EPA testimony on climate change

Testimony at EPA regional hearing on new carbon rules

July 29,2014  Denver CO

Good morning. My name is Nelson Bock, I live here in Denver. I speak today in favor of the proposed regulations on emissions of carbon dioxide from existing power plants.

I am a Lutheran minister, and I teach on the subject of religion and the environment for a Lutheran college. I am also a member of the Board of Directors of Colorado Interfaith Power and Light. Colorado is one of 40 IPL state affiliates working with communities of faith to lessen the impacts of climate change through education, through taking action to reduce their own carbon footprints, and through advocacy for more environmentally responsible policies at every level of government. We do this out of our conviction that we human beings have a divine calling and responsibility as caretakers of the creation-- the beautiful, intricate, interdependent web of life and natural resources upon which all life, including our own, depends. It is a sacred calling to care for a sacred gift.

All major religious traditions share this belief in our calling to be stewards of creation, to see ourselves not as the masters and commanders of the earth, but as part of a community of creatures who live an interdependent existence. We are not outside or above the natural order, we are part of it, and everything we do affects that natural order. We cannot pretend that our activity on the earth has no impacts and no consequences. Our scriptures attest that the well-being of the creation is dependent on treating it and each other with reverence and respect.  In turn, our own well-being as a human community is dependent on the well-being of the ecosphere of which we are a part.

As people of faith, we believe that God speaks to us through the creation, and that scientific inquiry is one of the tools available to us in order to discern what creation is saying. Concerns about climate change and intensive scientific research into its causes and potential impacts have been ongoing for several decades, and we are now experiencing many of the impacts that scientists began alerting us to back then. Our climate is changing rapidly. We know that a major driver of that change is the emission of carbon dioxide, and we know that the largest single source of human-caused carbon dioxide emissions is electrical power plants, mostly powered by coal. There is no getting around the facts: carbon dioxide heats up in the presence of infrared radiation, and we are significantly and rapidly increasing the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  In addition, atmospheric CO2 increases the acidity of the oceans, threatening the chemical balance which is so key the oceans’ ecosystems.

On behalf of the world’s poor and vulnerable, who are most susceptible to harm from the impacts of climate change, and whom we also have a sacred duty to care for and protect, and on behalf of future generations of humans and all species, I urge you to adopt the proposed rules as a first step towards bringing our emissions of greenhouses gases under control in order to help minimize the impacts of climate change.

As Chief Seattle is reported to have said when the United States government proposed to purchase some of the last remaining Indian lands: “This we know: all things are connected. The earth does not belong to us, we belong to the earth. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the children of the earth.  We did not weave the web of life, we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.”