Ending poverty requires more than financial aid
Ending poverty requires more than just providing temporary financial aid. It requires sound policies that bring about growth in the economy and people’s livelihoods. However, implementing such policies is increasingly difficult due to challenges from environmental activists.
Not all environmental activism is helpful. Lately, there has been a wave of activism against access to even the most basic energy resources like coal, oil, and gas. This is because fossil fuels are said to be endangering life planet by increasing global temperatures.
But how much of that is true, and how does activism against fossil fuels impact people’s lives?
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It is critical for people to understand energy’s role in the current world and rally for the right policies.
Thankfully, for Christians, God’s mandate for life is clear and has been a guiding light on how the earth’s resources are to be used. Can God’s principles on resource use help us even in these moments of heightened discussion and concern about climate change?
Poverty and development
It is remarkable how human life has changed during the past three centuries. There were thousands of incredible inventions and discoveries. Electricity, industrial machinery, and combustion engines were some of the most impactful inventions that revolutionized life by making food, clothing, shelter, and everything else needed for a long and healthy more affordable for everyone.
But all this required energy. Engines needed oil. Electricity needed coal and later natural gas and nuclear. Industrial processes required gas, oil, and coal. Thanks to the abundant reserves of fossil fuels, incredible progress was achieved.
Journeys that would take months now take only a few hours. Homes didn’t need firewood for heat or oil for light; now they use electricity for both. Factories powered by electricity, most of it generated from coal and natural gas, enable faster manufacturing and processing.
Thousands of everyday utility products were manufactured using hydrocarbon byproducts, reducing our dependence on wood and making our lives more efficient. In fact, more than 90 percent of products in an average urban household are likely to be manufactured from fossil fuels.
However, this growth was not uniform. There are nations still in poverty compared to the Industrialized West. These nations require the same fossil fuel sources the West used to grow out of poverty into prosperity.
Yet, environmental activists, fearing global warming, brand fossil fuels as bad for the environment. Developing countries across the world are being asked to stop using them.
Biblical stewardship of creation supports fossil fuel use
The Bible calls for a principle of stewardship where God’s people are advised to use the resources of the earth for the betterment of people’s livelihood. Among those resources are fossil fuel reserves.
Though it may seem to be a simple principle to use fossil fuel energy sources, doing so has become a difficult decision for many. That is due to global climate change activism that has clouded people’s minds with doomsday theories on climate change and fossil fuels.
There has been a concentrated effort to declare fossil fuels the major culprit behind global warming. As a result, Christians are caught in a dilemma of whether to support fossil fuel use or stand against them to prevent climate change. This dilemma can be done away with by sufficient knowledge about scientific facts that show that the world is not in peril.
Unlike the mainstream media and political institutions like the United Nations, academia still has a diversity of opinions when it comes to climate change. Hundreds of scientific papers every year show that the current warming is not unprecedented and not caused exclusively by man-made emissions of greenhouse gases.
Let us assume that these papers are invalid and that the world will indeed warm drastically like as some of the fearmongers claim. Even then, the impact of the climate on our world’s GDP is less than 3%!
According to the 1.5°C UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report — purportedly the global authoritative voice on climate change — even if we do nothing, the forecasted increase of 3.66°C in temperature will cause of a loss of just 2.6% of global GDP in 2100 — and that’s not 2.6% of current GDP, but 2.6% of a GDP many times higher than today’s. In other words, the effect of climate on our lives is insignificant. People will be much, much better off than they are today.
In fact, people will be better able to mitigate any climate impact and adapt to changing weather if they are economically more stable. Poverty makes us vulnerable to weather extremes; prosperity protects us from them. That is why human mortality from extreme weather has declined by more than 98 percent in the past hundred years.
But abandoning fossil fuels will slow economic growth, delaying the reduction of vulnerability to climate-related threats. So, whether the climate is deteriorating or not, the solution to development remains the same: increased use of fossil fuels.
Christian love is manifested in its compassion for the needy. To oppose the very energy sources that have helped half the world overcome poverty is cruel, especially when the justifications given are scientifically untrue and of insignificant outcome.
As the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation — a network of nearly 70 evangelical Christian scientists, economists, theologians, and other scholars — has demonstrated, God’s people can be catalysts for ending global poverty if they follow and promote Biblical principles of creation stewardship creation. By standing for the energy rights of the poorest in the world, they will play a direct role in lifting people from abject poverty and enabling them to flourish.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, VA., and holds a master’s degree in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, UK. He resides in Bengaluru, India.
