SBC ethics head lobbies in favor of coal, against cap and trade

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (ABP)—Coal-fired power plants have received the blessing of the Southern Baptist Convention’s top lobbyist for social and moral concerns, who is urging opposition to a market-based attempt to limit greenhouse-gas emissions.

Friends of Coal, a volunteer organization with ties to the West Virginia Coal Association, is running an article on its website that includes a link for readers to enter their ZIP code and send an e-mail to their senator opposing a “global warming tax” they said would raise energy costs.

The link goes to the website of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, where the agency’s president, Richard Land, warns in an article that Democratic Senate leadership plans to move ahead with a “cap-and-trade” bill.

And during the March 14 broadcast of his radio program, “Richard Land Live,” Land said he wants “to ring the alarm bells” about “a huge tax” that is coming to all Americans.

“It’s called ‘cap and trade,’ and it’s the tax that dares not speak its name,” Land said. “Politicians love cap and trade, because they can claim to be taxing polluters, not workers. But of course, that is never true. Taxes are costs that are handed on to consumers. Once the government creates a scarce new commodity—in this case the right to emit carbon—and then mandates that businesses buy it, the costs are inevitably going to be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices.”

Land said those hit hardest by cap and trade “will be the, quote, 95 percent of working families, unquote, that Mr. Obama keeps talking about, usually omitting that his no-new-taxes pledge comes with a caveat. It comes with a footnote: ‘unless you use energy.’”

“Putting a price on carbon is regressive,” Land said. “It’s not only a tax, it’s a regressive tax that hurts those who make the least the most, because poor and middle-income households spend much more of their paychecks, percentage-wise, on things like gas to drive to work or to go get groceries or for home heating and air conditioning.”

“Cap and trade is the ideal policy for every Beltway analyst who thinks the tax code is too progressive,” Land continued.

“But the greatest inequities are geographic and would be imposed on the parts of the U.S. that rely most on manufacturing or fossil fuels—particularly coal, which generates most power in the Midwest, in the Southern and the Plains states. It’s no coincidence that the liberals most invested in cap and trade … come from California or the Northeast.”

Land said coal provides more than half of electricity generated in the United States, and 25 states get more than half of their electricity from coal-fired generators.

Jonathan Merritt, national spokesman for the Southern Baptist Environment and Climate Initiative, said Christians who care about God’s creation and recognize something must be done about the global energy and environmental crisis “are growing increasingly weary of those claiming to represent us who preach relentlessly about what (they) oppose, yet refuse to offer policy alternatives.”

He added, “I find it curious that we are first in line to support the coal industry that is polluting our air and destroying the Appalachian Mountains, yet when it comes to actual pro-environmental legislation, we are nowhere to be found.”