At the briefing, (PCA Minister) Calvin Beisner, founder and national spokesman for the Cornwall Alliance, rejected the use of the pro-life cause to further the campaign against mercury emissions. “It is in fact not a serious risk to life at all,” Beisner said. “Those who are exposed to the supposedly harmful levels of methylmercury do not pay for those levels with their lives.

Environmentalists’ efforts to replace coal and other conventional fuels with alternative energy may result in actually harming the environment and human beings, according to a new paper released by a coalition of primarily evangelical Christians and scientists.

The document, released by the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation at an Oct. 31 briefing on Capitol Hill, points to the following problems in the approach taken to creation care even by some well-intentioned evangelicals:

— Efforts to preserve the environment through centralized government mandates instead of the free-market system can hurt the poor by reducing prosperity and “lead to further environmental degradation;”

— Government regulation of less expensive energy sources, such as coal and natural gas, “may cost more lives through reduced income than they save by avoiding the risk they regulate against,” while crippling businesses.

— The promotion of “green” energy would appear to undermine job and economic growth without any assurance it would improve the environment.

Attempts to improve the environment “must be honest,” said economics professor Timothy Terrell in the paper.

“Modern environmentalism, however, has employed fear and hyperbole to accomplish goals that may have as much to do with shutting down industrial competition as with promoting a cleaner world,” wrote Terrell, a senior fellow with the Cornwall Alliance.

Through the exaggeration of threats to the environment “while downplaying the all-too-real costs of the policies they support, ‘stewardship’ is distorted into a government regulatory agenda that impoverishes and destroys lives,” said Terrell, who is on the faculty at Wofford College in Spartanburg, S.C.

At the briefing, Terrell said the Cornwall Alliance is concerned about the poor in the United States and around the world. “I think the green energy movement has had a detrimental impact on the poor elsewhere in the world,” he said.

The lack of knowledge by human beings and the great complexity of both the environment and economics should produce humility in those seeking to care for creation, not centralized attempts to gain control in either arena, Terrell said in the paper.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory effort to reduce mercury emissions from power plants is an example of what appears will be insignificant results at a high price, he wrote.

[Editor’s note: This article is incomplete. The source for this document was originally published on bpnews.net—however, the original URL is no longer available.]