A faith-based program to care for Earth
Acouple of conservative Pennsylvania natives have penned a book subtitled “The Evangelical’s Guide to Climate Change and a Healthy Environment,” as surprising to some as “The Liberal’s Guide to Small Government.”
Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. Maybe it’s surprising only because so many of us like to stuff complex thought into convenient little boxes so we don’t have to think as hard. “Caring For Creation” is heavier on scientific data than on Scripture but it taps both without apology.
I found that refreshing, so I called the Rev. Mitch Hescox, who co-wrote the book with meteorologist Paul Douglas. Rev. Hescox leads the Evangelical Environmental Network and is the son of a coal miner, a lifelong Republican and a resident of York County.
He was in suburban Minneapolis on Monday to give a talk with Mr. Douglas, and then drove to Sioux Falls, S.D., for another speech Tuesday night. Those talks sandwiched President Donald Trump’s announcement that he’d keep a campaign promise and chuck the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan.
That executive order assuredly means an uptick in emissions of carbon and other pollutants. It didn’t surprise Rev. Hescox, but he doesn’t believe Mr. Trump’s oft-cited base is entirely with him on this move. Many evangelicals felt they had to make a choice between prolife and pro-environment, he said, and backed Mr. Trump for his late and calculated embrace of pro-life rhetoric. But that’s not a choice anyone should have to make, Rev. Hescox said.
Roughly 70,000 Pennsylvania pro-life Christians have called for methane reduction standards through online and email petitions, he said, because they’re tired of “burying its costs in the the lungs, brains and hearts of our kids.”
Shelving the Clean Power Plan can’t be the end of the story, he said, any more than shelving Obamacare could be.
“We have to have an alternative. We can’t afford to stop reducing carbon” emissions.
Their book is thick with supporting data on the warmest years on record, but the tone and cadence, if not the content, can sound downright Trumpian. Take this passage from Mr. Douglas:
“Wet areas are getting wetter, dry areas are trending drier. You’ve heard the expression ‘weather on steroids’? We’re turbocharging the storms that would have formed anyway — loading the dice in favor of more extreme weather events.”
Weather is local. Climate change is global. While there’s no silver bullet to stem it, this book makes a case for “silver buckshot — hundreds of new technologies and viable, cost-competitive clean-energy alternatives, which will gradually, methodically wean us off fossil fuels, employ more Americans, and jump-start a sputtering, rudderless economy.”
That’s not the message from the White House or from legions of Trump supporters in coal country, but other conservatives are pushing for a revenue-neutral carbon tax. The revenue raised would offset the payroll tax, dollar for dollar.
Every day seems to bring another climate- or weatherrelated story. This week we learned that Pennsylvania’s booming tick and mouse population, due in part to the warm winter, has heightened the threat of Lyme disease. But if fresh scientific data isn’t persuasive enough, this book rolls out biblical passages such as this translation of Isaiah 24:4:
“The earth dries up and withers, the world languishes and withers, the heavens languish with the earth. The earth is defiled by its people; they have disobeyed the laws, violated the statutes and broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore a curse consumes the earth; its people must bear their guilt. Therefore earth’s inhabitants are burned up, and very few are left.”
These may not be the end times but they are strange times, and reaching for God to make a point is nothing new. Some reaches are just longer than others. A couple of Saturdays ago at a raucous town hall meeting in Red Lion, U.S. Rep. Scott Perry, R-York County, angered the crowd when he said federal and state environmental regulations unfairly penalized some polluters while exempting others.
“Some violators, if you are spiritual and you believe in God, one of the violators was God because the forests were providing a certain amount of nitrates and phosphates to the Chesapeake Bay,” Mr. Perry said.
I can’t speak for Isaiah, but does anyone think he’s buying that?