Bill McKibben

Prayer & Global Warming Denial

Author, scholar in residence at Middlebury College, and founder of 350.org, Apr 25, 11.

Tagged with environment, energy, drought, global warming, coal, wildfires

Texas governor Rick Perry set aside these last few days for a period of prayer for rain across his state. It’s easy to see why: Texas has seen scant precipitation since September, and the drought is now worse than at the height of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. Here’s a spokesman for the state’s forest service describing the fires that have broken out around the state: “This is a situation of historic proportions. The fuels are so dry. The winds are astronomical. The behavior of the winds is a perplexing situation. It’s never been like this before.”

I’ve got no problem with prayer—in my life as a Methodist, I’ve served as Sunday School superintendent and lay leader, and I added my heartfelt supplication for Texas to my Easter prayers.

But I think maybe Mother Teresa put it best: “Prayer without action is no prayer at all. You have to work as if everything depended on you, and leave the rest to God.” And while Texas politicians have certainly worked, mostly it’s been to deny global warming and prevent the changes that might actually deal with their troubles.

It’s no great mystery why Texas is in historic trouble—or, for that matter, why we’ve seen historic trouble in central Russia, along Pakistan’s rivers, in Queensland, across the Arctic. We’re heating the planet: the CO2 we’ve poured into the atmosphere means that we now trap about 3/4 of a watt extra solar energy on each square meter of the earth’s surface. That’s enough to throw our planet out of balance. The science is simple: as a NASA team put it three years ago, above 350 parts per million CO2 we can’t have a planet “similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.” And right now that number is 390, and rising two parts per million per year, simply because we’re burning so much coal and gas and oil.

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Full Story: Texas GOP Fights Catastrophic Wildfires With Prayer and Global Warming Denial
Source: AlterNet, April 25, 2011

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