In a penetrating lecture Wednesday, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, explained that “religious communities are ‘failing profoundly in what is expected of us‘ in energizing a response to climate change in society.” The Archbishop told his audience at York Minster that “we are near a tipping point” of global warming “and that the church, and other religious communities, are not doing their part to lead the world against it.” He fiercely defined an “unintelligent and ungodly relation with the environment“:

It is impatient: it seeks returns on labour that are prompt and low-cost, without consideration of long-term effects. It avoids or denies the basic truth that the environment as a material system is finite and cannot indefinitely regenerate itself in ways that will simply fulfil human needs or wants.

Warning there “is no guarantee that the world we live in will ‘tolerate’ us indefinitely if we prove ourselves unable to live within its constraints,” the Archbishop eviscerated the false claims of right-wing evangelical campaigns like We Get It, launched by James Dobson, Jim Inhofe, and other conservative climate deniers:

We Get It: “The science is not settled on global warming.”

The Archbishop: “I don’t intend to discuss in detail the rhetoric of those who deny the reality of climate change, except to say that rhetoric (as King Canute demonstrated) does not turn back rising waters. If you live in Bangladesh or Tuvalu, scepticism about global warming is precisely the opposite of reasonable: ‘negotiating’ this environment means recognising the fact of rising sea levels; and understanding what is happening necessarily involves recognising how rising temperatures affect sea levels.”

We Get It: “A recent Barna study of evangelicals found that only 33% consider global warming to be a major challenge.”

The Archbishop: “As is true in various ways throughout the whole created order, humanity and its material context are made so that they may find fulfilment in their relationship. Without each other they are not themselves. And the deliberate human refusal of this shared vocation with and within the material order of things is thus an act of rebellion against the creator.”

We Get It: “Efforts to cut greenhouse gases hurt the poor.”

The Archbishop: “The world is less than it might be so long as human beings are less than they might be, since the capacity of human beings to shape the material environment into a sign of justice and generosity is blocked by human selfishness. In the doomsday scenarios we are so often invited to contemplate, the ultimate tragedy is that a material world capable of being a manifestation in human hands of divine love is left to itself, as humanity is gradually choked, drowned or starved by its own stupidity.”

The Archbishop’s full lecture, with audio, is available here.

On Hardball yesterday, Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) worried that a cap and trade system to prevent catastrophic global warming and drive green economic development might “suck money” and jobs away from coal-intensive states:

Cap and trade, you’ll probably need 60 votes because it affects so many states economically that if you don’t do it in the right kind of way, you’re taking money from carbon intensive states like Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and redistributing it to California, New York. That’s just a very hard sell to our people at a time when they’re hurting. And you also run the risk of taking jobs away and not solving global warming.

Watch it:

Sen. Bayh appears to be listening too much to global warming deniers like Rep. Joe Barton, who argued last week that “if you’re trying to cap carbon, which is one of the most ubiquitous elements in the world, it’s going to put a price on it and the price is going to go up while the jobs are going to go down.” Barton warned that “the cost of energy already has a bearing on whether we manufacture or create in the United States or in China or Mexico or Brazil.”

On March 9, Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal claimed that cap and trade “takes from Miami, Ohio, and gives to Miami, Florida“:

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, Southern and Plains states. It’s no coincidence that the liberals most invested in cap and trade — Barbara Boxer, Henry Waxman, Ed Markey — come from California or the Northeast.

It’s certainly Sen. Bayh’s prerogative to think that the most important questions to ask about cap and trade legislation are those promoted by fossil-fueled right-wing global warming deniers, even though their policies have led to the decimation of manufacturing jobs in “Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.” Bayh’s agenda should instead include asking questions like these:

– If we don’t act, will it be China, India, or Germany that will develop next-generation technologies and the economic prosperity that comes with them?

– How fast and strong must cap and trade legislation be to minimize the damages of global warming-fueled floods, heatwaves, disease, droughts, and hurricanes?

– How can we design legislation to prevent job losses from wildly veering coal and oil prices?

– How can we ensure that climate legislation builds new industries in renewable energy and energy efficiency for manufacturing-heavy states like mine?

– What must we do to mitigate the looming national security crises of unprecedented droughts, sea level rise, floods, and typhoons in developing countries even as fossil fuels grow scarcer and more expensive?

– How many jobs will be lost if our planet is no longer habitable in a few generations?

Transcript: Read more

In case anyone is wondering whether the news industry is doomed, a few data points:

— The New York Times Magazine is publishing an 8,000-word cover article on climate denier Freeman Dyson written by Nicholas Dawidoff, a baseball writer.

– The New Yorker’s lead ‘Talk of the Town’ piece on the economy and global warming is written by David Owen, a golf journalist.

– The Wall Street Journal’s “deputy Taste editor,” Naomi Schaeffer Riley, criticizes a groundbreaking Redefining Progress report on the demographics of environmental and economic inequality as “oddly conspiratorial” and “condescension.”

Environmental economist Jim Barrett, chairman of Redefining Progress, tells the Wonk Room:

Good grief. Let’s all start writing blog posts about what a crappy golf course Pebble Beach is, how steroids are good for baseball, and why white shoes are just fine after labor day. Don’t feel constrained by your lack of knowledge of the facts. No one else seems to.

Perhaps these papers are hoping to follow in the footsteps of the Atlantic and Newsweek, who publish football pundit Gregg Easterbrook as an energy expert. Their choice of assigning clearly uninformed culture writers to deal with complex scientific issues and economic policy is unfortunate, since so many qualified science and economic journalists — from Chris Mooney to Elizabeth Kolbert, Jeff Fleck to Kate Sheppard, Ken Ward, Jr. to Keith Johnson — are out there.