Climate Change and Poverty

Southeast Asia oneworld.net
It is an utter tragedy that those who are not responsible in polluting the planet and bringing on the adverse effect of systematic pollution are the very ones who will bear the brunt of climate disaster.

Today is Blog Action Day 2009. A day when thousands of bloggers across the world will blog about the chosen topic for this year, "Climate Change". This is not a topic that I know a lot about. Like all of us I know that it is happening and at least some of the responsibility for this change lies at my feet. I know that using fossil fuels and eating meat, especially factory farmed meat, add greatly to the sum of human causes for climate change. So I eat very little meat or fish and am trying to grow more of our food and buy more locally. But when it comes to fossil fuel use I plead guilty as charged. We live in the woods and when we go to town it is a long way (24 miles round trip). We try to limit our trips to two a week. Then there is the infrequent air travel of family coming to visit and our also infrequent vacations.

On Saturday Jim and I leave for our long-awaited trip to California. We plan to spend five days at Esalen Institute at a workshop for couples led by Gangaji and her partner Eli, then spend a few days in and around San Francisco. We will drive to Kansas City, 300 miles away and then fly to San Francisco. That's a lot of carbon exchanges, right! An article on this subject in Ode, the magazine informs us

According to the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, an independent group of scientists that advises the British government, emissions from aircraft will likely be one of the major contributors to global warming by the year 2050. According to USA Today, on a flight from New York to Denver, a commercial jet generates between “840 to 1,660 pounds of carbon dioxide per passenger. That’s about what an SUV generates in a month.”

This trip seems extravagant in many ways. Yet, we decided to go for it. It has been 11 years since we took a real vacation like this. I can't help but think that in another eleven years the world will be a very different place. Flying to San Francisco or anywhere may be a luxury as it once was, only for the very wealthy. Also if we are still living, we will have moved from the older adult to the old adult stage of life and may not be able to travel. So off we go on Saturday even though it seems a bit like fiddling while Rome burns. How did art ever get so literal?

One of the huge and largely unrecognized issues surrounding global climate change, one that has has been essentially unaddressed, is the injustice of the consequences of our consumption. The US is responsible for 21% of the world's energy consumption with 4.6% of the world's population. As a comparison, India consumes 3.1% of the energy with 16.6% of the population. We in the US are definitely the high consumers of the world. Yet as already has been seen in recent climate disasters, the poor people of the earth are the first victims of our consumption. We have a great moral responsibility to all of these people. Jim Wallis, theologian and editor of Sojourner Magazine spoke out about this responsibility at a meeting with Democratic senators last week. These were his words:

Put Poor People on the Climate Change Agenda
by Jim Wallis 10-15-2009

Thanks for the invitation. You have, I am sure, heard us speak about creation care as the commitment we have to the environment. Most of us believe that human-caused climate change is a threat to God’s creation. Religious leaders actually do listen to scientists, and they are telling us that the pace of climate change is all happening even faster than expected. A good climate bill could signal a whole new direction and could even be a “three-for.”
It could protect the environment and begin to slow and eventually even reverse the dangerous and deadly impact of climate change.
It could create important and meaningful green energy jobs, many of which could be an opportunity for low-income and undereducated people, and also be good paying work.
It could change our foreign policy, which has been dominated by successive wars over oil. This could begin to decrease our dependency on foreign oil.
But here is the heart of the moral issue for many of us. Simply put, those around the world who have contributed least to global warming and climate change will be the most and first to be impacted by the consequences of it all. Sadly, it’s an old story. We, the affluent, create the problem, and the poor pay the price for our sins. It is wrong, and it is a sin — ours.
Yet the amount of money to help poor people and countries mitigate or adapt to climate changes being proposed in this legislation is not nearly enough (through the emissions “cap and trade” penalties that wealthy countries would have to pay). The numbers are not clear yet in your bill, but the amount of funds directed toward “adaptations” for the poorest countries in the House bill (which came before the Senate bill) is pitiful — really pitiful. It is wholly and woefully inadequate.
This is such an important issue for us that some in the faith community are considering not supporting this bill at all. They have called me to say that they might not support the final bill unless you do much better in the Senate. So if you hear anything from us today, hear that. Your Senate bill must do better — much better — for the poorest of God’s children.
Read entire speech here.
Take action here.