What would God do? A rising chorus of voices is framing efforts to fight climate change in moral and religious terms — from the pope to a leading climatologist.
“The predominant moral issue of the 21st century almost surely will be climate change comparable to Nazism faced by Churchill in the 20th century and slavery faced by Lincoln in the 19th century” writes James Hansen director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies since 1981 recently in The Huffington Post.
“Our fossil fuel addiction if unabated threatens our children and grandchildren and most species on the planet” says Hansen who won the $100000 Sophie prize last week for his decades of work in warning about climate change.
Hansen says many religions — Catholics Jews Protestants Eastern Orthodox and Evangelicals — see climate change as a moral and ethical challenge and some are pressing Congress to pass legislation that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Indeed Pope Benedict XVI known to many as the “green pope” has increasingly spoken out about protecting the environment which he sees as God’s creation.
Green Like God: Unlocking the Divine Plan for Our Planet a new book this month by culture writer Jonathan Merritt argues that the world is God’s apologetic about Himself and it is the Christian’s job to maintain its beauty and complexity.
Numerous ministers rabbis and other faith-based figures made this argument during prayer vigils and other events at the United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen in December according to a USA TODAY story by colleague Brian Winter.
“”It’s our obligation for posterity to leave a world that exudes the beauty of the Creator for future generations” Sister Joan Brown a Franciscan nun who’s an ecology minister in the Archdiocese in Santa Fe says in the story. She went to Copenhagen and blogged during the summit which ended Dec. 19.
Officials from 193 countries did not agree to a successor treaty to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol but produced instead a non-binding accord with few concrete steps to combat global warming.
Pope Benedict XVI who has guided the Vatican toward installing solar panels and joining a reforestation project to offset its carbon emissions denounced the failure of world leaders to reach a new climate change treaty.
“To cultivate peace one must protect creation!” Benedict told ambassadors accredited to the Vatican in a January speech. He said the same “self-centered and materialistic” thinking that sparked global financial woes was also endangering creation. He added:
The protection of creation is not principally a response to an aesthetic need but much more to a moral need inasmuch as nature expresses a plan of love and truth which is prior to us and which comes from God.