The Patriot Post® · Energy and Empathy: Transitioning From Oblivion to Responsibility

By Vijay Jayaraj

At 16, I entered a boarding prep school that cut me off from the outside world. Two years later I walked onto a university campus and nearly every student carried a mobile phone. The mobile revolution had swept through society while I studied in isolation, and I had missed every sign of it.

Christians can suffer a similar blindness. We may faithfully attend worship, pray for missions, give to the poor, and teach our children Scripture, yet fail to notice the powerful ideas shaping the material conditions of our neighbors’ lives.

The first Christians understood that faithfulness could demand public clarity. Around AD 155, the aged bishop Polycarp of Smyrna refused a Roman proconsul’s demand to revile Christ and swear by Caesar. He chose the flames over denying his Lord.

From the second-century apologists to Augustine’s City of God to Abraham Kuyper’s declaration that Christ claims every square inch of creation, Christian thinkers have measured the demands of their culture against the teaching of Scripture.

In my own country, Christians fought for native women to have the right to cover their bodies — and not be burned on their husbands’ funeral pyres (the Hindu ritual of suttee). Even access to necessities of life — like water, food, and fuel — was once a right reserved for the wealthy in many parts of my country.

Hard-hearted Elitism vs. the World’s Poor

I dare say a form of such elitism still exists, practiced in open daylight, not just in India, but globally. It is better known as energy apartheid.

We live in a society deeply intertwined with energy use. In the still developing parts of the world, energy determines whether a mother cooks without choking smoke, whether a clinic refrigerates medicine, whether a child studies after sunset, whether a farmer irrigates a field, and whether a church can serve its community without depending on unreliable power.

Even in the wealthy nations of Europe, the disparity is unmissable. For a wealthy household, a higher bill may mean postponing a purchase. For a poor household, it can mean less food, less heating, reduced mobility, or a return to unsafe fuels. Energy inflation punishes the poor first and most severely.

This reality demands that we become keenly aware of its influence on our lives and choices. Your perception of the energy reality and God’s calling to carry out the Great Commission relate far more closely than you might realize.

The Cultural Mandate and Energy Choices

God gave humanity the cultural mandate in Genesis to exercise dominion over the Earth. This dominion is not exploitation but cultivating Earth’s resources for human flourishing. When we harness coal, oil, and natural gas, we utilize the abundant resources God placed beneath our feet to lift our neighbors out of crushing poverty.

How does this theological truth manifest practically? Consider the choices we make on matters of life and power. Imagine a government minister or department head who chooses to support policies making electricity cheap for the poorest among us globally.

Many churches and charitable organizations want to bring electricity to communities that lack it. That desire is good. The mistake comes when donors select technology for ideological reasons rather than asking what will deliver dependable power at a cost the community can sustain.

Picture a church mission fund deciding to help a rural African village connect to the main electrical grid rather than installing inferior solar panels and wind turbines. The solar option looks cheaper on paper, and that is exactly the problem. Energy economist Lars Schernikau shows that the levelized cost of electricity, the metric most often quoted to promote wind and solar, ignores the backup, storage, and transmission those sources require. He cites the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency’s own finding that a higher share of wind and solar always raises total system costs.

Envision a simpler case of a nonprofit providing portable gas cylinders for cooking instead of leaving families to burn highly polluting wood and coal inside their small homes. Across much of Africa and Asia, women still cook over wood, charcoal, crop waste, or coal. The smoke fills their homes and their children’s lungs. The World Health Organization attributes millions of premature deaths each year to household air pollution from these fuels.

These are profound moral choices. Supporting affordable, reliable energy aligns directly with loving your neighbor. Denying them that energy under the guise of environmentalism abandons them to suffering.

Recently, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency repealed most of the Biden administration’s greenhouse gas requirements for power plants, a move the agency projects will save $310 billion, and proposed scrapping every remaining greenhouse gas standard for the power sector. The agency stated that its models show power plant emissions have no material effect on global climate and that eliminating them would produce no meaningful climate impact.

Without this intervention, Americans were set to pay hundreds of billions of dollars in compliance costs for a climate benefit the regulator itself now calls negligible. In fact, many around the world are paying excessive charges for electricity because their governments have instituted emission-control policies that deny affordable and abundant hydrocarbon fuel-based power to the people.

A Call for Christian Understanding

This is why the church needs Christians who understand energy markets, mining, electricity grids, industrial development, household pollution, and the economics of poverty well enough to ask difficult questions.

This is not a distraction from ministry. It can be ministry.

The question is whether we are willing to understand that system well enough to steward it faithfully. That may require Christians to study matters far beyond the basics.

We should learn how electricity grids work. We should understand the difference between intermittent generation and power available on demand. We should examine the real costs and who bears the cost of energy restrictions.

Most of all, we should keep the human person in view. God did not command us to preserve poverty. He commanded us to love our neighbors. And sometimes loving our neighbors begins with something as ordinary, and as consequential, as helping them turn on the lights.

Vijay Jayaraj is Research Associate for Developing Countries with the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, a Science and Research Associate at the CO₂ Coalition, and a Visiting Fellow at the U.S. National Center for Energy Analytics. He holds a M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, postgraduate degree in Energy management from Robert Gordon University and has served as a research assistant at the University of British Columbia’s Fisheries Center in Canada.