It was sadly ironic that Texas energy company Luminant announced it would lay off 500 employees on the same morning that President Obama unveiled legislation designed to promote job growth. The company said that a new rule from the Environmental Protection Agency will force it to cease operations at two electricity generating plants, and close three coal mines.
“We have hundreds of employees who have spent their entire professional careers at Luminant and its predecessor companies,” Luminant CEO David Campbell said in a news release. “At every step of this process, we have tried to minimize these impacts, and it truly saddens me that we are being compelled to take the actions we’ve announced today.”
The company cited the EPA’s new cross-state pollution rule as the impetus for the decision, and noted that it had worked to identify other means of reducing emissions, but that “meeting this unrealistic deadline also forces us to take steps that will idle facilities and result in the loss of jobs,” Campbell said.
Campbell also announced that the company has filed a lawsuit against the EPA in an effort “to achieve [EPA emissions] goals without harming critically important Texas jobs and electric reliability.” The suit seeks to block the cross-state pollution rule for Texas companies, and to grant a stay to Texas companies to prevent them from having to comply with sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions standards by the existing January 1, 2012 deadline.
The big environmental issue nowadays is global warming. Anyone who watches or reads the news even occasionally has been told that humans are causing global warming through all the fossil fuels we’re burning. They’ve also been told that this warming process eventually will prove catastrophic if we don’t reverse course as soon as possible.
As thinking Christians and good stewards, how should we respond?
The short answer is, we should respond thoughtfully. Thoughtless stewards are rarely good stewards.
Notice that my brief summary of the global warming controversy bundled together several distinct claims. To think clearly about this issue, we have to tease apart this bundle of claims and consider each one. For each claim, there is a corresponding question we need to answer. And it’s only after answering these questions that we can be in a position to determine what, if anything, we ought to do about global warming.
Here are the four central questions:
Is the earth warming?
If the earth is warming, is human activity (like carbon dioxide emissions) causing it?
If the earth is warming, and we’re causing it, is that bad overall?
If the earth is warming, we’re causing it, and that’s bad, would any of the proposed “solutions” (e.g., the Kyoto Protocol, legislative restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions) make any difference?
This article is from Harvard economist Greg Mankiw. (H/T Michael)
Excerpt:
Here is the list, together with the percentage of economists who agree:
A ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available. (93%)
Tariffs and import quotas usually reduce general economic welfare. (93%)
Flexible and floating exchange rates offer an effective international monetary arrangement. (90%)
Fiscal policy (e.g., tax cut and/or government expenditure increase) has a significant stimulative impact on a less than fully employed economy. (90%)
The United States should not restrict employers from outsourcing work to foreign countries. (90%)
The United States should eliminate agricultural subsidies. (85%)
Local and state governments should eliminate subsidies to professional sports franchises. (85%)
If the federal budget is to be balanced, it should be done over the business cycle rather than yearly. (85%)
The gap between Social Security funds and expenditures will become unsustainably large within the next fifty years if current policies remain unchanged. (85%)
Cash payments increase the welfare of recipients to a greater degree than do transfers-in-kind of equal cash value. (84%)
A large federal budget deficit has an adverse effect on the economy. (83%)
A minimum wage increases unemployment among young and unskilled workers. (79%)
The government should restructure the welfare system along the lines of a “negative income tax.” (79%)
Effluent taxes and marketable pollution permits represent a better approach to pollution control than imposition of pollution ceilings. (78%)
I wonder which political party believes in most or all of these positions?
WINTERY KNIGHT 