They have no moral defense
Reflections on God are common right now. With 2024 virtually certain to be the hottest year on record, some may look at 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 Quran, or are an atheist, we can all agree 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 plenty of death and destruction.
Donald Trump’s choice for Secretary of Energy Chris Wright and one of his picks to co-lead the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Vivek Ramaswamy seem to have a different message, 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. He portrays fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal as virtuous. He has even called goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions “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 is lifting people out of poverty.
The jobs created pay well and are safer. Consumers are saving money with renewable clean energy sources like solar and wind because they are now both more resilient and less expensive 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 fossil fuels cause? Or the extreme weather disasters we see ravaging communities with increasing frequency and intensity?
Ramaswamy said last year, “The reality is more people are dying of bad climate change policies than they are of actual climate change.”
It is a claim utterly backward, even Orwellian. The New York Times fact-checked the statement and correctly rated it “false” with “no evidence to support this assertion.” To pretend there is a moral case for fossil fuels requires more than mental gymnastics. It requires willful dishonesty.
But let us look to scripture. It is as good a place as any to start, since the Bible and its lessons help guide so many people’s idea of morality. In it, God gave us a formula that certainly seems to be coming into focus today.
In the Book of Genesis, God charged people with being stewards of the Garden of Eden. He told Adam and Eve to cultivate and care for it. This early commandment recognizes nature — also known as God’s creation — as something to be grateful for and respected.
Going back to the beginning, God gave us the means to our salvation or our demise. He gave us free will — along with His many commandments was the free will to choose whether or not to follow them. The other thing God gave us was fire.
Ultimately 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 warmth, light, and eventually transportation came from burning things. And what people burned were the things that were most readily accessible and easy to harness — starting with wood, then oils from animals and trees, then coal, then petroleum and so on.
Over the eons, as the number of people increased exponentially, the accessibility of these finite sources began to shrink exponentially. Whale species were hunted to the brink of extinction for their oil. Island nations and huge swaths of the continents were deforested.
For a long time, we thought the answer was to replenish the finite things to burn as best we could. But along the way, we realized God gave us infinite sources of energy that had always been abundant: the sun and the wind. We realized the terrible cost of burning through finite sources was not simply running out of things to burn, it was extreme weather and our planet becoming ever less hospitable due to warming.
The signs all pointed to the need to make the switch from the finite sources of energy — and the destruction they cause — to the infinite sources, which are kinder both to people and to all of God’s creation. We can power our world and tend the Garden at the same time.
In the Bible, when humans finally understood the message and acted in ways God wanted, flood waters receded and fires stopped. So if saving lives, improving health outcomes, and expanding economic opportunity through more and better jobs are not enough of a moral calling to prioritize the clean energy transition, look to the Bible and listen to God. His message seems to be pretty clear.
Ben Jealous is the executive director of the Sierra Club and a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania.