(By Rick Jones, Presbyterian News Service). U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent decision to revive the coal industry and closely scrutinize the previous administration’s Clean Power Act is being met with strong opposition among leaders in the Presbyterian Church (USA). While the president promises the action will create jobs, many say the executive order, signed last week, will set the country back years in environmental progress.
“The General Assemblies of the Presbyterian Church (USA) for decades have passed policies that share concern for God’s creation, our obligation to be good stewards of the natural world, and our role in reducing energy dependence, promoting renewable and sustainable energy use, and otherwise caring for the earth,” said the Rev. Rebecca J. Barnes, coordinator of the Presbyterian Hunger Program. “In the past few months, President Trump has rolled back national environmental protections related to water, methane regulation and national monuments while also proposing drastic cuts to national governmental agencies doing key climate research and regulation such as EPA and NOAA. As Presbyterians, we are called to make our voice heard, to protect and defend all people and creation, and to push for just and sustainable solutions to environmental crises.”
Under the Clean Power Act, coal-fired power plants are to be phased out and replaced with new wind and solar farms. President Obama had said the plan would prevent nearly 3,000 premature deaths and almost 100,000 asthma attacks per year by 2030.
The Rev. Abby Mohaupt, a member of the Presbyterian Hunger Program Advisory Committee, says the president’s executive order is one more act of his administration’s denial of climate change.
“The urgency of climate change requires us to stand as people of faith in general and as Presbyterians in particular and to speak up with prophetic voices,” she said. “The groans of creation and people on the front lines of the climate crisis will not allow our silence, nor will our faith in Jesus Christ. We cannot leave the work of creation up to secular power. Now more than ever, we must work to end our dependency on fossil fuels and drastically reduce our carbon emissions.”
President Trump has argued that the Clean Power Plan has cut into oil, coal and gas company profits and said he would “reduce job-crushing regulations.”
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Here’s the problem, o PCUSA folks: as private citizens you are allowed and obligated perhaps to make your views and voices heard; as Presbyterians, you are not authorized to speak for anyone else except yourselves. You are not called to be anyone’s voice for all Presbyterians on any subject and you do not represent the body – you are not our parents. Although personally I would agree that climate change is real and we need to stand up for change, no one gives you permission to say that you represent everyone. Fight for what you believe in but do not say that you speak on everyone’s behalf – because you do not.
Meanwhile, almost 1 million unborn Americans never see the light of day each year because of abortion.
A disproportionately high number of these infants are minorities.
Some of them are selected for extermination because they are female.
The response of the PCUSA: Crickets.
Ray Dunsworth
Ruling Elder
Faith Reformed Church (PCA)
Erie, PA
The louisville sluggers at it again, as the Bible says, (for those in louisville that’s that the book that talks about Jesus as the only way to heaven) “they worship the created more than the creator who is blessed forevermore”, that pretty much sums up pcusa theololgy these days.
The general hostility of the PCUSA to the carbon energy complex in general has very little to do with environmentalism or economics. It is cultural and ideological. Simply put, the PCUSA does not see traditional blue collar workers, or those what work in the energy complex as worthy people or even people of value. They see such people both from a racial and ideological perspective. Further assigning either misogynists, racist, or other categories of identity to such. In that sense demonization of such is an easy sell to their partisan base in academia and deep blue coastal elite enclaves they curry too. Examples of the PCUSA’s behaviors in relationship to the working class has been its relative silence and lack of commentary to the Pain addiction crises and death rates of communities associated with coal and its types of industries, which skew heavily white and male. Again two categories or groups of people the PCUSA would simple wish to vanish.
As the PCUSA seeks to reinvent itself into a post-Christian, post-denominational domestic NGO or left leaning PAC, again the coal industry and or its communities and people simply do not exist for them. Nor do they have any use for them.