Global Warming: a Battle for Evangelical Christian Hearts and Minds

The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation is a conservative evangelical Christian public policy group that promotes a free-market approach to protecting the environment.  The organization recently published a list of ten reasons it opposes policies to reduce carbon pollution and slow global warming, purportedly to protect the poor.
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The Cornwall Alliance’s policy positions are similarly misguided.  On the issue of energy in developing countries, they argue,

To demand that they forgo the use of inexpensive fossil fuels and depend on expensive wind, solar, and other “Green” fuels to meet that need is to condemn them to more generations of poverty and the high rates of disease and premature death that accompany it.

Much of my colleague John Abraham’s work involves the design and installation of clean and robust energy sources in remote parts of the world.  Based on his firsthand experience, Abraham says the Cornwall Alliance has got it all wrong.

This statement is made by people without much experience in energy or in emerging economies.  My own team has led multiple projects where we bring low-cost clean energy solution to very remote and impoverished areas of the globe.  Not only can we deliver energy at a competitive (and sometimes lower) costs, but small-scale distributed energy systems such as wind and solar generation provide local control over

distribution.  What we find is that cleaning the environment also cleans the politics associated with energy.

Abraham also told me about the moral challenge surrounding this subject – poorer countries tend to be the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
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Many evangelical Christians recognize this moral angle of human-caused climate change, and also view the issue as one of stewardship of the Earth.  For example, climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe is an evangelical Christian herself, and often speaks to like-minded groups. She recently did an interview with Bill Moyers that’s well worth watching.  Hayhoe told me,

The foundation of the Christian faith is about loving others as Christ loved us, and it is clear from the work that I do myself as well as I see from other colleagues that those with the least resources to adapt to a changing climate will be most affected by our actions.

The National Association of Evangelicals has likewise acknowledged the reality of human-caused global warming and concluded,

Global Warming:  a Battle for  Evangelical Christian Hearts and Minds