Baptists Call for Clean Energy

Robert Parham, Executive Director of the Baptist Center for Ethics, wrote a letter to congress supporting the "American Clean Energy Act." More than 140 Baptist leaders from the across the country have signed the letter. Three Olahomans signed the letters that Parham sent to U.S. Representatives and Senators -- Larry Stevens, George Young and yours truly.

If Oklahoma Baptists carefully read the report about climate change (200 page .pdf) that was just released by the Obama administration, a groundswell of additional support should be forthcoming. Here's a quote from the news coverage about the government's report that supports Parham's contention that climate change will have its most dramatic impact upon the poorest among us:

Future generations could face potential food shortages because of declining wheat and corn yields in the breadbasket of the mid-west, increased outbreaks of food poisoning and the spread of epidemic diseases.

The extreme urgency of the need to pass this legislation is being emphasized by the authors of the government report on climate change:

"The most important thing in this report is that the impacts of climate change are not something your children might theoretically see 50 years from now," said Tony Janetos, one of the study's authors and a director of the Joint Global Change Research Institute at the University of Maryland.

"The thing that concerns me the most is that we have a whole host of impacts that we now observe in the natural world that are occurring sooner and more rapidly and that appear to be larger than we might have expected 10 years ago. If anything we might have underestimated the rate and the impact of changes in the climate system."