How Should Christians Care About the Environment?

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Jim Davis
Welcome to TGC is good faith debates. These are conversations designed to help you learn how to navigate difficult, emotional, maybe even polarizing issues in our current life and culture. My name is Jim Davis, a pastor Orlando Grace Church, and it is my privilege to be able to be the moderator for these debates. The topic for today is climate change and environmental protection. This is, of course, something most Christians would agree on that we have the mandate to steward this earth. But what does that look like now that we have 8 billion people living here, technologies that we have not had before? So this is a question that Christians really need to wade through. And of course, what role does the government have in that? Well, I’m thankful to be joined by two people who have thought through this and are willing to debate here today. We have Jake Meador, here, Brian Mattson, here. Jake is a writer, speaker and your editor in chief for mere orthodoxy. Brian, you’re a theologian, a writer, a musician, and the senior public scholar of public theology for the Center for Cultural leadership. Thank you both for joining us. And, Brian, we’ll start with you and get to hear your perspective on this issue.

Brian Mattson
Well, thank you, Jim. I’d like to begin by sharing what I believe are some controlling worldview norms that should inform Christians as they think about the environment. And then I’d like to share three areas of ethical concern that we ought to consider. As Christians, we have distinctive views about creation, human beings in relation to creation and the purpose or tell us of that relationship. Christianity has a unique perspective on creation itself. As Herman bobbing helpfully puts it, we neither denigrate nor deify nature. So unlike Gnosticism, we don’t believe that the material world is something evil, rather, it was created very good. And unlike those who would deify nature as divine, we believe that creation remains exactly that, a creation. As Paul warns us in Romans chapter one, we’re not to worship and serve created things instead of the Creator. Now, as for humans, Ronald Reagan was fond of a truism that I think is certainly consistent with Christian anthropology. Humans are ecology too. That is to say that humans belong to nature. Humans are not an aberration in an otherwise pristine environment. Our presence here is a creational norm. Notice that before the creation of humans God repeatedly in Genesis chapter one saw that it was good. But it was only after he creates his image, the Imago Dei and He blesses them and Commission’s them to rule and subdue the earth that he saw that it was very good. And that means thirdly, that the relationship between humans and nature from the beginning involved productive cultivation of the earth as an intrinsic good. God is not miserly. He made the Earth so that it responds to human cultivation. And that’s true even after the fall, thorns and thistles. Yes, yet fruitfulness in response to labor nonetheless. Now I hide all I highlight all of this because it seems to me that many environmental and economic approaches undermine these worldview commitments to significant degrees. For example, nation, nature is deified and worshipped often literally, it is imbued with personhood and rights, as if humans were made subject to it rather than the other way around. Many environmental approaches view humans as inherently parasitic and suspect. Cultivation is often viewed as essentially destructive and not productive. These kinds of assumptions, it seems to me are alien to Christian theology. Moreover, our question today also involves economics. And there’s no such thing as a neutral economic worldview. When it comes to economic interventions into the private sector by the state, it seems to me we ought to ask what kind of economic worldview is involved. So is there an underlying antipathy to say, the private sector itself, private property, corporations, wealth, economic growth and productivity and so forth? If so, then we might be right to suspect that the goal is not It actually environmental protection. So for example, I would say that I would note that Representative Ocasio Cortez hr 109. Build the so called green New Deal has among its grab bag of mandates free health care, affordable housing and economic security for all people. So worldview matters. So with that said, let me turn and focus on three particular ethical issues I think we ought to consider. When we talk about regulatory or economic interventions in the marketplace, things like punitive tax increases redistributive subsidies, imposed regulatory costs, we’re talking about civil sanctions. And I believe that civil sanctions must address actual arms with reasonable causality and proximity. So for example, it seems to me one thing for the state to say Acme manufacturing, you are pouring toxic waste into the groundwater of your local community. This causes cancer cease and desist. It seems to me quite another thing to say Acme manufacturing. According to our computer models, you are contributing to a global temperature change of three and a half degrees Celsius 100 years from now, cease and desist. I’m concerned about the abstractness of that harm, the tenuous causality of that harm, as well as the temporal distance of that purported harm without these kinds of elements or considerations, that is some requirement of actual harm or causality or proximity. What is the limiting principle for what a government may morally do? Is there one, are there any impediments or brakes on that at all? Second, it seems to me that many in this these kinds of debates don’t want to acknowledge trade offs, sanctions, the kinds of sanctions I just mentioned, put downward pressure on economic productivity and growth. It’s not cost free, it hurts consumers, employment opportunity, increase of wages, investments, retirement accounts, and as well as economic prospects for future generations. How much reduction in gross domestic product are we willing to take for every degree Celsius we wish to slow 50 years from now? Now, that’s a question I think must be answered. And a rationale has to be articulated and defended. But I have yet to hear it. Now, I realized that framing the ethical concern this way, talking about GDP, and stock prices are easy to write off as a self interested, capitalist greed, which it isn’t. But the ethical concern goes far beyond that, we are bound to ask what the trade offs and harms are to our neighbors. And here I have in mind economically marginalized peoples in the developing world. If we globally abandon or and or ban by Fiat energy production from fossil fuels, then it seems to me that we are in effect, placing the burden of our sins, as some imagined them to be on the weak and helpless, making skate goats of the most vulnerable. So here’s how it can sound. Africa, for the good of the planet, you must continue cooking your meals over dung fires, will allow you to have a dorm room refrigerator and we’ll give you a solar panel to power it. But you do not get steel mills, you do not get textile mills, you don’t get railroads, you don’t get natural gas. You don’t get manufacturing. We are sorry. But we’ve enjoyed all of these things, and we’ve gotten fabulously wealthy and healthy. But now the punishment for our sins must fall upon you. I believe that to be immoral. One might even call that the apotheosis of paternalistic colonialism. But the ethical problem is even worse than that, it seems to me and here I think there’s an analogy from Christian just war tradition. One of the principles of a just war is the necessity of a reasonable chance of success. The idea is that it’s immoral to initiate a conflict you cannot reasonably where you cannot reasonably achieve the outcome.

To invite all of the damage for have a war for a cause last before it even begins is unethical according to Christian just war tradition. Likewise, I think it is unethical to read Economic havoc here at home and to banish developing nations to darkness and poverty in a quest to reduce global carbon emissions. When, on the other side of the world, the People’s Republic of China is proposing to build and building unhindered as we speak, additional coal powered infrastructure at a capacity five times more than the rest of the world is building combined. Unless there is some magic solution to that problem, no amount of regulatory or economic intervention stands any chance of success. And the war on carbon is all for naught before it really even begins. That doesn’t mean that we are helpless. We have the greatest engine for human innovation and adaptation the world has ever known, free markets and all that they entail, private property and enterprise risk and incentives. These are the engine of human innovation that is not only brought about human prosperity, and flourishing on a scale, unprecedented in history, but also brings more creation care, not less. And I can elaborate more on that, in our time together today. I believe the way forward in the face of our environmental challenges is forward, not backward, free markets, even the high regulation, one that we are living in right now are not the enemy of environmental protection and creation care. They are its best friend. Thank you.

Jim Davis
Thank you, Brian. I appreciate that. Jake. Tell us your perspective.

Jake Meador
Yeah, thank you for having me. And thank you for your comments. Brian actually agreed with much of the the worldview section in particular. So as I begin, I think something that can happen, when we talk about something like climate change, or global warming, these terms can kind of sound very technical and remote and far off, they have no way of insulating us from the reality of what’s being described. And so I want to start off just by talking about some of the risks we’re facing. That are some of them we’re living with right now, some are likely to come in the coming decades, not century. And so just to go down these some of the things we’re talking about that have already happened, the destruction of a third of the world’s old growth forests in the last 30 years, thankfully, has slowed down in the last 10 years. But between 1990 and about 2010, we chopped down tons of old growth forests. And that’s especially dangerous because those have unique ecosystems that have developed over centuries, we don’t just plant more trees and recover that. We’re talking about a catastrophic number of species, maybe as many as 40% of all species on Earth, being driven into extinction or toward critically endangered status by 2050. We’re talking about the probable disappearance or significant reduction of most global coral reefs by 2050. As water temperatures rise, we’re talking about shrinking ice caps, which we can see happening now as glaciers break away in the Arctic and Antarctic. And as sea levels rise, sea levels rise, there are cities that will be put at risk by this in the US that would be Miami, New Orleans and New York, in particular number of other cities globally. We’re talking about the desertification of the American West. As they get less rain, wildfire, risks rise, farming will have to change because they will not have the same water resources to draw upon. We’re talking about dangerous to human life, animal life and air quality that are created by those more intense and frequent wildfires. We’re talking about economic and communal challenges that are created by more regular high intensity hurricanes. warmer water, warmer air can mean that hurricanes intensify faster and create more damage because they’re a category four or five hitting instead of a category two or three. And finally, we’re talking about some actually enormous financial costs that come with this, as we’ve seen recently with the hurricanes that have hit in Puerto Rico and Florida, and with wildfires. So the the dangers we’re talking about summer coming summer things we’re dealing with right now, there is a second question to consider as well though, which is how we’re going to respond to these problems. And there’s a lot of ways that we can, social problem does not necessitate a government response. We can deal with social problems through cultural means sometimes a cultural norm develops, and it gets reinforced softly through society such that you aren’t going to say or do a certain thing in a public place because the cultural norm has developed there. We can also accomplish a lot of things through commerce. Short means as we put the power of markets to work to accomplish some desired good. And then of course, there are also political means where we use public policy and law to try and accomplish some desirable good. So one, the obvious question to start with to begin is our cultural and commercial means enough. And I don’t think they are. And this is why.

First thing to consider, is it’s important to understand that there are reasons we got here. There are enormous market forces that have propelled many of these negative changes. We didn’t deplete oceans, because we were just doing it for fun. There were market incentives to overfish certain bodies of water, we didn’t chop down old growth forests. For fun, we did it because there were market incentives to do so. We have failed to act at many points because of market incentives to keep going as we’re going rather than changed course. There was a moment in the late 70s and early 1980s, where there was a very strong push to try and adopt some more aggressive measures to slow climate change. And those did not happen. And you can even see this now I looked up according to open secrets, just the oil companies spent $176 million on lobbying in 2009 alone, and they’ve spent around $120 million every year from 2010 to 2021, on lobbying in Washington. So I think to turn toward climate or to trend toward commerce alone to solve these problems is naive. The incentives of right now that a company has are not necessarily the incentives that we need to be thinking about because we might be dealing with a problem 20 3040 years down the road. Parenting analogies might be helpful in this sense. The incentives I give my child to not do something right now might not be about what’s going to happen to them today. If they do it, it’s what will happen to them. 15 years from now, if they keep doing it. The thing we need to understand is that markets don’t appear from nothing. They don’t descend from some kind of sky hook. In some pure sullied, untouched state. They’re made and they’re made through many factors. They are made through the laws of nations customs of cultures, the realities of Geography and climate. This is why we have the joke about someone who could sell ice to an Eskimo because they have no need for ice. markets evolve over time, until quite recently, there was not much of a market for air conditioning in Northern Europe. But after this last summer, where they had temperatures over 100 degrees in England, there is now more of a market for air conditioning. So what sound climate policy can do is it can help create new contexts and environments in which new behaviors are incentivized and rewarded by new markets. Likewise, while culture can and does inform practices, I think culture and law should be understood as friends rather than adversaries, as society where cultural norms and public policies are in conflict isn’t going to endure in that way for long because something is going to give one way or the other. I think you could say we’ve seen that recently, in lots of laws regarding sex and gender, the cultural norms were in one place, and the laws eventually shifted in response to changing cultural norms. They should work together. There’s one other angle to consider here. And this is an argument I’m borrowing from my friend, Brad Little John, he’s argued, given the degree of the dangers we’re dealing with it is extremely unlikely the government is never going to have to act to deal with these things.

The question before us is more are we going to try and do what we still can proactively? Or are we going to react in the heat of crisis, when sidewalks are melting railroad tracks are being warped as they were in England and Northern Europe just this past summer? Government can’t sit on its hands at that point, because so many things are disrupted. I think it is better to have laws that are passed proactively in concert with culture and commerce, rather than reacting in the heat of crisis, particularly because especially if you’re concerned about commerce and markets, I think government regulations passed in crisis often proved to be far more draconian. And they often are far harder to unravel than laws that are passed proactively, where we’re able to work with a broader coalition. And so that brings me to the second deeper argument I want to make is that if we imagine politics as having this purely negative, kind of a purely negative view of government, where government basically exists just to protect against physical harm, and protect property rights. I think that notion of politics is more indebted to certain post Christian modern ideas about politics than it is more traditional Christian ideas about common life. For Christians politics are about how to structure the necessary social relationships we all have, so that they’re mutually beneficial and delightful. So I think we should we make a mistake if we see the relationship between markets and culture and government as being adversarial, I think they should be convivial. Ideally, they are three different strands of a cord wrapped together, all working in the same direction. So to put government at odds with work or wealth, for example, or to define property rights and absolutist terms is, I think, a mistake that has more to do with modern political thought than it does traditional Christian thought. The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness there in the soul. And this tells us and this is why, for much of church history, the chief concern Christians have had with property rights has been about ensuring common use for all, not necessarily protecting individual rights, individual property rights are an administrative tool we use to ensure the common use of property of the earth for all because individual use has become dominant. And the comments have been neglected to such a degree. I worry that problems requiring collective action, which is what I think we’re facing, become almost unsolvable because we’ve lost the capacity for that common action, because we’ve come to see society as so grounded in conflict. And this is a problem on the left and the right. I’m not trying to score political points either way. Here, I think the the revolutionary sense of politics is founded in this vision of essential conflict. And I think that’s a serious misstep that Christians should avoid Bhavik has been very helpful to me and understanding that.

So what is to be done, I’ll just throw out a couple policy ideas, and then we can get into the conversation. Actually, a lot of these things are starting to happen now already. During his term to his credit, President Trump joined an international agreement to plant a very, very large number of trees, I don’t remember the exact number that a number of countries globally are involved in and that’s valuable. Trees can help soil quality, they provide shade for wildlife so that can protect species. They serve as a windbreak, which can help with soil erosion. Enough trees can also be a carbon sink, that might be able to help mitigate some of the damages we’re doing through burning so many fossil fuels. I think that’s one policy we should get behind. There’s a number of other provisions in the recently passed inflation Reduction Act that President Biden helped pass that do things like make it easier for nonprofits, as well as for profit entities to get solar power setup at their facilities. There’s another regulation that came through that is going to help us phase out so not ban overnight, but phase out particularly nasty compound called hydrofluorocarbons that trap more heat than just burning co2. So I think those are good steps, other things that we can do, or we can actually offer tax credits and incentives to try and help nudge incentive structures for markets and for ordinary consumers, interactions that are better for the planet. So I think if if we do start with this position of a conflict between humanity and nature, or between where we work and the political entities we participate in, then I think we are parting ways with historic Christian thought. But I think what government can do is it can try to create environments in which it is easier since the Dorothy Day idea, a world in which it’s easier to be good. And so what government can do through wisely develop policy is try to create spaces in which behaviors that are more conducive to environmental health are more likely to happen. This is a something a farmer with some friends of mine at the Bruderhof community has said, he says the good news is that there is a way back, we can stop destroying and start restoring. We can work with nature, so that in essence, the land heals itself, it is simply a matter of grasping certain principles that must be respected. And the Bruderhof have been able to do this at many of their communities around the world. And so my hope for us is that we would be people who respect these principles and that our communities, families, neighborhoods, cities, and governments, would also be such communities.

Jim Davis
Thank you. Appreciate both of you. I’ll start with you, Brian, one of the main areas of disagreement here seems to be the measure the degree to which we proactively address this problem and the role of the free market and the government in that process. So I come from the state of Florida, and when my grandparents moved there in the 30s, which means we were in Orlando before there was a good reason to be in Orlando. And back then the lakes were crystal clear. You can eat the fish in them. The the fishing all around the state was amazing. Now nobody we need a bass out of a lake in Central Florida. The estuaries around Canaveral are no longer have the vegetation they used to you wouldn’t eat the fish, they’re even the keys I can remember growing up as a kid and my dad would take me off shore and we would, we’d finished fishing some days when we filled up the boat. Now you go all day, hoping for one or two medium sized fish because of the impact of commercial fishing. And they’re so and then you add the sugar canes in sugarcane fields that block the water from the Everglades, the natural filtering process, all that to say, I hear what you’re saying. For me those issues feel like the free markets not helping. So how can you and I don’t expect you to be an expert, particularly on the waterways of Florida, Florida habit, but there but there are places where it feels like the the free market is doing the opposite. What do you say to that?

Brian Mattson
Well, I think I’m not here to deny the need for environmental regulation. I’m, in fact, I’m happy to to defend the status quo of environmental regulation. I think that Jake is saying more needs to be done. You know, the the Environmental Protection Agency’s share of the federal register this year is 30,246 pages. Yes, I took the opportunity to count spread over so you can’t say nothing’s being done spread over 37 bound volumes. That’s not low regulation, unfettered, lazy, fair, free market capitalism. I’m not at all against I mean, I’m from Montana. And we have a long history of industrial interests, extracting our natural resources, we’re called the treasure state for a reason. People extract those treasures, right. And we have one of the largest Superfund sites in the country. In Butte, Montana. I’m not against stopping the tragedy of Butte, Montana in the Berkeley Pit there at all. So I’m not against regulation. The proactive part, I think, is is the is key to your question. And that is, who has that insight, that forward looking inside to say, if we just craft these laws and these rules, and then the market will sort of inhabit the natural legal paths that we have prefabricated? I’m wondering who’s wise enough to do that? Because that kind of central planning has all kinds of problems with the knowledge problem, um, how can one person or one committee or one group of experts possibly know all of the factors that are going into things, and so you have a knowledge problem there, and I’m concerned about central planning, I’m concerned about a state that has no restraints on it. Jake, talked about conviviality and how the state and culture and economics and politics ought to all be friends, what he’s leaving out is that only one of those groups has a monopoly on coercion and violence. So that’s a concern of mine, that a state says to one industry that’s disfavor, we’re going to penalize you and reward our friends over here, because we approve of what they’re doing. The state has the power to do that. And so, no, I’m not a lazy, fair, I don’t know environmental regulations, I am concerned about how those policies get crafted. Is it A, is it a cult of the expert? who’s just going to tell everybody how this is going to go? That hasn’t worked well in the past? Or are there alternatives to that? And I think the markets are far more nimble than than many give them credit for?

Jim Davis
Well, I want to get Jake’s response to that. But I want to add a second part to the question, because you made a compelling case, Brian, about China. And you know, we can do all the good in the world here. But you know, looking at the other side of the world, it’s not changing anything. And in fact, in many ways, it’s getting worse. So how would you respond to what he said and add the element that even if we do is, is it worth it when? On the other side of the world, it’s not going very well?

Jake Meador
Yeah. So one of the big questions, concerns incentives. And so one danger, certainly is that how do you create incentives that will keep the state from abusing its power because the state does have a unique capacity? i There are plenty of ways for markets to be coercive as well and soft ways. So we’ve understood the greenhouse effect since the 19th century. And the greenhouse effect is not a comp Located kind of eggheads science idea that only three people on the planet understand. co2 traps heat. As we pump more co2 into the atmosphere, more heat is trapped, causing temperatures to rise. And if you look back a lot of the fears that were being discussed in the 60s and 70s, we are now starting to see in the form of more wildfires more, not necessarily more hurricanes, but more intense hurricanes. Just think back, I think it was five years ago, we had Harvey, Irma Maria hit boom, boom, boom. And if we want to talk about dangers and damages to the developing world of Middle East, South Asia, those are the places that are gonna get hammered by this in a way that like in Nebraska, Nebraska might be a little bit more like Oklahoma, or Texas in 40 to 50 years, which isn’t great. But it’s not a desert, which is what parts of the Middle East and Sub Saharan Africa are looking at. And so what concerns me with leaving these things to commercial entities is that commercial entities are going to behave in ways that are incentivized to help them now, they’re not necessarily going to be thinking about 3040 years down the road. And so I think what government can do is it can create a quote unquote, artificial environment that tries to incentivize commercial entities to think about those things. In the same way that my wife and I do this at home with our kids, we create a kind of artificial consequence when they do something wrong, because what we’re seeing now is where this behavior will go in 20 years, if it’s not addressed, problems develop over time. And I worry that the commercial incentives that most firms are given, don’t equip them to think long term in the way that a lot of these problems necessitate. Is there some variance in computer models? Sure.

Can we predict everything with perfect accuracy? No. But I think the basics here are not that hard. And they don’t require a PhD or a complex computer to understand its basic Greenhouse Effect dynamics. And the rising temperatures that result from that and the consequences of rising temperatures, glaciers melting, drier vegetation with, which leads to more wildfires, there’s actually concern now in the East Coast, about where wildfires where their wildfire season, which traditionally has just been April, is now stretching out into June. So the East won’t get hit as hard as the West, just different landscapes, different climate. But people are worried about wildfires on the East Coast now, which was not something we were worried about. So I would say that the move here is to try and create laws that help firms have incentives to think long term. So as this all relates to China, China is a time bomb, for several reasons. They have a demographic crisis that is worse than just about anywhere else in the world because of that one child policy. So they’re going to have major questions to deal with there. And as far as City’s vulnerable to sea level rise, China is way worse off than we are. I, as I was prepping for this, I pulled up a map that just showed major global cities that are especially at risk due to rising sea levels and is basically the southeast coast of China. I don’t think the fact that other parties are not doing something necessary exonerates us from the need to do it. I also think this is where, actually, we should talk more. Roger Scruton, an English conservative, has written extensively about environmental issues. And Scruton will make arguments about how environmental protection is about protecting Social Ecology. And so I think if we’re, if we’re approaching climate change, right, we are restoring a lot of things that have been lost that are part of human existence that are part of the good life, enjoying being able to enjoy healthy landscapes, as you were describing in Florida. So I think a lot of this work can just be delightful if it is designed properly, and not just like mandated top down regulatory way, but in a convivial way, that is trying to recognize the roles that all these different social bodies that make up a polity can play.

Jim Davis
So Brian, he acknowledges the difficulties in predicting the future. And that was one of the main points you were trying to make and how, you know, how we can really know what’s going on. But I am curious at a basic level, do you agree with the greenhouse effect the glaciers the the premise that this world is getting warmer, and that is going to present problem?

Brian Mattson
I accept the premise that the climate is changing, and I certainly agree with the greenhouse effect. I think that the the scientific debate at the highest levels is what portion of the carbon output is and is anthropogenic. So is it our portion of carbon emissions? That is the proverbial straw, you know, on the camel’s back, that is going to lead to these cascading catastrophes? I think that’s the question and I think is actually still debatable. And so I’m not nearly as worried, as Jake is about, about the litany of of catastrophes. So I don’t deny that at all. The question is, what are we going to do about it? And I didn’t hear Jake, really answer your question, your last question, which was, what are you going to do about China? And it sounded to me, Jake, like you were saying, well, they’re really going to suffer too. So they’re going to come to their senses, or on burning coal, or they just, it seems to me the intractable problem, if the goal is we’re going to reduce global greenhouse emissions. If you have a rogue, this is not just any old rogue state, right? This is one of the largest countries in the world largest population is is profligate in burning carbon, fuels, fossil fuels. That seems to be a big problem for our solutions. And I think that you may be right that that doesn’t absolve us, but at the same time, I wonder again, about the just war thing. Okay. We’re talking about inflicting real, serious known economic harm on ourselves for projected uncertain harms in the future. I think that’s something that we need to think about, um, how do we, how do we navigate that ethically, we know we’re going to harm our own economy and the developing world for something uncertain. And the China problem is just a real problem. If the goal is global reduction of fossil fuels?

Jim Davis
Well, I did so. So this connects with your example of those in the developing countries suffering for our sins. EBIT just made the case the cost to us is great, and them with an uncertain outcome. How does that land on you?

Jake Meador
Yeah, so just to circle back to China, because what I was trying to say, perhaps didn’t get it across while they’re not going to be able to keep doing that forever. was part of the response. What why is that? Because they have a demographic crisis on their hands, they’re an old, so they won’t have enough people to work in coal mines or their economy is not going to be able to continue to work the way it is now. 30 to 40 years from now due to a lack of workers, but

Brian Mattson
That’s too late by your own admission. I mean, you’ve you’ve mentioned a whole bunch of things that are the next 20-30 years.

Jake Meador
So, there’s a book Oh, crap, what’s the title? The gardener’s dirty hands, I think by Noah Tolle. He was a Wheaton prof for a number of years. He’s now at Calvin. And Professor totally makes the argument. He said, We need to become more understanding of the fact that we’re in a tragic circumstance, tragedy is just endemic to being human in a fallen world. There are always possibilities that are unrealized. And there’s a certain tragedy in that there are trade offs that are going to have to be made now, where there are not easy, obviously, perfect choices. And so I mean, even in talking about the developing world, where where Brian goes is, well, what about economic development there? And where my mind goes is, well, if you’re living in Kuwait, their temperatures are getting up to 140. In the summers routinely, which it’s always been hot, but it’s not always been that hot. Those types of regions around the equator are going to get much hotter they already are. We’re not talking about three degree increase centuries from now. We’re talking about it sooner than that. And we’ve already seen, I think we’re at two degrees, if I recall correctly. And so there’s going to be changes to the landscape there that will affect their ability to develop in the same way that we have. Although the other piece that’s worth keeping in mind here. If you look at something like the Paris Agreement, which was passed a few years ago, I read it recently, the whole thing I was struck by how contextualized it was, it makes strong distinctions between what the UN is asking of developed countries versus what it’s asking of developing countries. So the major global agreement on climate change is actually not telling developing countries you don’t Don’t get XY and Z. It is rather saying that as this is a global problem, we need to work on it together, developed countries have to carry more of the weight because they have already gotten to a certain established level, where they probably can absorb more of the body blow, that some of these things are going to be for us developing countries, we’re going to take a different approach, because we do want them to be able to develop economically, in certain ways develop certain infrastructure, health care, etc. And so it’s not, I mean, that’s the Paris Agreement. This is not some fringe scientists somewhere that no one’s listening to. So I don’t think that the choice being put to people is no Sub Saharan Africa, no, South Asia, no southern South America, you can’t have XY and Z. The issue is rather, we have to think differently about how we build as climate changes. This was something that was evident in Europe last summer. A lot of northern Europe is not made for that kind of heat. So they’re going to have to retrofit a lot of buildings in the near future. And probably a lot of people are going to start buying air conditioning in the near future. So we have to change the way we’re building in certain ways. And we need to be thinking about how developed countries can do things to help developing countries, while also recognizing the overall challenge that we’re facing globally.

Jim Davis
L et me let me ask a question right there, because we’re talking about the Earth warming. A lot of people would say we don’t have the history. I mean, the earth’s temperature rises and falls, it’s been we know, it’s been much colder than it is. And it’s been much warmer than it is you we don’t have the history to know if this is how much we’re contributing to it. And then on the hurricane front, my our city got hit last week by hurricane. But But there are those who would say we don’t have enough history to know if if they’re really more intense. And yes, they’re more expensive just because more people live there. How do you how do you respond to that?

Jake Meador
We have been putting more co2 into the air for 200 plus years. And we know what that does. So are there other things that might be driving it on the margins? Sure, I would grant that. But I think we know what co2 does. And we know that we’re putting a lot of it into the air. So it seems reasonable to me to think that a large part of the problems we’re seeing as temperatures rise and all as all these knock down effects happen when you have drier vegetation and more fires and warmer water and more intense hurricanes. I don’t think it’s a great stretch that requires computer models to prove to suggest that we would be influencing those things. And so certainly I’m concerned about developing worlds being able to continue to develop. I’m also concerned about many of these countries being deserts, in the not that distant future, where the people are just going to become climate refugees. We’ve already seen some of this in most parts of the world, actually. So I mean, that’s kind of my I think there’s trade offs here, as you said, but I think the trade offs run in a lot of different directions.

Jim Davis
So at the end of your argument, you made the point that free markets create more care creation, not less, if you eluded the fact that maybe there were some more some places we could double click, would you want to pull on that string?

Brian Mattson
Yeah, I’m glad that you asked that because it is related to a lot of what what Jake was just saying, Jake, Jake, you seem to think that you’re free markets aren’t enough. They’re not doing enough. So they, you know, we need we need law and regulation to nudge maybe industry in the right directions. I think you’re from my perspective, you take you’re taking far too dim view of the dynamism and and, and ingenuity of markets. So just in the last decade, private industry has invented a way of reducing carbon emissions for energy by 50% over coal 50% Now no one told them to do this. The governor note there was no regulation that said, Hey, big oil companies and oil drillers you guys need to do this. This was industry on its own, invents a way to cut carbon emissions by 50% over coal, by way of directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing for natural gas. And so 50% of recall is going the right direction. Where they cheered where they was there a big celebration was a parade in New York City, while private industry where they thanked no actually what happened was they have been opposed and had nothing but roadblocks from start to finish from permitting to extraction, to transportation, to refining and to export a They’re they’re facing barriers. And yet, that’s an example of an industry actually, without a nudge, doing something that is going the right direction. And clearly the right direction, the the the actual geographic footprint now, of oil and gas drilling has been has been exponentially improved because of directional drilling, for example. So I think that we should look at the full picture, I think that actually industry is interested in in more environmentally responsible ways of extracting energy. So that’s one way but the reason I say that markets, and I said, and all that they entail that met private property risk and incentives and so forth, provides more creation care, is because the countries on the earth, historically that have the worst environmental records of all, are the ones that are totally regulated, as in the state owns it. They own the means of production, and they regulate. Now, here’s the problem with that, when when a person doesn’t own something, when nobody in particular owns something, a piece of property, minerals, whatever it is, if no one in particular owns it, that means nobody owns it, and no one takes responsibility for it. And I think that the free enterprise system that we’ve had, that has been developed. And Jake, you might be right about the history of Christians and economics that this is fairly novel. I agree. I think it comes out of the Protestant Reformation and in a renewed interest in individualism. I think that that system actually improves creation care, because somebody in particular, somebody with skin in the game, somebody who is on location, somebody who knows the factors of what’s going on, in terms of the use of these resources, is actually responsible for it. So that’s why I think I think that that I think Jake is not as optimistic about markets as I am. But I am optimistic, I think that it produces more care for creation, when there’s actual people with skin in the game, who are responsible for it. And I think that they do respond, I just gave an example of industry responding in a positive way on these issues.

Jim Davis
So that is a compelling case for free market. So he combined that with the 30, something 1000 pages on the register. And he’s making the case that we’re doing more than, you know, certainly more than countries whose state controls the markets. How does that How do you respond to that?

Jake Meador
I’m not arguing for countries controlling markets. You’re correct. The Soviet Union and communist bloc was disastrous, ecologically. Biggest nuclear disaster in the world happened under their watch, and lots of other really bad things happen under their watch. I’m not arguing for centralized planned economies. I’m not arguing for the abolition of private property. What I’m trying to argue for is the idea that the economy exists for people, not people for the economy. And so there will be times where what is good for a firm for perhaps the business owner or the board is not actually what is good for the broader polity be that a state or nation partly because it’s not what is good for the land on which that polity lives. And so in those situations, it is right and good for people to come together through various means to try and provide incentives to help the firm have a broader scope for its work, to think more broadly about what it’s doing in the world. And certainly, I think a lot we can point to successes in commerce, I do think there are risks. I mean, I don’t live too far from I guess you don’t either from where a lot of the fracking has been happening. There are there are risks to water quality. We had many protests over the Keystone XL pipeline in Nebraska, actually led by a lot of farmers who were concerned about an oil pipeline running over their land. So even there, I think, yes, it’s a win on carbon emissions. We do need to also be mindful of other risks that are associated with that method. But yeah, I mean, I do think we, if the environmental side becomes stridently insistent on only like wind, solar, and hydro are the only kinds of power world will allow. I don’t think that’s going to be workable. Again, it’s a question of thinking about trade offs. So I grateful for I’d want to celebrate the ways that commerce has been able to do good things in this area. But it Again, I think this is a collective project that use capers term all the different spheres within society have a role to play. And I think government’s role to play is more than just stay out of the way.

Brian Mattson
Yeah, if I may, that that’s, that’s well said. I agree with a lot of what you said. But you keep using the term when you talk about the state has a role to play it is it it was to, to help cultivate, to to, you know, we’re all in this together kind of thing. No, these are there’s real decision makers. There’s real there’s real coercive power involved. And you say, you know, I’m not arguing for centrally planned economy, but I’ll give you a confession. Okay. So Edmund Burke, in his famous oration on the on the, to the House of Commons, March of 1775, arguing with his Englishman, what are we going to do about these Americans and he starts describing Americans and he says this, he says, Americans auger Americans predict Americans auger misgovernment at a distance, they snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze. I confess, I am one of those. So when I hear things like the government is going to help, the government is going to shape the government is going to form thinking No, this is a that’s a coercive institution. It’s they’re not just helping, the government does not offer to help when they when the EPA makes a recommendation. They’re not saying this is a suggestion. This is It’s compulsive. And so as that as that hot blooded American, I sniff on the wind, that a little bit of charity, because here’s what I’m concerned about. I’m concerned that the end result of where you’re going here is that we might end up with a cadre of experts who in the words of CS Lewis and other Brits are relying on Brett’s here, in the words of CS Lewis is a cadre of omnipotent moral busybodies, tormenting us for our own good. So that that’s the concern that I have when we talk about the state helping, I don’t think the state helps. I think it’s coercive. And it’s going to involve penalizing people, rewarding people. And I want to know, who has the expertise who has the moral judgment to do that. Is it a congressional committee? I think that’s problematic to me.

Jim Davis
Well, what I appreciate about both of you, is you you both want to steward the earth? Well, neither view comes across. There are extremes on either side of your positions that you do not fit into. So I want to finish by just asking briefly, what do you think the lowest hanging fruit is in front of us something practical, something helpful as a next step in this conversation in this part of the world? We’ll start with you, Brian.

Brian Mattson
Yeah. Well, thanks for asking that question. Because I think it’s an important one. I think that too often, when we are considering environmental issues. We’re too abstract. We’ve got a big headline problem, right? Climate change, carbon emissions, what are we going to do about that? Whereas I think that our resources can be better deployed on actually more more concrete and more local environmental issues and concerns. I think it’s pretty clear from our conversation today that I’m less optimistic that we can do much about the big headline global thing. But in local communities in in places like Florida, the hard Excel, the hard lessons of experience with the fisheries and with the Everglades and the sugarcane as you met as you, as you mentioned, those are precisely the kinds of experience that can then lead to better stewardship, better regulations. Why? Because we have we have experience, right? So GK Chesterton talks about the person fences, yeah, Chesterton, all the Brits are coming to my rescue here. You know, but those fences come up through hard experience. And those experiences don’t happen at an abstract global level. They happen at local levels. So I think that every anywhere you live, there are environmental issues and concerns that I think can be tackled far more effectively, that that is the lowest hanging fruit, because it’s where we are. And it’s where we have experience and skin in the game. So that would be I think, my my perspective on what do you think, Jake?

Jake Meador
It’s so funny. I feel like we have a lot of the same sources we’re working from and we go in opposite directions with them. Because when I think of Chesterton’s fence, I think that’s a very good argument for not destroying all the prairies. But

Brian Mattson
no, that’s right. But the fences but the fences, the fences, were not pre made by a committee. Right? The fences come through failure. They come through a while we ruins the prairie. Let’s put up a fence. Right? Right. Right, it’s a post facto say,

Jake Meador
industrial scale makes for very big failures is part of my fear. As far as what lowest thing is lowest hanging fruit. The problem, I think with carbon emissions is such that there’s certain things that need to happen on a policy level, which most of us are not going to have access to, to be able to be part of. So in terms of lowest hanging fruit for most folks, I would actually encourage everyone, there’s a wonderful story in plough, and I’m a contributing editor over there. So disclosure, I guess, called beating the big dry. And it’s about a community of Christians living in Southern Australia, who, through basically trying to observe the way that Australian landscapes have traditionally been treated prior to the last 200 years, and adopt more traditional methods of caring for land, what they plant where they plant it, they’ve seen their land transformed. And so there’s aerial pictures, you can see what the story that show what it looked like in 2000, and what it looks like now, and it was brown and barren in 2000. And now 20 years later, it’s green, I think they the amount of water flowing in at the crick at the top of their land versus coming out at the end is they triple it from the diamond passes through the land, because they’ve understood the Australian landscape wants stuff that retains moisture. So we are going to plant plants and trees that will help build and retain moisture. And it’s borne enormous fruit. And so I think, in our own lives, I think finding ways to be attentive to where we live, and how that land thrives. And then trying even if it’s in a yard. To bring back some of that beauty is really important. It’s something I’ve not been able to do as much at our property as I’d like. But I have an old prof in college who actually left academia. And he now runs a company that does landscaping with only native prairie stuff for Nebraska, because that’s what Nebraska ought to be. And I think those kinds of landscaping things we can all do with whatever property we have, would be a wonderful place to start. But what that starts with then is looking and trying to understand the place where you are in the world. And we live in a very distracted moment. And so I think just that kind of looking is hard. So being attentive to where God has put you in the world, and being attentive, not just in the ways that we often are going about our day, but being attentive to the land and the plants and the animals that live there. I love the stuff my parents have done at their property because they have lots of birds there all the time, because of the choices they’ve made with how they’ve, what trees they’ve planted. And so I think just look and see it’s the name of a Wendell Berry, biopic, look and see where God has put you and what you can do to make that place. Look more the way that the landscape wants to look, I think, hopefully it’s not too abstract. But

Jim Davis
Well, I appreciate it. appreciate both of you. You obviously both care. Thank you for giving us your time and your expertise. We hope that this was helpful for you out there viewing. We hope this was a profitable use of your time and that the Lord would bless it in your own journey.