Catholic blogger David Gibson wonders whether the BP oil spill in the Gulf will wake-up evangelicals on the issue of “creation care.” The post, which appears at dotCommonweal, focuses on recent comments by evangelicals Russell D. Moore and Mark Galli.
Moore compares the oil spill to Roe v. Wade:
After Roe, what seemed to be a “Catholic issue” now pierced through the consciences of evangelical Protestants who realized they’d not only been naive; they’d also missed a key aspect of Christian thought and mission.
For too long, we evangelical Christians have maintained an uneasy ecological conscience. I include myself in this indictment.
We’ve had an inadequate view of human sin.
Because we believe in free markets, we’ve acted as though this means we should trust corporations to protect the natural resources and habitats. But a laissez-faire view of government regulation of corporations is akin to the youth minister who lets the teenage girl and boy sleep in the same sleeping bag at church camp because he “believes in young people.”
Let’s hope that more evangelicals heed Moore’s call.
Gibson presumes that the oil spill was caused by inadequate government regulation. Yet the government closely regulates offshore drilling. Both the primary and alternate failsafes (both of which failed) were government mandated. The license for drilling was government granted. Last year the government granted BP an exemption from the required environmental impact analysis.
This hardly sounds like laissez-faire…
Interestingly, in February Obama's proposed budget called for an end to federal subsidies for the oil industry, a welcome move away from government distortion of the energy market. One of the proposed funding cuts was $50 million from the “Ultra-Deepwater exploration program.”
So again, government subsidies have been encouraging investment in precisely the sort of risky deepwater drilling that amplified the impact of this disaster.
http://www.triplepundit.com/2010/02/obama-call-for-end-of-oil-subsidies-in-2011-budget/