Last year, Lee Zeldin, administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, stated: “We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.” While in Munich recently, Secretary of State Marco Rubio described people who have supported policies to control pollution emissions from vehicle tailpipes and power plants as a “climate cult.”
Yes, it is part of our religion, and Zeldin and Rubio can call us a “cult” or whatever they like. For decades, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has recognized the consensus science that the climate change we’ve been experiencing is primarily caused by fossil fuel emissions.
Simultaneously, the Catholic Church has emphasized the need for the proper stewardship and care of creation: the earth, all living creatures and the resources that support life, God’s great gift to us. These Catholic bishops tell us that caring for creation is not just an Earth Day slogan. It’s also a requirement of our faith as one of seven themes of Catholic social teaching. And it’s not just the Catholic faithful who adhere to the statement, “We show our respect to the Creator by our stewardship of creation.” Many faiths do.
This month, the EPA rescinded the 2009 “endangerment finding” that provided a basis for action for the harm excessive greenhouse gas emissions pose to humans. The EPA now will no longer regulate all carbon pollution emissions that are negatively affecting the climate, clean air and clean water. The USCCB courageously sent a detailed 15-page letter to the EPA citing the many legal and ethical reasons why the endangerment finding should not be rescinded. Ultimately, human harm and environmental costs related to pollution did not factor in the EPA’s decision.
Regarding environmental action, Pope Leo XIV tells us, “Everyone in society, through nongovernmental organizations and advocacy groups, must put pressure on governments to develop and implement more rigorous regulations, procedures and controls.”
My religious “cult,” the Catholic faith, may have lost this especially important battle, but we’ll continue to press forward in the fight to care for creation.
— Andrew Panelli, Creation Care Ministry, St. Elizabeth Seton Catholic Church, Orland Hills
Hold polluters accountable
The recent decision of the Environmental Protection Agency to discard the scientific finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare is a slap in the face to all Americans who value clean air, clean water and a healthy environment. It is a painfully discouraging development to the many Americans who have worked to protect the climate and leave a livable world for our children and grandchildren.
With this step, the EPA has abandoned its responsibility to protect us from the effects of harmful heat-trapping emissions from sources like cars, trucks, airplanes and power plants. Instead, President Donald Trump’s administration has once again shown us that the profits of fossil fuel companies are far more important than protecting people from dangerous pollution. It claims that erasing the “endangerment finding” and ending regulations of greenhouse gas emissions will lower costs for Americans, partly by making new cars cheaper. However, this line of thinking overlooks the larger and longer-term economic costs of unregulated pollution to our communities.
The science that greenhouse gases harm health and contribute to a warming climate has been well established for years. The EPA’s policy change ignores the reality that people all over the country have suffered from dangerous heat waves, wildfires, flooding and unhealthy air, which have been made worse by the warming climate. This is a dangerous step backward that risks irreversible harm to the health and well-being of future generations.
The EPA’s decision to repeal its own scientific finding will likely be challenged by environmental groups, but the outcome of such litigation is uncertain. In the meantime, concerned citizens should contact their members of Congress at 202-224-3121 and urge them to support legislation to protect Americans from harmful greenhouse gases and hold polluters accountable.
— Sheila Brown, Citizens Climate Lobby volunteer, Evanston
Coal-fired power plants
I see President Donald Trump is ordering the Pentagon to make deals with coal plants. In the winter of 1967-68, as a second lieutenant, I was stationed at Fort Jackson in South Carolina as an advanced infantry training officer. All the young GIs were on orders to Vietnam after that training. I clearly remember the fort had a coal plant for power and heat. The smell of coal soot was all pervasive, and the particulate found its way into every nook and cranny of the fort. I remember writing my name in the coal dust on my fort dresser.
I am sure that coal plant is long gone. But maybe our president, who loves beautiful coal, could get a good deal for one at the White House.
— William Cragg, Oak Park
My immigrant grandparents
My hopes of finally tuning out the many facets of current immigration enforcement abuse were dashed by Julie Morita’s exquisite op-ed about the effects on her parents of Executive Order 9066 84 years ago (“My parents were interned in camps for Japanese Americans. We are repeating that national sin,” Feb. 19). I have had similar thoughts about how the current situation mirrors my grandparents’ experiences.
My father’s father emigrated from Japan in 1919. He grew up in privilege and originally planned to return after receiving his master’s degree in architecture from the University of Illinois. Instead, he elected to stay and marry my grandmother, who was white. He was never interned, but after working as an architectural designer for General Motors in Flint, Michigan, for 19 years, he was fired just after Pearl Harbor and made his way to Chicago, where he started a patent drawing service in the Monadnock Building.
Immigration laws culminating in the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 precluded him from naturalizing, which in turn prevented him from becoming a licensed architect, until he was near retirement age. The inability of Japanese to naturalize in turn fed into the U.S. Supreme Court’s acceptance of the federal executive’s argument that they could not be trusted to be loyal. My grandfather was deemed a peril at the same time my dad was fighting in the U.S. infantry in the Ardennes.
On a parallel track, my mother’s mother came here from Pinsk when it was a Russian city, a few years after World War I. She was effectively a refugee fleeing pogroms. By the time her mother and siblings had the resources to follow, the same Johnson-Reed Act with its anti-Eastern and -Southern European quotas made it impossible. Instead, they went to Argentina, and my grandmother saw them only one more time. My mother never knew her grandparents. Dozens of people with the same unusual surname as my grandmother appear on lists of Holocaust victims from that region, which is now in Belarus.
Until recently, I had thought this history, while troubling, was over and done with. But now — in a perverse sort of centennial resurgence — we see the same arguments and scapegoating of vast classes of immigrants and refugees, regardless of their talent and industry, as unassimilable contaminants. (To multiply the perversity, much of this animus is driven by Stephen Miller, whose great-great-grandfather also emigrated to escape pogroms, while other relatives perished in the Holocaust.)
As before, there will be much collateral damage, along with opportunities for courage and decency. Thus I can only echo Morita’s call to note well the echoes of history and to act accordingly.
— Andrew S. Mine, Chicago
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