Southern Baptists on global warming

Without doubt, Christians have a moral obligation to practice good stewardship of all of the resources God has entrusted to our care. The Christian believes that all of our possessions -- money, real estate, natural resources, animals, even our own bodies -- are actually God's possessions. To put it in terms of property law, God owns all of creation in fee simple, but allows humans to own temporary estates in His things.

So evangelicals do not disagree on the moral imperative of stewardship. We must faithfully steward our natural environment just as we faithfully manage our finances.

However, this moral agreement does not resolve the much more complex prudential question how to balance our financial priorities against environmental priorities. Here a tension inheres. Economic growth, with its attendant creation of jobs and reduction of poverty, necessarily requires consumption of some natural resources. The questions what portion of these resources it is wise to consume and how quickly to consume them entail more fundamental inquiries into the environmental consequences of increasing consumption and the economic consequences of decreasing consumption. These are questions on which the data are conflicting and about which reasonable people disagree.

The issue of climate change, like other environmental stewardship issues, is a complicated prudential question. So it is more than a bit curious to find some Southern Baptists proclaiming that the Church has a biblical obligation to stop global warming. Assuming arguendo that the globe is actually warming (a wide open question presently) it is absurd to assert that global warming is a biblical or moral issue.

The disagreement over regulation of carbon emissions is a prudential disagreement, not a moral one. It turns on the prior empirical questions whether we humans have it in our power to stop any warming; how much warming we can stop and at what cost; whether reduction of carbon emissions might negatively affect global temperatures (animals and humans have been emitting carbon for thousands of years; surely the system is designed to accommodate at least some of these outputs); and what deleterious effects any carbon emission reductions will have on economic growth.

Evangelicals ought to welcome rational debate on this important issue. They ought not silence their critics and foreclose debate by claiming that the Bible resolves the question conclusively.