Christians and climate change

I am fascinated and horrified that evangelical Christians are numbered among those who deny climate change or attribute it to non-human factors.

SIN AND THE ENVIRONMENT

The Bible declares that a high proportion of the ills besetting the environment have an origin in human sin. This is declared at the Fall (Genesis 3) and reaffirmed in places like Romans 8. Even when we do not clearly see the link, a straight-forward reading of the Bible suggests that the link is there.

Furthermore, most of the signs of the return of Christ are environmental. The sun will not really darken and the moon turn to blood. But, from an earth-bound perspective, that is how it will appear. We are all aware of how, for example, volcanic eruptions or bushfires have caused the sun and moon to appear dark, and often reddish.

Burning up of grass and drying of rivers -- these, too, are environmental disasters.

Despite the fact that human sin contributes to environmental damage, God's mandate that humans should have dominion over the creation has never been abrogated. It is just that, in our efforts, we fight an uphill battle.

GIVING THE WORLD A BREAK

There is also a clear command that the land is to have its rest -- sabbaths and jubilees -- to allow it to recover. God said (eg. Leviticus 26:34) that, when his people refuse to listen to him and remain hostile towards him, he will scatter them, lay their cities waste, and let the land have the sabbaths it has missed. This theme is also taken up in 2 Chronicles 36:21.

One evidence of this hostility is in greed: when we put money-making above God's command (as when people fail to give the land its rest) we worship mammon rather than God, because it is impossible to serve two masters.

IDOLATRY AND LAND-USE

In fact, the Bible has far less to say about abortion, homosexual activities, single-parent families and so many other bug-bears of so many conservative evangelicals than it has to say about idolatry, unjust trading, accumulation of wealth at the expense of the poor and other forms of economic and social unrighteousness. Yet we Christians far too often assume that these things are beyond God's interest!

COME OUT AND BE SEPARATE

So, when Christians fall in with the world and criticise environmental activity because of its economic costs, they fall in with the world's idolatry and mammon-worship.

I have been around long enough to remember when even non-Christians criticised Soviet-style communism for its assumption that all motivation is ultimately economic (whether or not that criticism was true is beside my point.) Since Reagan and Thatcher, the West has moved to abject mammon-worship and the assumption that economic motives dominate.

It is time for us evangelical Christians to return to our Biblical roots and stand against the world and its ways.

Carbon trading and Apocalyptic conditions

There's been some discussion going on about global warming.

A friend remarked that carbon trading, in his opinion, is a farce, a global tax hike to reduce government debt after "years of uncontrolled spending." He sees the current Labor government as mainly to blame.

I responded that I believe carbon trading to be a farce, but not for the reasons he suggests. I see it as a licence for big polluters to keep polluting, which also shifts responsibility from the polluting companies to the third world where carbon sinks are cheap.

However, I can't see that carbon taxes have anything to do with tax hikes as a revenue-raising technique, particularly as they were mooted back when Australia was making quite a bit out of the mining boom, before the Global Financial Crisis struck. And, even if I expect these measures to be ineffective and more a sop to businesses than a genuine solution, surely they have everything to do with trying to ensure that we have a world fit to occupy when our children and grandchildren are trying to live their lives.

I told my friend that there is little hope of getting the developing world on board unless we are willing to take the first steps.

He then responded that climate change might be a natural earth cycle that nothing man does changes.

I can't see that that changes anything in terms of our response. Even if there is an underlying natural cycle, since industrialisation we have been pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at unprecedented rates.

The problem now is that the world is entering a positive feedback cycle where greenhouse conditions run out of control. It’s the old Coke in the sun thing: heat a bottle of soft drink, and the gas comes out of solution. The same thing happens to greenhouse gases dissolved in ocean water or trapped in peat bogs and northern tundra. The hotter these get, the more carbon dioxide and othr gases are expelled and re-enter the atmosphere.
So, even if there is a natural cycle, what we do is now pushing it over the edge. We risk a run-away event.

All these things remind me of the plagues (desertification, locusts, run-away heat) in Revelation: people still didn’t repent, even when they saw others succumb.

Isn’t that human, and isn’t that happening now?