Fred Scherlinder Dobb: Curbing Carbon Should Be a “Faith-Based Initiative”
What joy to hear those words together: “President-elect Obama.” As a human being, citizen, progressive rabbi, and part of a multiracial family, this is the defining political moment of my life. Thank you. Blessings.
Alice Walker was right: you shouldn’t try to please everyone, and you must take care of yourself and your family. I have a group of friends who sing “Ella’s Song” (by Sweet Honey in the Rock), alternating “we who believe in freedom have to rest for it to come,” with the original “we who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.” Give yourself some Sabbath space, as you admirably did for your campaign staff as it was needed.
But believers in sustainability, justice, and even survival cannot rest long. Your inauguration comes barely in time for us to turn around a period of environmental neglect and inaction toward critical, intertwined goals: regulating the global climate, enhancing our national security, and getting the economy back on track. Where too little has happened in recent years, you—we—must now push hard, even when some say it’s too much. Too much sustainability? No such thing.
You recently said it yourself, in reaffirming your commitment to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s call to return to 1990 emissions levels by 2020, and then reduce them to 80 percent by 2050. You said: “Now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all. Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response.” Those words are music to our ears.
But your repeated references to “clean coal” (which your shoulda-been predecessor Al Gore called “too imaginary to make a difference in protecting either our national security or the global climate”), plus your own low League of Conservation Voters senatorial score, go against this monumental challenge. Forces without and forces within would scale back your response to climate change; they would have you hedge your bets, avoid rocking the boat. But the seas are rising, and getting ever stormier. Don’t give in; don’t hold back.
We need a new Manhattan or Apollo project, bigger even. A tanking economy is all the more reason to push for every one of those 5 million new green jobs you originally promised. Now you are proposing 2.5 million in two years. Double that goal! You’ve got to help lead us from New Deal to Great Society to Green Society. FDR had it right, putting unemployed folks back to work with a Civilian Conservation Corps. You must do the same, on a greater scale, for the yet more daunting task of reversing the greatest single challenge our civilization faces. It’ll be a hard sell to the American people and to their legislators, but that’s why we put a community organizer in the White House.
As an environmental activist rabbi, I’ve seen people of all faiths clamoring for swift action on climate change. Making energy enhancements affordable at lower incomes shows compassion for the least among us. Working toward a stronger-than-Kyoto treaty, with, or ahead of, the rest of the industrialized and developing world, is how we can love our neighbor in today’s global village, and care for creation. Think of curbing carbon as a “faith-based initiative” we can all support.
But how best to break the fossil-fuel addiction? Religious approaches love capping carbon, but question trading it; to commodify pollution is to risk condoning it. Nor is cap-and-trade the most effective way to deter destruction. Why not a hefty carbon tax instead, along with increased tax credits to soften the blow at the bottom of the socio-economic scale? Create market-based incentives, via the price point, for people to keep their thermostats low, their driving down, their consumption less all-consuming. Incentivize us to do the right thing.
“Choose life, that you and your descendants may live” (Deut. 30:19). Our lives, and those that come after us, depend on it. A lot of energy was burned up in getting us to this brink; it’ll take a lot of clean energy to nudge us back toward sustainability, toward life. Keeping climate your top priority—which also enhances the economy and solidifies our security—is a matter of intergenerational, social, and environmental justice. History will judge your presidency on whether, under your leadership, we did enough to avoid the worst—or whether we didn’t.
Fred Scherlinder Dobb, Rabbi of Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation in Bethesda, Maryland, serves on the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, Shalom Center, Religious Witness for the Earth, and Greater Washington Interfaith Power and Light.
