Rep. Shimkus is just concerned about the plants, man.

I just saw this at ThinkProgress. It tickled me. I think there were plants, like, the green, leafy kind, before there were the coal-fired energy kind. Seems like they managed before we were pumping CO2 out there via various industries. I try to do my part by exhaling CO2 around my plants. I sing classic rock tunes to them, too. But the finisher is the dramatic part I reallllly like.

"The basic finish with this comment is, the earth will not be destroyed by a flood."

The, er, sea levels are expected to rise a bit, what with the scientifically generally-accepted global warming going on, but I wonder exactly why "flood?" Progress Illinois' Adam Doster explains:

But what about Shimkus' random declaration at the end of the above clip that "the earth will not be destroyed by a flood"? To understand that one you've got to go back to his opening statement, during which he read various Bible verses, before concluding: "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."

I'm rather glad I wandered over to their site to check the original post, because that's what I kind of thought I was hearing him driving at.

And I think that's representational of something that always chills me a bit when I think about how people who are explicit and implicit Bible-believers are making policy under the influence of an assumption that we're just waiting on God. Of course we couldn't destroy the planet with an ecological mishap. We're so gonna be raptured by then. It's a kind of fatalism that encourages a "live for today" kind of thinking, and I don't think it makes for good policy.

(If one is a believer though, to get into the spirit of that train of thought, wouldn't it just make sense to be a good steward of the planet entrusted to us by God until He's ready to wind things up? If He created all this and we trashed it, wouldn't He be pissed?)