Southern Baptist leader Richard Land says cap-and-trade legislation would most hurt working people in states that rely heavily on coal for their energy.
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NASHVILLE, Tenn. (ABP) — Coal-fired power plants have received the blessing of the Southern Baptist Convention's top lobbyist for social and moral concerns, who is urging opposition to a market-based attempt to limit greenhouse-gas emissions.
Friends of Coal, a volunteer organization with ties to the West Virginia Coal Association, is running an article on its website that includes a link for readers to enter their ZIP code and send an e-mail to their senator opposing a "global warming tax" they said would raise energy costs.
The link goes to the website of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, where the agency's president, Richard Land, warns in an article that Democratic Senate leadership plans to move ahead with a "cap-and-trade" bill.
The bill would limit the amounts of greenhouse gases industries can emit and punish them with fines if they exceed those limits. But it would also allow them to pay less-polluting industries for the right to increase their emissions.
"Such a bill would put the brakes on our already slowed economy, forcing industries and businesses to slash jobs and to pass their taxes onto individuals and families in the form of price increases on commodities and energy," Land wrote. "This would make it even more difficult for America to climb out of its current economic troubles."
What's worse, Land contended, is that the whole basis behind the policy — that it will help avoid catastrophic, human-induced global warming — "is not even settled among scientists, who are growing increasingly skeptical, especially since we have been experiencing a decade-long cooling trend."
"Christians should take every reasonable step to care for God's creation," Land said. "But rushing into environmental policies based on questionable science that will create greater economic hardships on every American, especially the poor, is the wrong approach."
During the March 14 broadcast of his radio program, "Richard Land Live," Land said he wants "to ring the alarm bells" about "a huge tax" that is coming to all Americans.
"It's called 'cap and trade,' and it's the tax that dares not speak its name," Land said. "Politicians love cap and trade, because they can claim to be taxing polluters, not workers. But of course, that is never true. Taxes are costs that are handed on to consumers. Once the government creates a scarce new commodity — in this case the right to emit carbon — and then mandates that businesses buy it, the costs are inevitably going to be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices."
Land said those hit hardest by cap and trade "will be the, quote, 95 percent of working families, unquote, that Mr. Obama keeps talking about, usually omitting that his no-new-taxes pledge comes with a caveat. It comes with a footnote: 'unless you use energy.'"
"Putting a price on carbon is regressive," Land said. "It's not only a tax, it's a regressive tax that hurts those who make the least the most, because poor and middle-income households spend much more of their paychecks, percentage-wise, on things like gas to drive to work or to go get groceries or for home heating and air conditioning."
"Cap and trade is the ideal policy for every Beltway analyst who thinks the tax code is too progressive," Land said. "But the greatest inequities are geographic and would be imposed on the parts of the U.S. that rely most on manufacturing or fossil fuels — particularly coal, which generates most power in the Midwest, in the Southern and the Plains states. It's no coincidence that the liberals most invested in cap and trade — [Sen.] Barbara Boxer [D-Calif.], [Rep.] Henry Waxman [D-Calif.] and [Rep.] Ed Markey [D-Mass.] — come from California or the Northeast."
Land said coal provides more than half of electricity generated in the United States, and 25 states get more than half of their electricity from coal-fired generators. In some states it's even higher. Ohio gets 86 percent of its power from coal, Indiana 94 percent, Missouri 85 percent and West Virginia 98 percent.
"Who's going to get soaked the most with these taxes?" Land asked. "Well, West Virginia, Wyoming, Ohio, Missouri: Grab hold of your pocketbook and hold on tight, because you're going to get more of this tax increase because you get more of your generation from coal. People who run nuclear-energy plants aren't going to have to buy cap and trade. It's going to be coal plants. It gets messier and messier."
Christian anti-global-warming activists disagreed with Land's reasoning. Land is "lash[ing] himself to dirty coal, sacrificing human health and the global environment to corporate greed," according to Robert Parham, executive director of the Baptist Center for Ethics.
"As a global-warming denier, Richard Land continues to distort the overwhelming agreement within the scientific community about climate change," Parham, author of Loving Neighbors Across Time: A Christian Guide to Protecting the Earth, said. He said Land's "repeated claims about Earth cooling do not negate global warming."
Jonathan Merritt, national spokesman for the Southern Baptist Environment and Climate Initiative, said Christians who care about God's creation and recognize that something must be done about the global energy and environmental crisis "are growing increasingly weary of those claiming to represent us who preach relentlessly about what [they] oppose, yet refuse to offer policy alternatives."
He added, "I find it curious that we are first in line to support the coal industry that is polluting our air and destroying the Appalachian Mountains, yet when it comes to actual pro-environmental legislation, we are nowhere to be found."
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Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.