No one who believes in a God that loves all people should be able to sit by as the wealthy harm the poor on a massive scale. Indeed, the fact that God loves all people should spur us to search for the ways in which God's beloved children are being oppressed worldwide. It seems God demands that the poor be at the center of our analysis of the issues of our day. When viewed in this way, we see that global society has not yet begun to come to terms with the degree of victimization that climate change represents. God sees this victimization and demands that we see it too.
Climate change is almost entirely created by rich and rising countries. The poorest countries in the world have essentially no discernible impact on global carbon emissions. The wealthier a person is, the greater his carbon footprint, and therefore greenhouse gases can be considered essentially a product of wealth. Climate change is thus a problem almost entirely caused by the global rich.
If rich people in rich and rising countries are creating the problem of climate change, who is most harmed by it? It is overwhelmingly poor people in developing countries. The global poor are in double jeopardy when it comes to climate change: they are concentrated in equatorial regions that are the most vulnerable to global warming's effects and they have the least ability to protect themselves from the catastrophic droughts, storms and floods it causes. This double vulnerability is predicted to translate into deaths on a staggering scale. The WHO states that climatic changes already cause 150,000 deaths annually, a number on the same scale as the deaths that resulted from Hiroshima. These victims are poor children, women and men who probably know little about climate change and have no way of advocating their interests.
Scientific consensus tells us that the more greenhouse gases wealthy and rising countries emit, the more poor people will die as a result of catastrophic climatic events. This can and should be viewed as victimization of the poor by the rich on a massive scale. However, in mainstream cultural dialogues on global warming, the problem is rarely posed as one of victimization.
God demands that religious voices be raised to expose the many deaths that will result from rich and rising countries' continued failure to mitigate carbon emissions. It is high time that light be shone on the atrocious crime against the poor that unmitigated greenhouse emissions represent. As moral voices in our societies, religious leaders, groups and organizations have the power to shape social dialogues around climate change. God demands that we lift up the voices of the poor and show the world what is really at stake: nothing less than infinitely precious and highly vulnerable human lives. We have no more time to lose. The time to speak out and act is now.
Global temperature has gone up dramatically since 1990. Meanwhile, child mortality has dropped by a third (12 million deaths dropped to 7.6 million). That statistic dwarfs 150K.
http://www.unicef.org/media/media_56045.html
Are we sure warmth is bad?
http://www.theonion.com/articles/scientists-trace-heat-wave-to-massive-star-at-cent,21088/
The question boils, no pun intended, down to is global climate change man made or an act of nature or a combination thereof. Forty years ago we were headed for a new ice age, and then most of the same supporters decided that we were heading for global warming and now its global climate change.
If the current buzz words “global climate change” do not pertain to man made changes then what are the dangers to the underprivileged. If all of the money is spent for no reason, what could the money have been spent on to help those in need?
Global warming remediation will costs 75 cents per person per week. For that cost, you can stop worrying about when the oil will run out, have few emphysema deaths, less mercury in your seafood, fewer Appalachian mountains blown up, less methane in your drinking water, fewer British Petroleum's dumping god-knows-what into your Gulf of Mexico, less skinning of Alberta, less need to suck up to Iran and Venezuela, and probably fewer cancer deaths.
And those advantages occur whether global warming is real or not. If global warming is real and human caused (the VAST majority of experts believe this to be so), then that 75 cents per week will return $1.50 per person per week over the course of this century (the return next century is even higher). That's right: doing something about global warming is an investment that promises to double our money. But we're not going to double our money. Why? Because of people like you.
"Whom the Gods would destroy, they first render Mad"
Global warming remediation will costs are estimated to be $1.5 trillion dollars as of 2010, but that is a monetary cost and not the cost to the people that these cuts would affect. If we worry about CO2 and spend our money on that then we would not be able to reduce other pollutants so it boils down to what you spend your money on.