God Went Green

John Tierney, NY Times column Saturday, "And on the Eighth Day, God Went Green", commenting on a Christian group's environmental call to action:

It may look odd for evangelicals to be taking up Hollywood's most fashionable cause, but the alliance makes perfect sense. Environmentalism has always fundamentally been a religion — "Calvinism minus God," in the words of Robert Nelson, a professor of environmental policy at the University of Maryland. He calls the global warming debate the latest example of environmentalist creationism.

Tierney goes on to say today's environmentalists are in the strict Puritan and Calvinist tradition, alienated from Eden by man's "pride and sinfulness". I can see it---imagine Al Gore in Puritan garb--it's a fit, better than those earth tones he adopted during his last failed campaign---think fire and brimstone.

Even economists who support the Kyoto treaty acknowledge that it will make only a small difference far in the future while imposing serious costs today.

And those costs seem too high to other economists, like the four Nobel laureates and their colleagues who met in Copenhagen in 2004 to study proposals to help the world's poor. The Copenhagen Consensus, as they called it, was that programs to slow global warming are one of the worst investments — far less worthwhile than programs to immediately combat disease and improve drinking water and sanitation.

Saving lives now makes more sense than spending large sums to avert biblical punishments that may never come. Scientists agree that the planet seems to be warming, but their models are so crude that they're unsure about how much it will heat up or how much damage will be done. There's a chance the warming could be mild enough to produce net benefits.

And identifying environmentalism as a religion would have the added benefit of saving our children from endless earth worship in the public schools!