De Klimaatverandering 142

Archbishop of Canterbury: Humanity risks environmental 'doomsday'
Humanity risks being "choked, drowned or starved by its own stupidity"
unless action is taken to save the environment, the Archbishop of
Canterbury has warned.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/5049919/Archbishop-of-Canterbury-Humanity-risks-environmental-doomsday.html

By Martin Beckford, Religious Affairs Correspondent
Last Updated: 10:58AM GMT 26 Mar 2009

In his most apocalyptic predictions in recent years, Dr Rowan Williams
claimed that the Earth is now facing a "whole range of 'doomsday'
prospects" from climate change to the destruction of delicate ecosystems
and even attack from "bio-terror" weapons.

He brushed aside the views of those who are sceptical about global warming
or deny mankind is to blame, saying that it is impossible to deny that
entire countries are in peril from rising sea levels.

And he told fellow believers that God is not going to intervene and protect
the human race as we have a "terrible freedom" to decide our own destiny.

The Church of England has been at the forefront of efforts to encourage
"green" behaviour in recent years, even suggesting recently that people
should post fewer Christmas cards.

But in a lecture on responsibility delivered at York Minster , the most
senior cleric in the Church used unusually direct language to spell out the
scale of the threat facing the planet if "unintelligent and ungodly"
attitudes to the environment prevail.

He said: "We discover too late that we have turned a blind eye to the
extinction of a species that is essential to the balance of life in a
particular context. Or we discover too late that the importation of a
foreign life-form, animal or vegetable, has upset local ecosystems,
damaging soil or neighbouring life-forms.

"We discover that we have come near the end of supplies ˆ of fossil-fuels
for example ˆ on which we have built immense structures of routine
expectation.

"Increasingly, we have to face the possibility not only of the now familiar
problems of climate change, bad enough as these are, but of a whole range
of 'doomsday' prospects."

He said that "bio-terror" attacks using germ warfare were the "ultimate
reversal" of the harmony between humanity and the environment envisaged by
religion, but added: "It is only a projection of the existing history of
military technology."

Dr Williams said ecological questions are a matter of "justice" and that it
is up to humans to decide what the consequences of economic and
manufacturing activity will be for future generations.

He warned: "We are capable of doing immeasurable damage to ourselves as
individuals, and it seems clear that we have the same terrible freedom as a
human race."

He dismissed the theory that the Old Testament book of Genesis implies
humans are allowed to exploit the Earth.

On the claims of climate change sceptics, the archbishop observed:
"Rhetoric (as King Canute demonstrated) does not turn back rising waters."

Dr Williams said that although the environment had been changed
"appallingly for the worse", it could also be made better.

However he warned that this would require a "radical change of heart" as
well as practical developments such as a form of "carbon taxation" and a
new type of economics in which sustainability is rewarded.

The archbishop went on: "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."