Bismillah, alhamdulillah:
Your first response would be a Muslim scholar or even a video excerpt by a certain Osama. Well you may be suprised that this is the type of conversation occurring in the US halls of power. Talking about the new congress elections here is a transcript from the Amy Goodman show with Ryan Grim (correspondent for the Huffington Post) quote from a Republican Senator called John Shimkus being discussed on the Democracy Now website (speech highlight is mine). Note Ryan Grim’s analysis, the site also has this on video as well:
REP. JOHN SHIMKUS: So I want to start with Genesis 8, verse 21 and 22. “Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done. As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.” I believe that’s the infallible word of God, and that’s the way it’s going to be for His creation.
The second verse comes from Matthew 24. “And He will send His angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather His elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other.” The earth will end only when God declares its time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth. This earth will not be destroyed by a flood. And I appreciate having panelists here who are men of faith, and we can get into the theological discourse of that position, but I do believe God’s word is infallible, unchanging, perfect.
Today we have about 388 parts per million in the atmosphere. I think in the age of the dinosaurs, where we had most flora and fauna, we were probably at 4,000 parts per million. There is a theological debate that this is a carbon-starved planet—not too much carbon.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s the Illinois Republican Congress member John Shimkus, the new chair of the Subcommittee on Environment and Economy. Ryan Grim?
RYAN GRIM: Yeah, and what’s really remarkable about that clip that you just played is that it wasn’t something that was, you know, surreptitiously recorded at some obscure Christian conference where he thought he was speaking just to the faithful. That comes from a congressional hearing, where you have scientists that come before the panel in order to talk about the dangers of climate change. And that’s his response. And that’s one of this scariest things about the takeover of this committee, is because there isn’t a lot of time to reverse climate change. As he said, the carbon concentration is approaching 400 parts per million. It’s probably gone beyond, according to most scientists, the threshold by which there start being these feedback mechanisms that just send climate change over a cliff. So, it’s going to be extremely hard to get carbon emissions to start reversing when you have people who are just quoting the Bible as their scientific policy.
Now, Shimkus and Upton are going to be going after the EPA, which is the last chance that the U.S. has to turn around carbon emissions, at least at this point. And Shimkus almost became the committee chairman. He gave quite a run against Upton to get that chair. And that’s one of the things that drove Upton so far to the right. Now, I followed that race pretty closely, and it was always a long shot, but his goal was to raise his profile, which he did, and to put himself as the next in line behind Upton, when he moves on, because House Republicans have term limits where you can only serve three terms as chairman. So, we could see him as chairman of the committee overseeing the energy industry.
Filed under: World Affairs, Fundamentalist christian in US congress, John Shimkus
