WASHINGTON (ABP) — Climate-change legislation pending in the Senate should include robust funding for impoverished people most vulnerable to the affects of global warming, according to a new faith-based effort launched Oct. 8.
The DaySix campaign, sponsored by Faith in Public Life, says addressing the root causes of global warming is important, but so is helping communities across the world adapt to changing weather conditions through methods such as growing drought-resistant crops, storing food for lean times and installing severe-weather alert systems.
A climate-change bill passed in June by the House of Representatives included between $500 million and $700 million in so-called "adaptation funding" — an amount that Jim Ball, senior director of the Evangelical Environmental Network's climate-change campaign, called "woefully inadequate." Ball, an ordained Baptist minister, said he hoped the Senate would increase adaptation funding to $3.5 billion at the start and ramp it up to $7 billion a year.
Ball said adaptation funding provides common ground for evangelicals, regardless of their beliefs about the causes of global warming. He said the views of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who during her run last year as the GOP vice-presidential nominee said she thinks global warming is taking place but is not sure how much humans are part of the cause, are "fairly representative" of many in the evangelical community.
"For someone like her, adaptation is something they should be in favor of as well," Ball said. "If you think that global warming is happening — you're not yet sure about what the causes are, but you're convinced that it's happening, and there are going to be these consequences — then we have to adapt to those things. And if the poor are going to be hit the hardest, then Christians who are not yet convinced about causation should be ready to say 'Yes, I'm in favor of making sure that the poorest of the poor can adapt to these consequences.'"
A new DaySix website — a reference to the sixth day of creation in Genesis where God made humankind stewards of creation — includes 60-second web video, web ads and online social-networking tools. The resources are designed to educate and mobilize hundreds of thousands of people of faith on the human-needs dimension of global warming.
"This is the core of the climate-change issue for people of faith," said Katie Paris, program and communication director for Faith in Public Life. "Those who are hit first and worst by climate change should not be helped the least and last."
Ball said projections are that rising global temperatures could put an additional 107 million people at risk of hunger and malnutrition, reduce water availability to upwards of 2 billion people already in water-stressed situations, cause health concerns for hundreds of millions and create a possible 200 million "climate refugees" by 2050.
Ball said the impacts of climate change "are going to fall hardest on who Jesus describes as the least of these."
"In our community we've been funding our relief-and-development organizations to help poor people cope exactly with these types of problems, and climate change is going to make them worse," Ball said.
On Sept. 30 Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) introduced the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act of 2009, which seeks to stop pollution, create clean-energy jobs and reduce America's dependence on foreign oil.
The bill calls for a 20 percent reduction, by 2020, in greenhouse-gas emissions over 2005 levels, and an 80 percent reduction by 2050. That goes further than a bill passed by the House in June establishing a 17 percent emissions-reduction target for 2020.
Environmentalists were lukewarm to the House bill but praised the Senate version for setting a stricter emissions cap. Opponents said the 800-plus-page Senate bill is too vague in how it intends to constrain carbon emissions.
Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) a global-warming skeptic who has described media coverage of the issue as "unfounded hype," blogged about the bill under the headline, "Some questions for Sen. Boxer."
Ball, a graduate of Baylor University and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is best known as founder of the What Would Jesus Drive? campaign urging evangelicals to trade in their gas-guzzling SUVs for more fuel-efficient transportation modes as an act of Christian stewardship.
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Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.