By Rev. Jim Ball
Advent is a time of anticipation as we await the arrival or birth of our Savior on Christmas day. For those of us working to improve the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, we had a great deal of anticipation about how the bill and the provisions for the poor we worked hard to secure would fare as the Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee considered S. 2191. I’m happy to report that on Dec. 5 the EPW Committee voted to approve the bill and send it to the floor with important provisions for the poor that we had fought hard for still intact. Thus, we’ve been given an early Christmas present. (If you were thinking of what to get me for Christmas, it’s already been taken care of).
The key turning point for whether the bill would be something we could support was a meeting of religious leaders with Sen. John Warner on Nov. 27. We had been told that he would not agree to our major requests related to strengthening the provisions related to helping the poorest of the poor around the world adapt to the consequences of climate change – that he was “intractable.”
So expectations were low, and we were already developing our strategy of how we would try to move forward without his support – although we knew that success without him would be very hard to accomplish. The outcome of the meeting exceeded our wildest expectations of what we could achieve for the poor at this stage.
While all of the religious communities played an important role, Sen. Warner himself singled out evangelicals as a community he felt was important. Rich Cizik (NAE) and I were the evangelicals in the meeting, and Rich mentioned our polling results, including that 84% of evangelicals were in favor of climate legislation. Rich helped him understand that the evangelical community was changing and growing in its concern for the poor and for God’s creation.
When Sen. Warner saw how much all of us were committed to the international adaptation provision, he said to his aide, “Chelsea, go get the bill.” When the appropriate pages were handed to him, he took out his pen and said, “So tell me what you want.”
I reiterated to him what one of our Catholic colleagues had said earlier for the group, that we wanted the funds targeted to Least Developed Countries. So Sen. Warner scratched out the language we wanted deleted and wrote “least developed countries.” Then he asked, “What’s next?” At that point my colleague Walt Grazer pulled out all of our suggested changes and handed them to him. He then said, “Chelsea, let’s get this done today.” Around 10pm that evening Chelsea emailed us the changed language that is now in the bill the EPW Committee approved on December 5.
While Rich and I played our roles in this meeting, we were representing you. Without you, we could not have played our part. So together the ECI, EEN, and the NAE are achieving great things.
This was an important victory. While there will be many more battles to be waged before a bill is passed, we can now move forward in a supportive rather than critical stance.
God bless you all, and have a peaceful Christmas.
Rev. Jim Ball is the President & CEO of the Evangelical Environmental Network
Evangelical Environmental Network 