by E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., Founder and National Spokesman, The Cornwall Alliance

The Evangelical Environmental Network declared Friday, May 20, “National Day of Prayer for Creation Care.” While I’m wholeheartedly in favor of praying for a clean, healthful, beautiful Earth every day, I’m cautious about this campaign.

What raised my concern was the campaign’s central emphasis this year: “The day will focus on the impacts of mercury on the unborn …,” said an email. Then, at EEN’s website, the page on “Mercury & the Unborn” claimed, “Approximately one in every six babies in the U.S. are born with harmful mercury levels in their blood.” Finally, a fact sheet on “Mercury and the Unborn Child” claimed, “The main source of mercury pollution is dirty air released by coal-burning power plants.”

Those three things raised my suspicions and set me about obeying Scripture’s command to “test all things, hold fast what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21).

The reference to coal-burning power plants was immediately suspect. Why? First, because 20 to 80 percent, probably about 70 percent, of mercury deposited in the U.S. actually comes from non-U.S. sources. Second, because coal has been in the Greens’ crosshairs for decades. Yet coal power plants provide about 50% of America’s electricity (as EEN admits) at a fraction of the cost and with much greater reliability than “Green” alternatives like wind and solar (which EEN promotes), and affordable, reliable electricity is crucial to human well being. The drive to reduce its use conveniently serves radical environmentalists’ desire to de-industrialize Western civilization—a goal that would necessitate a much smaller, much poorer, much less healthy, much shorter-lived human population. EEN doesn’t share this radical environmentalist goal, but by joining the effort to reduce coal use, it promotes it, even if unintentionally.

Ironically, this means EEN’s promoting stiff mercury emission regulations, which would force reduced use of coal and steep increases in electricity prices, links concern for the unborn (a clear appeal to Christians’ pro-life sympathies) with a radical environmentalist agenda that EEN does not embrace—an agenda that is distinctly anti-human and would lead to far higher rates of disease and premature death than the mercury exposure the EEN wants to reduce—even if its claims about mercury were true.

But they’re not.

I’d seen similar claims before, about half a dozen years ago. …

Those claims, however, badly exaggerated findings of a survey of mercury in Americans’ blood by the Centers for Disease Control. In reality, fewer than 1 in 1,000 American women had levels as high as those associated with even very subtle neurological effects (not with broader cognitive and intellectual performance) in children.

What accounts for the difference between “one in six” or “one in 12” and “1 in 1,000”? NRDC and Friends of the Earth confused what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) calls the “Reference Dose” with “a dangerous level.”

On the contrary, EPA’s Reference Dose is intentionally set unrealistically low …. EPA’s Reference Dose is multiples lower than necessary to ensure safety. To put it differently, while EPA is sure there’s no significant risk of harm at exposures below the Reference Dose, it doesn’t assert that exposures above it are harmful.

As a result, claims that mercury emissions from coal power plants are putting one in six unborn babies at risk of neurological harm are at best badly exaggerated, at worst, outright false. Rather than one in six (which would be about 690,000), the number is more likely about one in 1,000 (about 4,130). And the risk of harm to them is actually vanishingly small, while the harm, when it does occur, is also so subtle as to be almost undetectable. . . .

[A shorter, less technical version of this article appeared last week in The Washington Times and at Crosswalk.com.]

Focus on the Family Citizen Magazine Reports Fruitful Use of Resisting the Green Dragon in Churches

“Many Christian leaders currently using the [Cornwall Alliance’s Resisting the Green Dragon] DVD series in their churches … say that it is helping to counter the trends [toward radical environmentalism], especially among young people,” wrote Barbara Pogue in a 2-page feature article about Resisting the Green Dragon in Citizen Magazine’s May 2011 issue.

“… environmentalists are actively targeting the church—especially its youth, who are already saturated day after day with green propaganda from public schools, movies, television, radio and the Internet,” Pogue explained. “Now, organizations like Interfaith Power and Light (mission: ‘mobilizing a religious response to global warming’) are writing environmental curricula for church preschools.”

Resisting the Green Dragon “trains kids to spot the hazards of a ‘green’ worldview—and how to care for the earth the biblical way,” Pogue continued.

She told of two churches, among many, that have used the video series already.

“Kevin Boling, senior pastor of Mountain Bridge Bible Fellowship in South Carolina, has been showing the DVDs to his congregation of about 100 members, mostly young families—and says others in their 20s are also coming because they want to understand their stewardship responsibilities from a practical standpoint.

“Boling’s audience goes well beyond them. He hosts a radio program that covers all of South Carolina and parts of North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia and is broadcast live online. He dedicates Wednesdays to playing the DVD and answering questions because ‘this may be the issue of our time, and we need to know how to think about this intelligently and biblically so that we know how to respond.’”

“In upstate New York,” Pogue continued, “a group of youthful church members ranging from pre-teens to college students are having lively conversations with adults that include scientists and engineers. William Basener, an associate professor of mathematics at the Rochester Institute and an elder of New Horizon Christian Fellowship, shows the series on Sunday afternoons while his pastor, Mike Hicks, runs them on Wednesdays.

“Basener and his wife, a former high school science teacher, home school their five children, ages 1 to 11, and the older two watch the series, bringing up topics throughout the week. He says the congregation especially enjoys discussing how the green worldview is spread through popular media and movies and that the series provides a terrific opportunity to train families to talk about a variety of issues ‘beyond the green philosophies.’”

Focus on the Family, one of America’s premier evangelical ministries, has endorsed and is promoting the groundbreaking new resource.

Cornwall Alliance is grateful for Focus on the Family’s support and glad to recommend Citizen Magazine to our readers. To read Citizen's feature article, click here. To subscribe to the magazine, click here.