Wednesday, 3/15/17
With our Lord Christ Jesus, we stand with the ‘least of these’
and advocate for the poor and oppressed in present and future generations who
are often the victims of environmental injustice and least able to
mitigate the impact of global warming that has fallen disproportionately on
them.
As citizens of the U.S., which has historically produced more
greenhouse gases than any other country, and which is currently responsible for
over a fifth of the world’s annual emissions, we implore our nation to accept
its moral responsibility to address global warming.
By drastically
limiting the Environmental Protection
Agency’s ability to protect public health and enforce environmental safety
standards, this administration’s actions are no less than an attempt to gut the
Clean Air Act. The Clean Air Act is a landmark public
health and environmental protection law that has drastically reduced
dangerous, toxic pollutants in our air, land and water, and protected Americans
for more than four decades.
The current
administration has signaled its intent to eliminate EPA protections against
dangerous pollutants like smog, mercury, arsenic and methane and limits on
carbon pollution from power plants. All of these standards are authorized under
the federal Clean Air Act.
We oppose these
reckless attacks on clean air as if our lives depended on it, because they do.
Because of immoral decisions to harm our air quality, our communities will
conduct thousands of funerals for preventable premature deaths. It will cause
dramatic harm to the health of children, especially those already suffering
with illnesses such as asthma. This is tragic, it is wrong, and we will not accept
it.
As people of faith, we are called to hold
the powerful to account. We still do not know the full extent of Scott Pruitt’s ties to corporate
polluters. The American people deserve to know the full truth. We know that as a Baptist,
Scott Pruitt, shares a faith tradition that calls us to responsible stewardship
of God’s creation and Mr. Pruitt himself has publicly stated his intention to
protect clean air and clean water. However, we need him to earn our trust. His
track record of suing the EPA, and his public refusal to recuse himself from
ongoing cases he brought against the EPA, are deeply troubling. And his
statement last week to CNBC denying that carbon dioxide emissions are a primary
cause of global warming is extremely troubling. He said, “I think that
measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very
challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of
impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global
warming that we see.” This is
a dangerous belief which is out of touch with environmental scientists who are
signaling just the opposite. It is our prayer that we have an Environmental
Protection Agency head who actually believes in science and protects the
environment. We are watching him closely, and we will hold him to account if he
harms clean air and clean water.
Our President has claimed he will protect
clean water, yet in his short time in office, he has not only gutted a rule to
protect streams from coal mining waste, he has also used his executive
authority to gut protections for wetlands and drinking water sources for more
than 117 million Americans.
The Clean Water Rule is critical -- polluting or destroying a water resource can obviously harm other water users,
fish, and wildlife, indeed all of God’s good creation. Polluting activities
need to be minimized to ensure that downstream neighbors are not harmed by
upstream polluters. Too often, it is low income communities and communities of
color who bear the brunt of harm caused by major polluters while seeing few of
the benefits of industry. The faith community and the Presbyterian Church
(U.S.A.) in particular take a firm stand against environmental racism that
would be wrought by a rollback in clean water protections. We call upon this
administration to fortify and strengthen the EPA and the Clean Air Act, not
diminish their power and influence.
A
report approved by the 218th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church
(U.S.A.) titled The Power to Change:
U.S. Energy Policy And Global Warming states emphatically that we have
both a spiritual and moral responsibility
to address the issues related to global warming. In order to do this we believe
that repentance is required. Repentance in our biblical understanding
calls humanity and nations to stop the actions that are contrary to God’s
desires for the sustainability of human life, while turning to a new way of
living that promotes life more abundantly. God can give us the power to change.
