Where are our Christian leaders when we need them?

Posted by Ann Pettifor on 25th Apr 2008 at 08:40pm

on www.operationnoah.org

Back from Bolton and really mad at myself for letting a Bolton MP get away with promoting Nigel Lawson's book at our meeting.......Then got even crosser about the debate raging in the Financial Times this week: a debate that falsely juxtaposes care for the planet and future generations against care for current generations. Why should we not, these economists suggest, massively discount the future, and invest instead in looking after our own today? After all, they assume (on the basis of very little evidence) people in the future will be richer than we are today. As Mark remarks in his blog, this is a debate conducted between economists, without any reference to the body of ethics defined by Christianity....and Christians appear to exclude themselves from these fora....Is it because we are in awe of these economists? And retired politicians?

We need Christian thinkers and leaders willing to intervene - loudly and angrily - in these crucial debates - and to do so in public spaces dominated by establishment figures like Lord Lawson, whose supreme arrogance permits him, a retired politician, to challenge a body of distinguished climate scientists who have over 18 years painstakingly built up a body of evidence and come to conclusions likely to cause Lord Lawson to have to tighten his belt and make sacrifices.....

Lord Lawson does not like that prospect at all, and so has invented convoluted and often deeply flawed scientific arguments to challenge a whole community of scientists, and a large body of alarming science....His voice is a lone one, but it has ricocheted around the establishment's echo chamber these last few weeks almost without challenge....Why aren't more Christian thinkers and leaders challenging him, publicly, angrily and authoritatively? Not by trying to outdo him on the science front (although that is not difficult) but by moving the debate on to the terrain of Christian ethics? Why does this man go unchallenged on this vital ethical issue of discounting the future?

We need more Christian thinkers and leaders to challenge climate change deniers - and engage in debates in forums like those of the Financial Times, where important decisions about our future are debated, weighed up and agreed. We Christians have become too accustomed to talking to ourselves, or to the already-converted....too used to engaging in arcane debates around matters that should be private...like one's sexual preferences. An introverted obsession with sex and with women is revealing.. (there! I got that off my chest... !)...but does little to challenge the unethical and thoroughly un-Christian stance taken by powerful and influential opinion-formers - like Nigel Lawson - and other decision-makers....shaping the amorality of our society's approach to climate change ...and therefore the very possibility of any future for coming generations....Humph! Humph! Humph!

Below some quotes from the economist Wilfred Beckerman's letter to the FT (22nd April, 2008) castigating Lord Stern's assertion that society as a whole should consider future generations......

“How much certain sacrifice is one prepared to impose on people living today, most of whom are desperately poor, in the interests of future generations who, as it happens, are projected to be much richer?”

a very respectable ethical foundation that goes back far as David Hume, the pioneer of “agent-relative ethics”. This is the view that “special obligations” – say to one's family, friends, neighbours, fellow citizens and so on – require giving their welfare priority over that of other people, including distant generations.

"Second, there is also no basis for Lord Stern’s assertion that not many people would dissent from his approach. Personally, I do not think I have ever met anybody who would not give priority to the welfare of his or her family or friends over that of distant generations. And if I did I would quickly sever my relationship with them. Furthermore, one authoritative survey of people's attitudes to discounting the future reports a study restricted to residents in Washington DC and Maryland, which showed that the average respondent would trade off 45 lives in 100 years' time against one life today, and another study in Sweden that implied a trade-off over a similar period of 243 lives against one life today!