The National Religious Partnership on the Environment (NRPE) organized Mainline Protestants, Roman Catholics, Evangelicals and Jews in a special statement to the U.S. Congress pleading for a joint crusade against Global Warming and poverty.

The Religious Left prefers to deny that reducing global economic growth, even if it could affect the climate, is no way to help the poor.

Instead, the Religious Left wraps its Global Warming agenda in the mantle of caring for the poor. The NRPE’s November 1 press conference emphasized that a hotter planet will cause the poor to suffer the most. Although not stressed in the press conference, the NRPE wants government subsidizes for poorer Americans to compensate for the increased energy and transportation costs that will inevitably result from Global Warming regulation.

At least the Religious Left is tacitly admitting there will be an actual cost to all of its proposed climate change regulation. But worry not! An expanded welfare state can compensate the poor for their expenses. The NRPE appeal to the U.S. Congress insisted that the "needs of people in poverty must be a central priority as you and your colleagues develop legislation to address the critical challenge of global climate change."

Ironically, it is indeed the poor who will suffer the most from the hundreds of billions of dollars in additional taxation and increased regulation that Global Warming activists demand for saving The Planet.

It's wonderfully convenient for the Religious Left that Global Warming will be one more urgent reason for adding additional layers to the welfare state. Keeping the poor dependent on government transfer payments is politically useful. Reducing economic growth through climate change regulation will further reduce the poor's ability to escape poverty. Newly empowered people who have escaped their poverty through economic entrepreneurship are always a political threat to the statism of the Religious Left.

The NRPE’s religious officials predictably quoted Scripture about the goodness of the earth and the divine mandate for caring for "the least of these." Showing unusual restraint, they admitted that these Bible verses "do not necessarily prescribe specific policies."

But supposedly, these Scriptures do provide principles to guide Congress’ reaction to climate change, the NRPE insisted. They asserted that there is "sufficient scientific consensus about the dangers of global climate change.” Its consequences “will fall disproportionately on the world’s most vulnerable people and inaction will only worsen their suffering."

The religious humanitarians urged that climate change policies "should seek to enhance rather than diminish the economic situation of people in poverty." And they further insisted that Global Warming policies should "help vulnerable populations here and abroad adapt to adverse climate impacts."

The religious officials concluded that Congress must "shield those who contribute the least to global warming from suffering the worst of its consequences, and that those with the fewest resources should have their economic circumstances enhanced rather than diminished by implementation of the responses to it."

Nice words, but the Religious Left will not admit that its Global Warming agenda is intrinsically at odds with helping the world's poor. Very few poor will have their economic situation "enhanced" by the draconian taxation and regulation that Global Warming activists demand. An increased welfare state in the wealthy West may spare Western poor from too much additional suffering.

But no amount of increased Western aid will spare the Global South's paying a steep price for Global Warming activism’s deep hostility to economic growth. Upper middle class environmentalists in the U.S. and Europe believe that their Global Warming policies will simply result in slightly larger fuel bills, which they of course can well afford. And isn't saving the whole planet worth the price of a few Lattes at Starbucks?

Unappreciated by Western environmentalists is that hundreds of millions in Africa and Asia will have to sacrifice more than their favorite espresso. Capping international economic growth means preventing industrialization in the Global South. It means Indians and Congolese and Chinese and Nigerians and Indonesians and Brazilians and countless others will not have refrigeration, or air conditioning, or easily potable water, or cleans ways to heat their homes. For the Global South, freezing the global economy in a ephemeral attempt at affecting the climate means permanent poverty, with reduced life spans, continued plagues, unsanitary living and working conditions, and diminished opportunities for education, for Western-levels of medical care, and for convenient and safe transportation.

But Western environmentalists and the Religious Left, preoccupied by their own political goals, and blinded by their own wealth, prefer not to admit these consequences for the world's poor. In the Religious Left' mythology, much of the world remains poor only because the exploitative West is rich. If the West will sacrifice and become less rich, while transferring much of its wealth to the Global South poor, then justice will be achieved.

No amount of international welfare will lift the Global South’s poor permanently out of poverty. The West got rich because industrialization, protected by property rights, allowed millions of poor to work their way into the middle class. If given similar economic opportunities, Nigerians and Congolese and Indonesians and Indians are no less capable of achieving what Americans and Germans and French and English achieved in the 19th century.

But the Religious Left, with its environmentalist allies, opposes a wealthier world. After all, wealth creates pollution and greenhouse gases and greedy people who care more about their SUV's than about The Planet. For the Religious Left, the wealthy West is not an economic model for the poor nations but a source of shame.

During the NRPE event, National Council of Churches President Michael Livingston explained that the U.S. has "created more than 25 percent of global warming pollution.” He did not mention that the U.S. also generates 25 percent of the world’s wealth, upon which many hundreds of millions outside the U.S. depend at least partly for their livelihoods in a global economy.

Livingston and others on the Religious prefer to talk about melting icebergs and theoretical floods and hypothetical famines that their favorite computer models project possibly could occur if Global Warming accelerates. They do not admit to a lack of firm evidence that their proposed vast reductions in global economic growth meaningfully would affect climate trends. Nor will they discuss the possibility that dealing with the consequences of climate change might be more practical and humanitarian than questionable and hugely expensive tax and regulatory efforts to prevent it.

“We must provide financial support and the resources necessary to enable our brothers and sisters to eliminate the devastating impacts that global warming will have around the world," Livingston implored, in typical fashion. For him and the Religious Left, the solution is simple. The U.S. Government should cut a check. But not even the U.S. Treasury could ameliorate what Global Warming activists want to impose upon the world's poor.