The bishops of Europe’s Protestant state churches mostly preside over beautiful, empty museums that commemorate where Christians once worshipped. Lacking flocks to shepherd, and subsidized by the state, these clerics inevitably mouth the pieties of Europe’s secular left, in a bid for relevance. Most Europeans probably respond with cynical yawns, but these clerics frequently are echoed by their Religious Left co-belligerents in America, where there are more Christians available for political mobilization.
Europe’s bishops are greatly exercised over Global Warming, naturally. It’s the perfect cause for emphasizing Western guilt and the sins of capitalism, while emphasizing “scarcity,” the urgency of more state regulation and reduced free markets. Ostensibly, all of this self-denial by the West will save the poor in distant Third World villages from the ravages of climate-change induced flood and famine. But what these bishops never mention is that the Third World poor will just have to be comfortable with their perpetual poverty. If human-induced Global Warming is the apocalypse the clerics prophesy, then the world’s poor must not be allowed access to the polluting comforts to which Westerners are accustomed.
The most recent blast from distressed Euro bishops is a joint letter from British Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, Church of Sweden Archbishop Anders Wejryd, and German Lutheran head Bishop Wolfgang Huber. These clerics are grimly pessimistic. “Substantially reducing global emissions of greenhouse gasses will not avoid the serious impacts of climate change already experienced by many of the world’s most vulnerable communities,” they intoned. They sent their mournful missive to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Premier Gordon Brown, the Swedish prime minister, and UN General Secretary Ban Ki-Moon, along with European Union officials.
Specifically, the bishops were focused on the December Intergovernmental Conference on Climate Change in Bali, where internationalists will discuss a successor accord to the Kyoto Treaty’s failed attempts to significantly curtail global carbon emissions. The European clerics want the world to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent between 2012 and 2050. They do not explain how to achieve this draconian reduction over 38 years, short of moving most of humanity back into caves and holes, to subsist on berries and nectar.
Like good eco-prophets of doom, the bishops bewailed there “is yet further evidence that the conditions for life on earth are not secure, but are more frequently threatened by a violent and seemingly irreversibly changing climate.” They warned that, “the biblical creation narrative is not to be understood as an unlimited licence to exploit, but rather as a promise of blessing that humankind should and can live up to.”
Not willing fully to admit that many Kyoto signers have already failed to comply with their promises of reduced carbon emissions, the bishops obliquely noted that “past climate negotiations have been characterised by a legacy of broken promises and missed opportunities.” They insist that governments negotiating in Bali must take “the necessary steps to reverse the declining levels of trust within the international community that currently exist between North and South.”
Hoping for a “successor agreement to one of humanity’s most pressing and difficult challenges,” the bishops insisted that a post-2012 treaty depends on nations looking beyond their own “national interests” in favor of “the global common good.” Nonchalantly, the bishops ask that all countries reduce global emissions by at least 80% by 2050. Developed countries should reduce emissions between 30% and 40% by 2020. Meanwhile, “rapidly industrialising countries should be encouraged to commit to reduce their energy intensity by 30% by 2020.” And other “other developing countries should commit to an energy intensity target differentiated by their responsibilities and capabilities.”
Of course, the bishops suggest a “global carbon tax.” They generously insist it is all for the benefit of the world’s poor. They cite “the paradox of climate change – that those who contributed least to the problem are suffering most. And the urge a treaty that will limit Global Warming to “a maximum of 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.” The bishops obviously have great confidence in mankind’s ability to fine tune the earth’s temperature with such precision. With north European Protestant understatement, they admit such a goal will “require an extraordinary effort that is without precedent in global environmental politics.” All of the massive global taxation and reduced industrialization that the bishops demand will require a “radical change in mentality and awareness in society as a whole,” they acknowledge. No doubt they are right.
These middle aged prelates of subsidized state churches in wealthy northern Europe of course will be largely unaffected by the vast taxation and deindustrialization that they demand for the earth’s supposed salvation. They will remain in their official ecclesial palaces, which will undoubtedly remain well air conditioned and well heated, thanks to the largely non-church going taxpayers of their countries. But if the bishops’ demands are taken seriously, which they are by the international environmental left, then hundreds of millions of other people will have to abandon any plausible dreams of better lives for themselves or their children.
A growing world population cannot simultaneously reduce industrial emissions by 80 percent in 38 years without withholding modern material comforts from most of the Third World. Hundreds of millions in China, India, Africa and Latin America cannot aspire to refrigeration, air conditioning, reliable heating, or most electricity, much less automobiles, if reducing “carbon footprints” becomes humanity’s most important goal.
In the mournful Malthusian minds of the European bishops, humanity must suffer in favor of preserving the sacred earth. They probably envision greedy Americans only having to abandon their SUV’S and mega-homes in favor of mass transmit and European style apartment dwellings. But the gargantuan reductions in industrialization for which the bishops plead will mostly punish those who have the least, not those who have the most, which includes the very un-self aware bishops themselves.