room, pumping out the Pharell song “Happy” as his ringtone, emphasizing his roots in hip hop. Utilizing hip hop allows climate change to be discussed in a different way, gets to the heart of the matter and uses art and culture to reach people.

“When the movement is strong, the music is strong” says Reverend Yearwood. And it showed in late 2014 when the likes of Common, Ne-Yo and Kanye West’s producer Malik Yusef put together the album “Home” in response to the People’s Climate March in New York City that drew more than 400,000 people. Proceeds from “Home,” which stands for Heal Our Mother Earth, go to organizing communities impacted by climate change.

At first glance, Reverend Yearwood isn’t the stereotypical hippie we normally think of leading the green movement. That is exactly the point. His speech emphasized the need of all people to get involved in reducing climate change because it’s a human issue, not just one particular group’s problem. He saw the need to diversify the movement and stepped up.

“The kind of people (community) that I want to be a part of is a people that loves to create change, that love this country, and loves to come together, doesn’t care about republican or democrat, if you’re rich or poor, if you’re black or white, that we come together to figure out and listen to hey we have a problem here in regards to climate change” Reverend Yearwood said.

Reverend Yearwood warned of playing the middle of the road through examples of our past in slavery, asbestos and cigarette smoking. At some point our culture accepted these issues and it took a long time to take a hard stand against them. Reverend Yearwood urged us that this is our time, now is not the time to play middle of the road on this issue, if we fail, we have no second chances.

It was inspiring and refreshing to watch someone deliver the climate change message in a non-traditional way. Whether you like hip hop music or not, there was a message for you in his speech. A lot of students who attend Dallas County Community Colleges are preparing for a future nursing career and Reverend Yearwood did his homework reaching out to those students. He emphasized the role nurses play on the front lines of climate change witnessing pollution induced diseases on a daily basis. He encouraged students not to sit back and watch more people get sick without getting to one of the roots of the problem.

Reverend Yearwood’s powerful words mixed with his infectious giggle led the audience through an encouraging way to tackle climate change. His cap read, “DIVEST” meaning to divest from the fossil fuel industry. He strongly stated, “It is morally wrong to continue to pollute and corrupt our planet. It is wrong for us to continue on this path of not moving from fossil fuels toclean energy and we must stop the madness now.” Urge policy makers, school and company boards, and community leaders to stand strong and make changes away from fossil fuels.

The crowd erupted the loudest after Reverend Yearwood led us in his vision of a fossil free future. “What I now say, 50 years later, with our work together that one day … they will rejoice in what you have done and they will say that we are fossil free at least, fossil free at last, thank God oh mighty we are fossil free at last!” The strength and volume of his “fossil free at last” energized the crowd and left us all with a hope and inspiration that together, we can make it happen.

Being a lover of hip hop, I was surprised I had not heard of the album “Home.” I immediately downloaded it from iTunes and started listening as I left the summit. The remake of the song “A Big Yellow Taxi” really hits home for all of us here in Dallas. The famous line is, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”

Recent revelations about the plan to continue burning coal at the San Juan Generating Station have revealed serious financial risks for local ratepayers. Last month Farmington, New Mexico, home of the San Juan Generating Station, announced they were dropping plans to acquire an increased stake in the plant due to the huge costs that would be passed on to the community. The Albuquerque City Council recently adopted a resolution directing the city to withdraw support for PNM’s current proposal. Other New Mexico stakeholders have also pulled away from the agreement to continue PNM’s use of coal at the plant, citing overall uncertainty about San Juan’s operations.

PNM recently announced that due to an accounting error, the cost estimate for their plan to increase reliance on dirty coal and other expensive fuels has jumped by more than $1 billion, with those costs likely to be passed onto local ratepayers. Given PNM’s recently proposed rate hike that would cost the average New Mexico family $10 a month to fund the utility’s plans to continue burning coal, local utility customers are deeply concerned about the financial impact of PNM’s commitment to coal.

Renewable energy sources like wind and solar are now cost-competitive with coal. Communities impacted by the San Juan Generating Station are questioning why they should bear the financial burden and risk of sticking with coal on top of the devastating health impacts of living near a coal plant.

“There are moral and ethical issues involved in where we get our energy. The direct links to economic justice, care of creation and health of future generations mean that people of faith must pay careful attention to energy issues,” said the Rev. Dr. McNiel, Executive Director of New Mexico Conference of Churches and Advisory Board Member for New Mexico Interfaith Power and Light. “We must move to more renewable energy sources in order to reduce the economic and health consequences of power consumption. Our brothers and sisters who are economically poor and live in the shadows of coal fired power plants suffer the most here in New Mexico and around the world. PNM’s plans to continue burning coal will only continue to threaten them, and that is immoral.”

http://ecowatch.com/2015/04/10/unitarian-climate-justice-month

In a call for spiritual action in the fight against climate change, Unitarian Universalists and other faith groups have joined together to participate in Climate Justice Month. This time of reflection and spiritual grounding started on World Water Day March 22 and will culminate with the worldwide celebration of Earth Day on April 22

The faith groups hope that Climate Justice Month will inspire meaningful action on climate change. They hope the month of reflection gives participants a chance to consider concrete solutions for a low carbon future and advancing the human rights of those most impacted by climate change. During the first week, the focus was on water and rejoicing in connection with the natural world and its gifts. The second week concentrated on fire while providing an opportunity to consider the impacts of climate change while exploring where our energy comes from.

Now in its third week, participants are reflecting on air while reconnecting with hope through relationship and exploring who is impacted by our energy sources. During the fourth and final week, participants will concentrate on the Earth while committing to long-term actions that shift energy, advance human rights and grow the movement.

“Climate justice is a moral issue. Climate change is all too real, and affects disadvantaged people disproportionately,” says Terasa Cooley, program and strategy officer of the Unitarian Universalist Association. “Our Earth and all its people require us to come together across faith lines and political parties to make the changes needed now,” said Cooley. “We cannot afford to feel hopeless. It is our obligation to act.”

The faith group encourages people of all religions to honor interconnectedness while deepening partnerships among different groups to work for positive change. They emphasize that the solutions to climate change must take into account those most marginalized in our society.

“We sacrifice people on the margins of society—generally people of color, immigrants and people who live with great financial instability—to maintain the industrial growth economy,” said Rev. Peggy Clarke. “This economic system assumes ecosystems, communities, cultures and non-human beings are all externalities that are expendable in the pursuit of maximizing profit.”

Climate Justice Month is organized by Commit2Respond, the new climate justice initiative led by Unitarian Universalist groups. The initiative was formed out of the People’s Climate Marchin September 2014 and Climate Justice Month is its first action.

“The goal of Commit2Respond is to help us move ourselves from being overwhelmed to feeling empowered,” says Rev. Brock Leach, vice president of mission, strategy and innovation for the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee.

“We can honor our fundamental interdependence and we can remind ourselves of those deeper human values we all hold sacred, like ensuring a life of dignity and opportunity for our own children and the generations to come.”

pro-solar conservative group in Florida cleared a major hurdle this week in its journey to make solar more accessible in the state.

Floridians for Solar Choice reached 72,000 signatures on a petition that seeks to allow Floridians to purchase solar power directly from other consumers — something that isn’t currently allowed in the state. That number of signatures clears the way for the petition to be reviewed by the state’s Supreme Court, which will decide whether or not the petition’s language legally qualifies it to be a ballot initiative for Floridians in 2016. Getting its petition on the 2016 ballot is the main goal for Floridians for Solar Choice.

“We are thrilled to reach this important milestone,” Tory Perfetti, founder of Floridians for Solar Choice, said in a statement. “It shows broad support among Florida’ families and businesses for removing barriers to commerce in solar power.”

The petition for the initiative seeks to “encourage and promote local small-scale solar-generated electricity production and to enhance the availability of solar power to customers.” Under Florida’s current law, only utilities can sell electricity directly to consumers. Florida is one of only five states in the country with a law like that, and solar advocates say that it’s holding the Sunshine State back from its solar potential. If the ballot initiative is successful in 2016, businesses and property owners in the state would be able to produce up to 2 megawatts of solar power and sell it directly to consumers.

If the state Supreme Court does approve the petition’s language for a ballot initiative, Floridians for Solar Choice will still have some work to do. In order to get on the ballot in Florida, an initiative must collect 683,149 signatures from Floridians in at least seven congressional districts by February 1. Any delays in the Supreme Court’s approval of the petition means there’s less time for Floridians for Solar Choice to collect signatures. Already, supporters have expressed frustration that the state took too long to acknowledge that they had received enough signatures for Supreme Court review.

Perfetti’s group began circulating the petition in January, and he said at the time that he received “overwhelming” response to it. Perfetti and Debbie Dooley, a tea party activist who founded the original chapter of Conservatives for Energy Freedom in Georgia, say that they’re tackling solar in Florida because increasing access to the energy source makes sense from a conservative standpoint.

“Free market and the freedom to choose — those are core conservative principles,” Dooley told ThinkProgress in January. “Unless you cherry-pick your principles, if you’re a true conservative, this is something that resonates with you. I think the residents are fed up with the government telling them who to purchase their power from.”

Floridians from Solar Choice has gained multiple backers of the ballot initiative. The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) voiced its support of the initiative earlier this week, and it’s also gained the support of the Tea Party Network, the Christian Coalition, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, the Florida Retail Federation, theSierra Club, and other groups.

“This fight is about consumer choice and private property rights — cherished, long-standing American principals that we strongly support as an organization and an industry,” Rhone Resch, president and CEO of SEIA, said in a statement. “We urge Floridians to sign this critically important, freedom-of-choice petition, allowing it to be placed on next year’s ballot.”

Conservative group Americans for Prosperity has attacked the initiative, however, sayingthat it’s “about money, and using government and taxpayers to prop up the solar industry.” Supporters reject that claim, saying the measure isn’t calling for solar subsidies or mandates; instead, it simply wants to make it easier for Floridians to gain access to solar.

The ‘Green Dragon’ Slayers: How the Religious Right and the Corporate Right are Joining Forces to Fight Environmental Protection

Introduction

As Republican officials accelerate their efforts to weaken environmental regulations and attack climate scientists, energy corporations are reaping the benefits of a decades-long effort to put a more benevolent, humanitarian, and even religious spin to their anti-environmental activism. Among their most valuable allies are the Religious Right organizations and leaders who have emerged as ready apologists for polluters and critics of efforts to protect the environment. The Religious Right’s attacks are intended to lend credence to the efforts of corporations and the GOP to quash the Environmental Protection Agency and chip away at state and federal environmental safeguards. And increasingly, Republican leaders themselves are echoing the same misleading arguments and themes of the Religious Right’s corporate apologists.

Buoyed by corporate finances and a radical ‘dominion theology,’ the Religious Right has become more aggressive and fanatical in its defense of corporations and denial of climate science. Trying to combat the increasing number of evangelical Christians who are part of the “creation care” movement that is calling for a greater commitment to combat climate change, the Religious Right is working to misrepresent the environmental movement as dangerously deceitful, harmful to the poor and destructive to Christianity.

Corporate America’s Religious Right Power Play

In the last decade, as evangelical Christian leaders increasingly became involved inconservation, “creation care” and taking action against global climate change, the alarms went up in corporate America that many traditional members of the conservative coalition were becoming advocates for environmental protection. To counter the rise of the faith-based environmentalist Evangelical Climate Initiative, the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance emerged. The ISA, propped up by business interests including Exxon Mobil, has peddled misleading and false claims to make the case that climate change is a myth. In 2007, the ISA was renamed the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation and became more belligerent and zealous in its anti-environmental activities.

The Cornwall Alliance is led by E. Calvin Beisner, who believes that since God granted humans “dominion” over the earth, humans have a right to exploit all natural resources. As Randall Balmer writes in Thy Kingdom Come, Beisner “asserts that God has placed all of nature at the disposal of humanity.” Balmer quotes Beisner’s own summary of his dominion theology: “All of our acquisitive activities should be undertaken with the purpose of extending godly rule, or dominion.” As Balmer notes, “the combination of dominion theology from the Religious Right and the wise use ideology of corporate and business interests has created a powerful coalition to oppose environmental protection.”

According to a report by *Think Progress*, the Cornwall Alliance is a front group for the shadowy James Partnership. Both the James Partnership and the Cornwall Alliance are closely linked to the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), an anti-environmental group that is “funded by at least $542,000 from ExxonMobil, $60,500 from Chevron, and $1,280,000 from Scaife family foundations, which are rooted in wealth from Gulf Oil and steel interests.” CFACT is also part of a climate change denialist networkfunded by the ExxonMobil-financed Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Beisner is a CFACT board member and an “adjunct fellow” of the Acton Institute, which isprimarily funded by groups like ExxonMobil, the Scaife foundations and the Koch brothers. Beisner is also an adviser to the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, which is financed by the oil-backed Earthart Foundation, the Koch brothers, and ExxonMobil.

In fact, Beisner is not a scientist and has no scientific credentials. Despite claiming to be an authority on energy and environmental issues, he received his Ph.D. in Scottish History.

In 2009, Beisner’s Cornwall Alliance cosponsored a climate change denial conference led by the Heartland Institute, a pro-corporate group funded by Exxon Mobil, the Koch Family Foundations, and the Scaife foundations. Other organizations funded by energy corporations that cosponsored the conference include the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Tax Reform, and Americans for Prosperity.

The Cornwall Alliance has been enormously successful in recruiting Religious Right leaders to promote its anti-environmental cause. In 1999, the group started recruiting prominent Religious Right figures to sign the “Cornwall Declaration,” a document that attacks environmentalists, saying they “deify nature or oppose human dominion over creation” and promote “erroneous theological and anthropological positions.” Among its signatories were Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, Chuck Colson of the Colson Center, D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries, Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association, Janice Shaw Crouse of Concerned Women for America, Daniel Lapin of Towards Tradition, and Frank Pavone of Priests for Life. The president of CFACT called himself “a driving force” behind the declaration.

Recently, the group started collecting signatures for an updated “Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming,” which states that “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human contribution to greenhouse gases is causing dangerous global warming” and maintains that “reducing greenhouse gases cannot achieve significant reductions in future global temperatures.”

The Cornwall Alliance’s board includes Religions Right notables David Barton of WallBuilders, Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Center, Jerry Newcombe of Coral Ridge Ministries and Joel Belz of WORLD Magazine.

Painting Environmental Protection as Anti-Christian

In 2007, Jerry Falwell warned that environmental action was “Satan's attempt to redirect the church’s primary focus” away from evangelism and religious faith, and a year later James Dobson and Gary Bauer slammed Rev. Richard Cizik, a principal evangelical supporter of environmental protection, and his allies for “using the global warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time.”

The Cornwall Alliance has coordinated with Religious Right leaders to accuse Christians who believe in environmental protection not only of attempting to divide the faith community, but of promoting a dangerous anti-religious and anti-Christian agenda. The group calls the environmentalist movement “The Green Dragon” and earlier this year produced a star-studded documentary to help slay it.

The Cornwall Alliance’s documentary, “Resisting the Green Dragon,” includes appearances by a who’s who of Religious Right leaders: Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council; Tom Minnery of Focus on the Family; Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission; Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association; Wendy Wright of Concerned Women for America; David Barton of WallBuilders; Michael Farris of the Home School Legal Defense Association and Patrick Henry College; radio show host Janet Parshall; and anti-gay activist Bishop Harry Jackson.

In heartfelt interviews for the documentary, these activists claim that the environmental movement (The Green Dragon) is promoting an anti-religious agenda: Parshall derides the Green Dragon’s “lust for political power” and “spiritual deception,” and calls the environmental movement “deadly to the Gospel of Jesus Christ”; Fischer labels it a “threat to the Christian faith”; Perkins claims that environmentalists are “pointing people away from God and into humanism” and support “an unbiblical view”; Beisner says “the green movement threatens liberty”; and Farris warns that environmentalists are “scaring little children to achieve [their] political ends.” Barton adds a summary of the dominion theology: “Mankind is the apex of creation; He placed it over the planet, over the environment.”

The Cornwall Alliance’s companion book, “Resisting the Green Dragon: Dominion, Not Death,” warns of “The Church Complicit: How Environmentalism Has Penetrated the Church with Anti-Human and Anti-Christian Ideas.”

Along with Barton, Beisner appeared on Glenn Beck’s television show to claim that environmental protection is an attack against religion and humanity. Beck accused environmentalists of holding “anti-human” beliefs and “worshiping the ancient god of Babylon, the god of weather,” warning that “the progressive left is coming for the kill on religion.”

Beisner now boasts that approximately half of all Protestant pastors are skeptical of climate change, and charges that “the root of belief in catastrophic, man-made global warming is anti-biblical” and “blasphemous.”

Blending Fundamentalism with Climate Change Denialism

As the 2010 Republican takeover of the House of Representatives and major gains in Senate and the states have hardened the GOP’s anti-environment stance, the Religious Right’s enthusiastic embrace of climate change denial has seeped even further into GOP discourse about the environment.

Conservative religious leaders have lent credence and a veneer of righteousness to therapidly growing climate change denialism in the GOP, and in turn GOP leaders have begun to pick up their talking points. Land of the Southern Baptist Convention argued that environmentalists’ “exaggerated or baseless fears lead to unreasonable policies that can do a lot more harm than the things feared,” Fischer of the American Family Association said that “exaggerations, myths, and outright lies are commonplace in the environmental movement” and Focus on the Family’s Minnery lamented, “when we think about science, we think about the truth; yet in so-called global warming science, we’ve gotten a lot less than the truth many times.”

Increasingly, Republicans are using the ideological rhetoric of groups like the Cornwall Alliance as they launch attacks against the Environmental Protection Agency, climate scientists, and efforts in both Congress and state legislatures to regulate polluters. In fact, both Religious Right leaders and some Republican officials are suggesting that the very notion that humans are harming the planet is somehow a repudiation of the biblical story that God promised Noah after the flood that He would never again destroy the earth.

Congressman John Shimkus (R-IL), who is now chairman of the Subcommittee on Environment and the Economy, during a 2009 hearing said:

“I want to start with Genesis 8, verse 21 and 22, ‘Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood, and never again will I destroy all living creatures as I have done. As long as the earth endures, sea time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.’ I believe that’s the infallible word of God and that’s the way it’s going to be for His creation. The second verse comes from Matthew 24, “And He will send his Angels with a loud trumpet call and they will gather His elect from the Four Winds, from one end of the Heavens to the other.” The earth will end only when God declares it’s time to be over. Man will not destroy the earth. This earth will not be destroyed by a flood.

Congresswoman and likely presidential candidate Michele Bachmann (R-MN) derided House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi’s environmental policies, telling the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow,“[Pelosi] is committed to her global warming fanaticism to the point where she has said that she’s just trying to save the planet. We all know that someone did that over 2,000 years ago, they saved the planet -- we didn’t need Nancy Pelosi to do that.”

The leading climate change denialist in the Senate, Jim Inhofe (R-OK), who is the ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, agreed with a caller on a radio show who claimed that “the world is just changing like it usually does,” replying: “I think what he’s saying is God’s still up there. We’re going through these cycles.… I really believe that a lot of people are in denial who want to hang their hat on the fact, that they believe is a fact, that man-made gases, anthropogenic gases, are causing global warming. The science really isn’t there.”

In Praise of CO2

Part of the climate change denial movement centers on the case that escalating emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are good for the environment. As PolitiFact notes, while CO2 is “naturally occurring,” it “is also emitted when we burn fossil fuels.” As a greenhouse gas, CO2 “traps energy from the sun in the atmosphere,” which leads to warming temperatures. The level of CO2 in the atmosphere is rapidly growing, and the International Panel on Climate Change confirmed unequivocally “that the marked increase in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) since 1750 is the result of human activities.”

Even a recent UC Berkeley study that attempted to “challenge the scientific consensus on global warming is finding that its data-crunching effort is producing results nearly identical to those underlying the prevailing view” that human activities have led to a sharp increase in emissions of greenhouse gases like CO2 that is increasing temperatures.

But the Religious Right’s anti-environmental movement has a different view. Beisner told Bryan Fischer on his radio show that “higher CO2” is a “win-win situation, it’s a very good thing to see CO2 rising.”

Similarly, Bachmann stated on the House floor, “Carbon dioxide, Mister Speaker, is a natural byproduct of nature. Carbon dioxide is natural. It occurs in Earth.” She went on to argue that “there isn’t even one study that can be produced that shows carbon dioxide is a harmful gas. There isn’t one such study because carbon dioxide is not a harmful gas, it is aharmless gas.”

But Bachmann isn’t alone in her ignorance of the problem of CO2. Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) claimed that “the idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical.”

A Republican state senator in Montana went even further, introducing a resolution that would declare that “global warming is beneficial to the welfare and business climate of Montana; reasonable amounts of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere have no verifiable impacts on the environment; and global warming is a natural occurrence and human activity has not accelerated it.”

Republicans in Congress eventried to pass a bill that would repeal the “scientific determination by the EPA that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse-gas pollutants are a threat to human health and welfare,” legislation which received praise from Beisner and Focus on the Family’s political arm Citizen Link. The GOP’s push to overturn the scientific finding that CO2 causes pollution detrimental to humans led one congressman to wonder if the Republicans would next try to “excommunicate the finding that the Earth revolves around the sun.”

Crocodile Tears for the Poor

One of the most disturbing arguments made by Religious Right in its defense of corporations and big polluters is the claim that environmental protections are intended to hurt the poor.

In Resisting The Green Dragon, Bishop Harry Jackson accuses the environmental movement of leading “the war on the poor,” Jackson founded a group with Niger Innis ofCORE and Samuel Rodriguez of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conferencewhich derided clean-energy policies as “dangerous and immoral.” His Affordable Power Alliance relied heavily on research from a corporate front-group that received funding from ExxonMobil, Peabody Energy and other energy corporations.

Concerned Women for America’s Wright lamented that “the policies that environmental groups and even these evangelical groups got behind were ones that would consign the poorest of people around the world to grinding poverty, to disease, to premature death,” adding that environmentalists “don’t see humans as the Bible, as God sees them.” Beisner argues that “climate change is the totalitarian’s dream come true” and efforts to fight climate change would “make millions jobless” and “hurt the poor worst of all.”

Corporations and their front groups are increasingly using this rhetoric as well. For example, the pro-corporate American Action Network ran featuring a senior citizen suffering through cold winter nights, claiming that the American Clean Energy and Security Act would make energy unaffordable and devastate the economy. Peggy Venable, the Texas state director of the Koch-financed Americans for Prosperity, claimed that “the Global Warming hoax is imperialism allowing a vehicle for environmentalists to dictate the way of life for us all - and is most harmful for third world countries where children often don’t see their fifth birthday.”

The argument that environmental protection will hurt the poor is at best misleading. Polluters disproportionately target low-income areas, particularly communities of color. Thedegradation of the environment in the most economically depressed places, a fact that launched the environmental justice movement.

With climate change contributing to rising sea levels, desertification, extreme weather, water scarcity and drought, studies predict that displacement due to climate change will disproportionately impact poorer people and developing nations. As the BBC notes, experts believe that “people living in poverty would be worst affected by the effects of climate change.”

Conclusion

The Religious Right’s intensifying hostility to the environmental movement and embrace of climate change denialism conveniently couples with the GOP’s mounting assaults on climate science and environmental regulations on polluters. Energy companies stand to benefit immensely from the plans of Republicans in Congress and state legislatures to weaken attempts to limit pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, and their opposition to building a more sustainable economy and adding ‘green-collar’ jobs. The Religious Right’s vicious attacks on environment-minded Christians and false assertions in the debate over environmental protection not only bolster the GOP’s war on science, but also suggest that it is a duty of faith to combat environmental protection, fight environmentalists, and deny global climate change. Just as corporate America has infused the GOP with an anti-environmental and anti-science ideology, the Religious Right is more than eager to provide cover for politicians and their corporate backers by claiming God’s blessing for their dishonest assertions and destructive policies.

moyers 9/14

http://ecowatch.com/2014/09/12/evangelical-christian-climate-change/ hayoe

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/07/31/3465941/health-concern-epa-hearings/

A retired coal miner traveled roughly 1,300 miles from his home in Harlan County, Kentucky to Denver, Colorado where the Environmental Protection Agency was holding public hearings on its new proposed regulations to cut carbon pollution from power plants.

In the five minutes he was allotted, Stanley Sturgill spoke to the EPA about how he now suffers from black lung diseases among other respiratory illnesses and how the pollution from coal plants were adversely affecting not only his health, but the public’s too. His plea: “We’re dying, literally dying for you to help us.”

The hearing in Denver was one of several the EPA held across the country Tuesday and Wednesday to gauge public opinion on the Clean Power Plan, the new proposed regulations to cut carbon pollution emitted from existing power plants by 30 percent by 2030 proposed in early June. Other hearings this week on the rule were held in Atlanta, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C. At EPA’s headquarters in D.C., pollution’s health effects dominated the concerns of speakers giving their testimonies.

For Rev. Richard Cizik, president of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good,that meant the health of his son who seven years ago was diagnosed with serious asthma. “On one occasion, before we really understood what was happening, he woke up in the morning unable to breathe,” he said during his testimony. “It’s the kind of frightening experience a parent never forgets.”

Cizik was also part of the Environmental Working Group’s “Humane Toxome Project” which tested the Reverend’s body for 84 industrial compounds, pollutants and other chemicals to see how his body was personally affected by the intake of pollution. In an interview with ThinkProgress, Cizik listed all the chemicals found present in his body: mercury, methylmercury, pesticides, lead, among 39 other pollutants.

“One reality is very clear,” Cizik said during his testimony. “The EPA’s first-ever carbon rule for regulating existing power plants is absolutely essential to reduce the effects of climate change that worsen smog and trigger asthma attacks and other health consequences.”

According to the EPA, the Clean Power Plan would eliminate 25 percent of the soot and smog polluting the air by 2030, and would help prevent 2,700 to 6,600 premature deaths, 340 to 3,300 heart attacks, and 140,000 to 150,000 asthma attacks in children like Cizik’s. The public health and climate benefits, the EPA estimates, are between between $55 billion and $93 billion, or upwards of $7 for each American family.

Some at the D.C. hearings said the regulations don’t go far enough, however, noting the potential shift away from coal will most likely result in an increase in use of natural gas. Though natural gas releases about half the carbon emissions as coal when burned, it is mostly methane, which is 86 times better at trapping heat as carbon dioxide. Scientists havefound that even low leakage of methane from using natural gas resources is just as harmful for climate change as pollution from coal. And as it is now, methane leakage in the United States is quite high.

Natural gas production and its potential leakage can also impact health too, according to Dr. Poune Saberi, a physician in occupational and environmental medicine who works at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. In places where natural gas booms are happening, such as Texas, families are increasingly experiencing symptoms such as chronic nose bleeding, irregular heartbeat, muscle spasms, and open sores from methane leakage. In an interview with ThinkProgress, Saberi said the EPA’s regulations on coal plants could lead to more health benefits — but only if states chose to switch to truly renewable sources when trying to reach their 2030 goals.

“Instead of switching from coal to natural gas or to nuclear, if states switch from coal to non-combustible sources to renewable sources, they will actually get there faster and it’s better for climate change and it’s better for the air,” Saberi said. “It’s almost like a win, win, win, but somehow that gets lost in the discussion.”

Sara Via, a biology professor at the University of Maryland, agreed.

“Natural gas is not the solution,” she said during her testimony. “It just swaps one health problem out for another.”

Shannon Greenwood is an intern at ThinkProgress.

Evangelical Christian leaders in Florida are making just that point, calling on Republican politicians in the state to take climate change seriously. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) recently went full-on climate denier, and Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) is a denier too.

Rev. Mich Hescox, president of the Evangelical Environmental Network, has started a petition drive calling on Scott to make climate change and "creation care" priorities. Here's an excerpt:

THIS STORY CONTINUES

grist 5/14

The Coming GOP Civil War Over Climate Change

Science, storms, and demographics are starting to change minds among the rank and file.

By Coral Davenport

May 9, 2013 | 8:20 p.m.

Clarion call? New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie tours the devastation in the wake of superstorm Sandy. (AP Photo/Mel Evans)

Inside This Week's Cover Story

Kerry Emanuel registered as a Republican as soon he turned 18, in 1973. The aspiring scientist was turned off by what he saw as the Left’s blind ideology. “I had friends who denied Pol Pot was killing people in Cambodia,” he says. “I reacted very badly to the triumph of ideology over reason.”

Back then, Emanuel saw the Republican Party as the political fit for a data-driven scientist. Today, the professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is considered one of the United States’ foremost authorities on climate change—particularly on how rising carbon pollution will increase the intensity of hurricanes.

In January 2012, just before South Carolina’s Republican presidential primary, the Charleston-based Christian Coalition of America, one of the most influential advocacy groups in conservative politics, flew Emanuel down to meet with the GOP presidential candidates. Perhaps an unlikely prophet of doom where global warming is concerned, the coalition has begun to push Republicans to take action on climate change, out of worry that coming catastrophes could hit the next generation hard, especially the world’s poor.

The meetings didn’t take. “[Newt] Gingrich and [Mitt] Romney understood, … and I think they even believed the evidence and understood the risk,” Emanuel says. “But they were so terrified by the extremists in their party that in the primaries they felt compelled to deny it.Which is not good leadership, good integrity. I got a low impression of them as leaders.” Throughout the Republican presidential primaries, every candidate but one—former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who was knocked out of the race at the start—questioned, denied, or outright mocked the science of climate change.

Soon after his experience in South Carolina, Emanuel changed his lifelong Republican Party registration to independent. “The idea that you could look a huge amount of evidence straight in the face and, for purely ideological reasons, deny it, is anathema to me,” he says.

Emanuel predicts that many more voters like him, people who think of themselves as conservative or independent but are turned off by what they see as a willful denial of science and facts, will also abandon the GOP, unless the party comes to an honest reckoning about global warming.

And a quiet, but growing, number of other Republicans fear the same thing. Already, deep fissures are emerging between, on one side, a base of ideological voters and lawmakers with strong ties to powerful tea-party groups and super PACs funded by the fossil-fuel industry who see climate change as a false threat concocted by liberals to justify greater government control; and on the other side, a quiet group of moderates, younger voters, and leading conservative intellectuals who fear that if Republicans continue to dismiss or deny climate change, the party will become irrelevant.

“There is a divide within the party,” says Samuel Thernstrom, who served on President George W. Bush’s Council on Environmental Quality and is now a scholar of environmental policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “The position that climate change is a hoax is untenable.”

A concerted push has begun within the party—in conservative think tanks and grassroots groups, and even in backroom, off-the-record conversations on Capitol Hill—to persuade Republicans to acknowledge and address climate change in their own terms. The effort will surely add heat to the deep internal conflict in the years ahead.

Republicans have been struggling with an identity crisis since the 2012 presidential election. In particular, the nation’s rapid demographic changes are forcing the GOP to come to terms with the newly powerful influence of Hispanic voters and to confront the issue of immigration. For now, climate change isn’t getting anywhere close to that kind of urgent scrutiny from Republicans, at least not in public. GOP strategists say that Republican candidates hoping to winprimary races, where the electorate tends to be older and more ideologically driven, are still best served to deny, ignore, or dismiss climate change.

Today, a Republican candidate “wouldn’t be able to win a primary with a Jon Huntsman position on this,” says strategist Glen Bolger.

The problem is, as polling data and the changing demographics of the American electorate show, it’s likely that the position that can win voters in a primary will lose voters in a general election. Some day, though, the facts—both scientific and demographic—will force GOP candidates to confront climate change whether they want to or not. And that day will come sooner than they think.

Already, the numbers tell the story. Polls show that a majority of Americans, and a plurality of Republicans, believe global warming is a problem. Concern about the issue is higher among younger voters and independents, who Republicans will need to attract if they want to win elections.

According to a pair of Gallup Polls in April, 58 percent of all Americans are worried about global warming, and 57 percent believe it is caused by human activities. Not surprisingly, responses reflect a partisan divide on the issue, but among Republicans, concern about global warming is rising. Gallup found that 75 percent of Democrats worry about climate change, compared with 59 percent of independent voters (up from 51 percent in 2010) and 40 percent of Republicans (up from 32 percent from that year).

A January poll of Republicans and Republican-leading independents conducted by George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication said that a majority (52 percent) think climate change is happening; 62 percent favor taking action to combat climate change, such as taxing carbon pollution. Only 35 percent of the Republican respondents said they agree with the Republican Party’s position on climate change. (The party’s 2012 platform opposed any limits on greenhouse-gas emissions and suggested the science underlying projections of a warming climate is “uncertain.”)

Meanwhile, a March poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 69 percent of Americans believe the climate is already changing. On the more contentious question of whether fossil-fuel pollution is causing that change, the poll uncovered a generation gap: Only 28 percent of voters over age 65 accept the scientific consensus that such emissions are warming the Earth, while close to 50 percent of those under 50 accept it.

“These polls show that there are a lot of people who are inclined to vote Republican—and believe America should respond to climate change,” says Edward Maibach, director of the George Mason program. “Republicans aren’t inclined to respond to it right now, but in the future, if they don’t take these issues seriously, they’re inclined to alienate a lot of Republican voters.”

CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS

Mother and daughter Roberta and Michele Combs are pillars of the Religious Right.Roberta, president and CEO of the Christian Coalition America, got her start in Republican politics working with celebrated strategist Lee Atwater. Michele, who was named Young Republican of the Year in 1989 and worked as a planner for events such as George W. Bush’s inauguration, is the coalition’s communications director. With their white-blond bouffant hair, penchant for fuchsia lipstick, soft South Carolina accents, and sterling conservative bona fides, the Combses are familiar presences in the ruby-red heart of the GOP establishment.

That’s why it’s so surprising to many that they are tackling climate change. But both women see global warming, and clean air and environmental protection more broadly, as issues that tie into their core conservative mission of protecting family values.

“This is an important issue for the Republican Party,” Roberta Combs says. “At one point in time, this was a Republican issue, but Democrats took it over.”

In 2010, Roberta led a Christian Coalition push for her friend Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina to sign on to a Senate climate-change bill, as the measure’s sole GOP sponsor. Graham eventually pulled his support, but thanks in part to Roberta’s pressure, he’s remained one of the few Republicans to openly acknowledge climate change and to call on his party to look for a solution. He is sticking with his position even as he prepares to face South Carolina voters for reelection next year.

“I think the Republican Party needs to embrace an environmental agenda,” Graham says. “When you ask a Republican candidate for president, what’s your environmental platform, what do they say? We need to be able to speak to this just as quickly as to do to reforming the tax code. Younger people, people under 30, this is a huge issue for them.”

Roberta was the Christian Coalition official who persuaded Emanuel, the MIT scientist, to speak with the GOP presidential candidates in January 2012. And she continues to employ her group’s grassroots muscle to muster conservative support for Republicans like Graham who support action to combat climate change, with the hope that eventually one will sponsor a bill that can pass.

“I think the Republican Party has got to move to the center. We should never leave our base, but we’ve got to be more open-minded and look at issues more American families care about,” Roberta says. “As the electorate changes, we’re not going to win as much. It’s a different generation, and the Republican Party has got to look at all of this and broaden its agenda if they want to continue to win elections.”

Last summer, Michele launched a new group,Young Conservatives for Energy Reform, aimed at amassing grassroots support for lawmakers and legislation addressing clean energy and climate change. She is channeling her network of connections among the Christian Coalition and the Young Republicans.

She works closely with Brian Smith, a 32-year-old Air Force veteran and the chairman of the Midwest chapter, who is also a former cochairman of the Young Republicans National Federation, a training ground for party leaders founded in 1931. The energy group is structured like the Young Republicans, with volunteers staffing city, state, and regional chapters. So far, the group has state chairs in Florida, Georgia, Indiana, New Hampshire, Ohio, South Carolina, and Texas—all of which have Republican governors.

Over the past year, the group has held a dozen events in those and other states. In October 2012, it sponsored a get-together in Washington for GOP congressional staff. The gatherings—mostly of young professionals in their 20s, 30s, and 40s—feature hors d’oeuvres, cocktails, and a talk from retired Marine Gen. Richard Zilmer, who makes the case that both climate change and U.S. oil dependence are matters of national security, and that policies to cut fossil-fuel use are consistent with conservative values. Emanuel has also spoken at some of the events.

The goal, Michele says, is to build a database of voters who will, at some point, come forward to back Republican candidates who support cutting carbon pollution. “We are building a grassroots army of young conservatives around the country,” she says. “When the time comes, we’ll have the grassroots to organize around candidates or legislation, and we can activate them.”

PAYING THE PRICE

What Michele and Roberta want to do, in other words, is protect lawmakers such as Bob Inglis.Today, Republicans point to the former House member from South Carolina as the textbook tale of what happens when a red-state conservative dares to acknowledge climate change.

Inglis, who left Congress in 2011, recalls the challenge his son, Rob, threw down to him a decade ago before he was to vote in his first election. He said, “I’ll vote for you, Dad, but you’ve got to clean up your act on the environment.’ ”

Inglis had never given much thought to the issue of climate change. As a by-the-books conservative, he says,“I accepted that if Al Gore was for it, I was against it, until my son challenged my ignorance on the subject.”Inglis spent the next few years educating himself on climate issues. He joined the House Science Committee and accompanied climate scientists on research trips to Antarctica and the Great Barrier Reef, where he saw firsthand the damages wrought by rising carbon pollution and warming temperatures. “I got convinced of the science,” he says, and, in2009, Inglis cosponsored climate-change legislation with Republican Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona. The bill proposed an idea that had strong backing from environmentalists, including Gore, as well as prominent conservative economists. It would create a tax on carbon pollution but use the revenue to cut payroll or income taxes.

Inglis would pay dearly for his support of the so-called carbon-tax swap. The following year, he lost his primary election to a tea-party candidate, Trey Gowdy. And Inglis knows his position on the climate was the reason. “The most enduring heresy was saying, ‘Climate change is real and we should do something about it.’ That was seen as a statement against the tribal orthodoxy.”

“But,” he says, “these heresies and orthodoxies change so quickly. Back in 2010, I was voting for immigration reform; look how that’s changed. It’s going to be like that with climate change.”

Along with the evolving politics of immigration reform, Bob and Rob Inglis also see in their situation a kinship with Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, who jolted the party earlier this year when he came out in support of gay marriage. Portman changed his stance after conversations with his 21-year-old son, Will, who is gay.

“I hope there’s a parallel,” Bob Inglis says. “Rob [Portman] is a hero of mine. He loves his son. He’s willing to take risks for his son.” Unlike Inglis, Portman hasn’t yet had to face voters in a primary—and won’t until 2016. Given the rapid shift in public attitudes toward gay marriage, he may in fact suffer no repercussions. It wasn’t long ago that gay marriage served as a valuable wedge issue for the party (think George W. Bush in 2004)—much like placing limits on carbon is today.

For the moment, however, Inglis has taken on the arduous task of bringing his party back to him. Last summer, he founded the Energy and Enterprise Initiative, a nonprofit organization based at George Mason University, focused on convincing conservatives, particularly young ones, that climate change, caused by carbon pollution, is a serious threat—and on pushing for the carbon-tax swap as a fundamentally conservative economic solution. Since last fall, Inglis and a cohort of conservative economists have made their case at a dozen events, including talks at colleges and universities in Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, and Mississippi.

Last month, 21-year-old Republican Kevin Croswhite, a senior at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wis., who grew up in nearby Salem (both towns lie within in the district of Rep. Paul Ryan, the 2012 GOP vice presidential candidate) attended one of Inglis’s events—and was sold.

Croswhite has considered himself a conservative Republican since high school. As an economics major, he is a big believer in data: scientific, economic, and demographic. He is persuaded that his party’s rejection of the data on climate change will damage it politically.

“The country’s going to become more educated, and that’s not going to break our way, as a party, if we are denying what 90 out of 100 scientists say,” Croswhite argues. “If the scientific community is generally accepting of something, you need to trust that.”

While Combs’s and Inglis’s groups try to appeal to conservative Christians and young Republicans, another organization—the National Audubon Society—is reaching out to red-state conservatives in the West, linking the threat of climate change to the ideal of Theodore Roosevelt’s Republican conservatism, in a bid to appeal to hunters, fishers, ranchers, and other lovers of the outdoors. The venerable nonpartisan group has teamed with the Washington organization ConservAmerica to ask red-state voters to sign an “American Eagle Compact” calling for lawmakers to act on conservation policies, including climate change. The effort, which Audubon says is funded by a Texas Republican who has asked to remain anonymous, has so far garnered 55,000 signatures.

“We’re trying to figure out how to partner with those people, so they can turn out in communities across the country, to activate them for support,” says Audubon President and CEO David Yarnold. “We want to make sure that when Republican legislators who support conservation and climate policy go home, they’re not just getting hollered at. We want to make sure they’re hearing from reasonable conservationists who say this is not a partisan issue.”

LIGHTING THE WAY

huffpo

Rev. Jim Ball

Author, 'Global Warming and the Risen LORD: Christian Discipleship and Climate Change' huffpo

41 Years of Faithful Investments in People and Planet http://www.iccr.org/

The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility is the pioneer coalition of active shareowners who view the management of their investments as a catalyst to promote justice and sustainability in the world. To learn more about our history and current initiatives, visit our About Us page.

http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2011/09/evangelicals-rally-mercury-rules

ANNAPOLIS, Md. -- Religious leaders in Prince George's County are calling on Maryland lawmakers to support offshore wind power development.

A group of 30 religious leaders says it plans to deliver a letter to the county's delegation supporting off-shore wind legislation. The group, which plans to release the letter on Monday, says it is supporting offshore wind because of the toll pollution from coal-fired power plants is having on the health of county communities.

Offshore wind is a key piece of Gov. Martin O'Malley's legislative agenda this session.

A bill that would have required utilities to enter into long-term wind power contracts failed last year over concerns about the costs to customers. This year, the governor is proposing legislation similar to a New Jersey law that sets requirements, but doesn't require long-term contracts.

vs ICES (dobson etcon, inhofe etc) also vs ISA

wind: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/13/maryland-religion-wind_n_1273387.html?ir=Green

Some senior Republicans who have left the battlefield of electoral politics are starting to go vocal with their worries about their party’s stance on climate change—and to take action to stave off its electoral consequences. They fear, in the words of one GOP operative, “that the party is going to drive itself off a cliff with this.”

Conservative economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a senior adviser on McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign who now heads the American Action Forum, a center-right think tank, is working with the climate-policy advocacy group Clean Air-Cool Planet. The New Hampshire-based group has flown Holtz-Eakin to the state several times over the past few months to talk to voters in small living-room meetings about the economic threats of climate change—and the economic benefits of addressing the problem.

Another prominent Republican, John Warner, the former senator from Virginia and secretary of the Navy, is a senior adviser to the Pew Project on National Security, Energy, and Climate, which focuses on the need to develop alternative energy to combat climate change and lessen U.S. dependence on foreign oil. Warner, who cosponsored a major cap-and-trade bill when he was in the Senate, now travels the country, including stops at military bases, calling attention to the national-security concerns of climate change and fossil-fuel dependence.

Working with Warner on the Pew climate-change project is George Shultz, President Reagan’s secretary of State and an adviser to George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign. Last year, Shultz, who is a distinguished fellow at Stanford University, cochaired the “No on Prop. 23” campaign in California, which successfully defended the state’s pioneering cap-and-trade law against an oil industry-led effort to overturn it.

“My own opinion is that this problem is very real,” Shultz told National Journal. “I recognize there are a lot of people pooh-poohing it. Whether they like the science or not, there’s a huge problem coming at us. There’s a huge melt coming in the Arctic regions. There’s melting taking place.” Of Perry and other Republicans who deny climate science, Shultz said, “They’re entitled to their opinion, but they’re not entitled to the facts.”

Former GOP Rep. Bob Inglis of South Carolina, who lost his primary race last year in part because he acknowledged climate change, gives speeches and lectures across the country about the need for conservatives to do likewise and begin working on solutions to the problem. Otherwise, the Republican Party will be labeled antiscience, he warns. Inglis takes his message directly to conservative strongholds such as Federalist clubs and meetings of the Conservative Political Action Conference.

“Being branded as antiscience is not a good future for us,” Inglis told National Journal. “How can we say to young people, we’re dismissing science? That’s not a good place for our party to be, and it’s not historically where we’ve been. There are conservative voices that will hopefully show the way back to conservatism and away from a populist rejection of science.”

On November 8, William Reilly, who ran the Environmental Protection Agency under President George H.W. Bush, blasted his party’s stance on science in a widely reported speech. “For some of the most prominent leaders of the Republican Party, science has left the building,” he said. “Science doesn’t feature prominently in these debates. Republicans once were the party of science where environmental policy was concerned,” Reilly contended. Of House Republicans’ recent unanimous vote to overturn EPA’s scientific finding that climate change poses a public health threat, he said, “There was no explanation justifying a position at odds with the findings of 11 National Academies of Science, including our own.”

Another longtime GOP ally, Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, is also disturbed by the party’s shift toward science denial. Anderson, who is Tim Pawlenty’s pastor and worked with the former Minnesota governor on his state climate-change initiatives, in 2006 joined with other prominent evangelicals in sending a letter to President George W. Bush arguing that no legitimate scientific debate remained on the merits of climate science and that evangelicals had a moral obligation to solve a problem that threatens the world’s most vulnerable people.

“Most evangelicals in other countries believe that there is climate change and that we need to do something. It seems to be an American position to deny that,” Anderson told National Journal. “It’s curious to me that there are people who have taken strong positions and then changed them. Many of the candidates were expressing concern four or five years ago. Whenever there are sea changes on particular issues and many get on board, you wonder what changed the political or cultural climate.”

According to Focus on the Family, it's not 'Pro-Life' to Protect Newborns from Mercury Poisoning

Submitted by Brian Tashman on Friday, 12/16/2011 6:00 pm

Like David Barton, who has no academic training as a historian but is the Religious Right’s point person on American history, Calvin Beinser of the Cornwall Alliance has**no scientific credentials**but has become the**go-to person for right-wing activists**on questions of science, particularly climate change. While he lacks any credentials what Beisner does have is**close ties to organizations financed by the energy industry**and a history of**attacking scientists**,**spreading misinformation**, and fueling fears that the environmental movement is a**pagan plot**to**destroy Christianity**and kill “**about 95% of the human race**.”

Beisner is especially concerned about growing calls for environmental protection made by evangelical Christians, and has went out of his way to attack groups like the Evangelical Environmental Networkfor calling

on public officials to clamp down on mercury poisoning. Beisner’s outburst against his fellow evangelicals should come as no surprise, as he has even :{gone after a **Koch-financed study** :(style="background-color:#fff200"):}:which actually confirmed the science behind climate change. He joined Focus on the Family’s political arm CitizenLink, whose head Tom Minnery appeared in :{Beisner’s :(style="background-color:#fff200"):}:*:{Green Dragon:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}:*:{ video series:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}:, to :{disparage the EEN:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}: for :{thanking both Republican and Democratic politicians:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}: who supported efforts to reduce mercury emissions:

According to the EEN, one of every six American babies is born with harmful blood mercury levels, “which causes permanent brain damage in the unborn and infants.” Therefore, the 12 federal legislators EEN is thanking with radio, TV and billboard ads for supporting the EPA restrictions are “pro-life.”

In truth, only one in every 1,000 American babies is exposed to harmful doses of mercury, and the slight delays in cognitive development it may cause generally disappear by age 7, says Beisner. Moreover, all 12 of the federal legislators EEN is supporting are among the most pro-abortion Congress has to offer.

“Calling this ‘pro-life’ is quite a misnomer, but it will result in a lot of people being confused about who’s really pro-life and who’s not,” Beisner said. “Some of these people have 100 percent pro-abortion voting records in Congress, so people need to know they’re really getting the wool pulled over their eyes if they fall for this.”

But the Center for Disease control did in fact find that one in six newborns, or 630,000 of the 4 million babies born annually, are “at risk for developmental disorders because of mercury exposure in the mother's womb,” which PBS described as mercury levels “so high that they are potentially at risk for learning disabilities and motor skill impairment and short-term memory loss.”

This attack on evangelical environmentalists comes at a time when Focus on the Family head Jim Daly pledged to take the organization in a different direction than his predecessor James Dobson,and Christianity Today reported that CitizenLink recently launched “an effort to reach young adults on issues related to sex trafficking, poverty, and the environment.” It also puts the group at odds with the long list of evangelical leaders who signed the “Evangelical Call to Stop The Mercury Poisoning of the Unborn.”

But apparently for Focus on the Family, being “pro-life” does not entail protecting newborns from mercury poisoning.

Filed Under

http://www.creationcare.org/index.php

Welcome to the home page of the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN), a ministry dedicated to the care of God's creation. EEN seeks to equip, inspire, disciple, and mobilize God's people in their effort to care for God's creation. We believe the body of Christ should be an example of what God's people can do in the world to solve some of the great challenges of our time.

Founded in 1993, our ministry is grounded in the Bible's teaching on the responsibility of God's people to "tend the garden" through a faithful walk with our Lord Jesus Christ. Based in the scriptures, EEN publishes and develops material for churches, ministries, families, and individuals to use as they seek to know the Lord more fully, especially his care for all that he has made.

Environmental toxins and climate change have repercussions for many of today's pressing issues from the health of our children, to global and domestic poverty, to jobs and economic growth. This makes how we care for God's creation one of the greatest moral challenges of our time. And as Christians, we also know it is a challenge that cuts to the heart of how we promote and cherish life.

http://www.creationcare.org/blog.php?blog=43

From the Mission Field

June 19,2012, 12:02 PM

Hear first hand what missionaries are experiencing when it comes to climate and the vulnerable, hear what's happening on the ground in countries like Malawi, Zambia, and Honduras, hear from young evangelicals and what they're asking us to consider when it comes to climate change, and hear about what the Lausanne Movement(founded by Billy Graham and John Stott) is calling us to do when it comes to addressing creation care and climate.

See also shareholder revolts to enforce corporate social responsibility eg GE

True enough. The tactic first emerged in 1971, when the Episcopal Church bought up shares to shame companies that were doing business with South Africa—part of a larger pressure campaign that convinced corporate America to divest from the apartheid regime. This success inspired pension funds and others to apply their shareholder clout, pushing for firms to do the right thing on a host of issues—AIDS, tobacco, climate change.

The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, a coalition of religious interests, has filed at least 282 activist resolutions this year, many aimed at curbing emissions. So it's no surprise that its reps have run into Borelli at shareholder meetings. "He used the tool we had against what we were doing," says Sister Pat Daly, an ICCR climate leader who has taken on the likes of Ford, GM, GE, and ExxonMobil.

October 24, 2006

Back Issues

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Evangelicals Embrace of Environmental Stewardship Creates Problem for Bush

“Evangelicals… comprise between 40 to 50 percent of… the Republican base, and so if the largest single population group in the Republican coalition were to say, ‘this is important. We want you to take, as leaders in the Republican party, leadership on climate change, on clean air, on pure water, on the stewardship of our natural resources.’ If evangelical Christians were to say that, I daresay Republicans will listen. This president, George Bush, will have to listen, the Republicans running for the White House in 2008 will have to listen…”

Reverend Richard Cizik, vice president of governmental affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals, from the film The Great Warming

Around the country, many religious groups, and most notably evangelical Christians, are taking a stand on the environment. Observers say the Bush administration could lose significant support from its conservative religious base if it doesn’t change its stance on issues like global warming.

In addition to promoting sermons on “creation care” – the idea that the Bible calls on people to care for God's earth – evangelical leaders are urging their congregations to see The Great Warming, a documentary film that has been highlighted this week in the Los Angeles Times andWashington Post.

Narrated by Alanis Morissette and Keanu Reeves, The Great Warming depicts the threat global warming poses to millions of people, particularly the world's children, the poorest and the most vulnerable. The film also showcases the recent engagement of religious groups in confronting the enormous challenge of global warming.

Groups like the Christian Coalition and the National Association of Evangelicals are also making global warming an issue. Reverend Richard Cizik, vice president of governmental affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals, has been pressing politicians to publicly state their positions on global warming.

Last summer Cizik invited contenders for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania – Democrat Bob Casey, Jr. and incumbent Senator Republican Rick Santorum – to a forum on climate change. Casey appeared and endorsed the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, Santorum declined to attend.

The Great Warming is set to open in 34 theaters around the country on the weekend of November 3. To find out where the film will be playing, visit www.thegreatwarming.com.

Special note to BushGreenwatch subscribers in the Los Angeles area: You are invited to attend a special advance screening of The Great Warming on Wednesday, October 25, at the Pacific Design Center. Click here to RSVP

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