WASHINGTON, USA – Environmentally concerned evangelicals are reluctantly supporting a new U.K.-California global warming agreement as they urge greater consideration to factors affecting the solution such as economics and federal government involvement.

|PIC1|On Monday, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced an agreement to work together to fight global warming.

The partnership bypasses the Bush administration and calls for cooperation on cleaner-burning fuel research and technologies as well as using market forces and incentives to curb pollution, The Associated Press reported.

Carbon dioxide emission from cars, trucks, and other forms of transportation is a main target of the U.K.-California agreement.

Transportation is responsible for an estimated 41 percent of California’s greenhouse gas emissions and 28 percent of Britain’s.

Michael Cromartie, a member of the advisory board of the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, expressed concerns about the agreement’s potential effects on impoverished people.

“What needs to be debated is not so much the science but the solutions,” said Cromartie. “The debate should be more about whether the solutions that are offered make matters worse for people who are going to be affected by it?’”

|TOP|The Interfaith Stewardship Alliance (ISA) – a coalition of Christian and Jewish leaders, scientists, and policy experts aimed at promoting proper and balanced biblical view of stewardship to the environment and development – recently issued a letter partly in response to the Evangelical Climate Initiative’s (ECI) call in February for the federal government to pass legislation to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to fight global warming.

ISA wrote that mandated reductions in energy consumption would harm the world’s poor people because it requires a significant increase in costs of energy.

Cromartie, who is also the vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Centre, said that policies and solutions to global warming problems, including those that will result from the U.K.-California agreement, should not “make matters worse for underdeveloped countries.”

|AD|On the other hand, the Rev. Jim Ball, executive director of the Evangelical Environmental Network and supporter of the Evangelical Climate Initiative, continued to urge greater federal involvement in the fight against global warming.

Ball called the partnership “a helpful dose of sensible leadership,” but noted it was “not nearly enough.”

“What we really need is strong leadership from the federal government to create a mandatory, market-based system to reduce global warming pollution, as called for by the nearly 100 signatories of the Evangelical Climate Initiative's statement,” he said.

In addition to the evangelical leaders, environmental groups have also questioned the value of the agreement, calling it little more than a symbolic gesture, AP reported.

California was the 12th-largest source of greenhouse gases in the world last year, greater than most nations while the United States is reportedly responsible for a quarter of the world’s global warming pollution.






Michelle Vu
Christian Today Correspondent