Reflections on God are common right now.
We are entering a new year. Many of us are getting ready to celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah. By 2024 “almost certain” to be the hottest year on record, some may see the symptoms of the climate crisis—the extreme heat, the fires and floods, the climate-charged cyclones—as signs of God’s wrath.
Whether you believe in the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, or are an atheist, we can all agree that there is a moral imperative to address the climate crisis. After all, it kills people and destroys lives. The cause of the climate crisis – the burning of fossil fuels – is also responsible for many deaths and destruction.
Donald Trump’s pick for energy secretary, Chris Wright, and one of his picks to co-head the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, Vivek Ramaswamy, seem to have a different message. It is one that turns the concept of morality on its head and distorts reality.
Wright has invented a warped “moral case” for the rampant extraction and burning of fossil fuels. Wright portrays fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal as virtuous. He even has called targets to reduce greenhouse gases emission “perverse”.
What he leaves out is that the current and future American economy is powered by clean energy. The clean energy revolution is behind the rebirth of American manufacturing and lifting people out of poverty. The jobs created pay well and are more secure. And consumers save money with renewable clean energy sources like solar and wind because they are now both more resilient and cheaper to produce than fossil fuels.
And if we want to talk poverty, what about the countless families that have been bankrupted and sent into poverty because of pollution, fossil fuel leaks and explosions, and unbearable health care costs to treat the diseases that fossil fuels cause? Or the extreme weather disasters we see ravaging communities with increasing frequency and intensity?
Ramaswamy said last year, “The reality is that more people are dying from bad climate change policies than they are from actual climate change.”
It’s a claim that is completely backwards, even Orwellian. New York Times fact-checked the statement and correctly rated it as “false” with “no evidence to support this claim.”
Pretending there is a moral argument for fossil fuels requires more than mental gymnastics. It requires willful dishonesty.
But let’s look to Scripture. That’s as good a place as any to start, because the Bible and its lessons help so many people’s ideas about morality. In it, God gave us a formula that really seems to be coming into focus today.
In the Book of Genesis, God commissioned humans to be stewards of the Garden of Eden. He told Adam and Eve to cultivate and take care of it. This early commandment recognizes nature—also known as God’s creation—as something to be grateful for and respected.
Playing with fire
Going all the way back to the beginning, God gave us the means of our own salvation or our downfall. He gave us free will – along with his many commandments was the free will to choose whether or not to follow them. The second thing God gave us was fire.
Eventually, fire became electrical power. But it was the tool that allowed humanity to thrive; to give us light in the dark and warmth in the cold.
So the energy we needed for heat, light and eventually transportation and more came from burning things. And what people burned were the things that were most readily available and easy to exploit—start with wood, then oils from animals and trees, then coal, then petroleum, and so on.
Over the eons, as the number of humans increased exponentially, the availability of these finite sources began to shrink exponentially. Whale species were hunted to the brink of extinction for their oil. Island nations and huge parts of the continents were deforested.
For a long time we thought the answer was to stock up on the finite things to burn as best we could. But along the way we realized that God gave us endless sources of energy that had always been abundant in the garden: the sun and the wind.
We realized that the terrible cost of burning through finite sources was not only running out of things to burn, it was extreme weather and our planet was becoming less hospitable due to warming.
The signs all pointed to the need to switch from the finite sources of energy – and the destruction they cause – to the infinite sources, which are kinder both to humans and to all of God’s creation. We can run our world and tend the garden at the same time.
In the Bible, when people finally understood the message and acted in the way God wanted, the flood waters receded; fires stopped.
So if saving lives, improving health outcomes, and expanding economic opportunity through more and better jobs isn’t enough of a moral call to prioritize the clean energy transition, look to the Bible and listen to God. His message seems to be quite clear.
Ben Jealous is the executive director of the Sierra Club and a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania.
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