Where can we find a moral response to the climate crisis?
Climate change is no joke. In fact, the EPA has said carbon dioxide poses a threat of “likely increase in mortality and morbidity.” Scary stuff. But, the thing is, this won’t be happening to those of us in the developed world first. The world’s most vulnerable–those living off the land in developing nations–are already suffering from effects of global warming. More than a tenth of the world’s population is at immediate risk from climate change, from crop failure in Malawi to flooding and malaria in Asia.
A moral response is in order, and this week, there have been a few contenders.
Option A:
Richard Land, the “Southern Baptist Convention’s top lobbyist for social and moral concerns,” who prefers coal-fired power plants to a cap-and-trade plan to cut greenhouse-gas emissions. Land says, “It’s called ‘cap and trade,’ and it’s the tax that dares not speak its name… Politicians love cap and trade, because they can claim to be taxing polluters, not workers. But of course, that is never true.”
Option B:
Think Progress blogger Matt Yglesias, who thinks ” failure to start reducing carbon emissions in the very near term is a substantive human and ecological catastrophe… Climate change means drought and famine, flood and forest fire, all in new and unprepared places. People will die.”
Land relies on the stale argument that any attempt to hold polluters accountable will break the bank and cause “greater economic hardships on every American, especially the poor…” He spouts the Republican talking point that cap-and-trade is an “energy tax.” He claims to be speaking in defense of poor Americans, saying “… rushing into environmental policies based on questionable science that will create greater economic hardships on every American, especially the poor, is the wrong approach.”
While figuring out how to cut back on emissions won’t be easy, there are ways to avoid placing a burden on low-income Americans. (Ezra Klein quotes Dave Roberts from the CBO, who says,”Auctioning permits and rebating the revenue, compared to freely allocating permits, produces the same macroeconomic effect, but auction-and-rebate is vastly more progressive, favoring low-income taxpayers, while freely allocating permits overwhelmingly favors the rich.”)
Yglesias, a secular blogger, doesn’t purport to lobby for “social and moral concerns.” But it seems to me that he does a vastly better job of making the moral case for curbing emissions. After all, people’s lives are at stake.
P.S. Thankfully, many religious voices are making the moral case for environmental protections– like Jonathan Merritt or Rich Cizik, as well as outstanding organizations like Interfaith Power and Light.