Faith upon the earth: Global warming and religion

[cbayer]

http://www.economist.com/blogs/erasmus/2013/11/global-warming-and-religion

Nov 6th 2013, 18:21 by B.C.



THE WORD "religion" is often used, rather effectively, to demonise a category of people who hold a strong conviction about something and propose to translate that belief into action. And John Howard, a former prime minister of Australia, used a lecture in London this week to denounce people who in his view exaggerate the certainty of global warming and demand urgent efforts to mitigate it. His talk was called "One Religion is Enough" and he explained that:

I chose the...title largely in reaction to the sanctimonious tone employed by so many of those who advocate substantial and and costly responses to what they see as irrefutable evidence that the world's climate faces catastrophe...To them the cause has become a substitute religion.
He went on to argue that global-warming campaigners had dishonestly (nay jesuitically) confused science with public policy, as though certain scientific propositions led automatically to certain policy courses. In fact, policy should be left to elected policymakers, and parliaments should never surrender the role of setting policy to any other body of people, whatever their expertise.

Mr Howard was, in a sense, preaching to the converted. He was addressing the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a think-tank whose founder Nigel Lawson—a former British chancellor—has made an equally negative correlation between climate-change concern and faith. "Global warming is a new religion and blasphemy against that religion is not a laughing matter," Lord Lawson has said, adding that "there is a great gap in Europe with the decline of any real belief in Marxism and any real belief in Christianity. This has filled the vacuum."

Before making any comment on this variety of scepticism, I should declare an interest. Over the past decade, I have participated in many conferences and symposia that explored the link between faith and the environment, in places ranging from Brazil to Greenland to New Orleans. So I'm familiar with most of the standard arguments in this area. There are many different points on the spectrum. As well as green-minded people of faith, there are greens who hate religion, arguing that the anthropocentric bias of the Christian West has made humanity indifferent to other living things; and there are religious people, including some evangelicals, who scorn environmentalism as neo-paganism.

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