Fixing the climate crisis is “moral” and the Bible says so

Thinking about God is common now.

We are about to enter a new year. Many of us are getting ready to celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah. From 2024 “almost certain” to be the hottest year on record, some may view the symptoms of the climate crisis—extreme heat, fires and floods, climate 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 solving the climate crisis is a moral imperative. After all, it kills people and destroys life. The cause of the climate crisis—the burning of fossil fuels—is also the cause of much death and destruction.

Donald Trump’s pick for Energy Secretary Chris Wright and one of his picks to head the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, Vivek Ramaswamy, seem to have a different message. This is the one that turns the concept of morality upside down and distorts reality.

Wright invented a distorted “moral argument” for the rampant extraction and burning of fossil fuels. Wright portrays fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal as virtuous. He even has are called greenhouse gas reduction goals “perverse” emissions.

It glosses over the fact that the current and future American economy is powered by clean energy. The clean energy revolution is behind the revival of American manufacturing and lifting people out of poverty. The jobs created are well paid and more secure. And consumers save money with renewable, clean energy sources like solar and wind because they are now more sustainable and cheaper to produce than fossil fuels.

And if we want to talk about poverty, what about the countless families who have been bankrupted and plunged into poverty by pollution, fossil fuel leaks and explosions, and the exorbitant health care costs of treating fossil fuel-related diseases? Or the extreme weather events that we see destroying communities with increasing frequency and intensity?

Ramaswamy said last year: “The reality is that more people are dying from bad climate change policies than from actual climate change.”

This statement is completely backward, even Orwellian. The New York Times checked the statement and correctly graded it as “false” with “no evidence to support this claim”.

It takes more than mental gymnastics to pretend there is a moral case for fossil fuels. This requires willful dishonesty.

But let’s look at the Holy Scriptures. This is as good a place to start as the Bible and its lessons help guide many people’s ideas about morality. In it, God gave us a formula that is certainly 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 raise it and take care of it. This early commandment recognizes nature—also known as God’s creation—as something to be thankful for and to respect.

Playing with fire

Going back to the very beginning, God gave us the means for our own salvation or our death. He gave us free will—along with many of his commandments was the free will to choose whether or not to follow them. Another thing that God gave us is fire.

Eventually fire became electricity. But it was a tool that allowed humanity to flourish; to give us light in the dark and warmth in the cold.

So the energy we needed for heat, light, and eventually transportation, etc., came from burning things. And what people burned was the most readily available and easy to use—starting with wood, then animal and tree oils, then coal, then oil, and so on.

Over the eons, as the human population grew exponentially, the availability of these limited resources began to decline exponentially. Whale species have been hunted to the brink of extinction for their oil. Island countries and vast areas of continents were cut down.

For a long time, we thought the answer was to stock up on limited items to burn as best we could. But along the way we realized that God gave us endless sources of energy that were always abundant in the Garden: the sun and the wind.

We realized that the horrendous costs of burning due to limited sources are not simply due to a lack of things to burn, but to extreme weather conditions, and our planet is becoming less hospitable due to warming.

All signs pointed to the need to move from limited sources of energy—and the destruction they cause—to infinite sources that are kinder to both humans and all of God’s creation. We can feed our world and tend our garden at the same time.

In the Bible, when the people finally understood the message and acted as God wanted them to, the waters of the flood receded; the fire is stopped.

So, if saving lives, improving health outcomes, and expanding economic opportunity through more and better jobs isn’t enough of a moral imperative to prioritize a clean energy transition, look to the Bible and listen to God. His message seems pretty clear.

Ben Jeloz is the executive director of the Sierra Club and a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania.

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