As persons of faith, we believe that the health of God's children is paramount and that we should practice good stewardship of God's creation. With these two core beliefs in mind, we call on Senators Ben Nelson and Mike Johanns to oppose S.J. Res. 26, commonly known as "the Dirty Air Act." In 1970, a Democratic Congress and a Republican president worked together to pass the Clean Air Act (CAA), which has kept the air our children breathe safe ever since. Unfortunately, between 1992 and 2007 dirty energy sources not covered by the CAA led to a 16 percent increase in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

Three big companies quit an influential lobbying group that had focused on shaping climate-change legislation, in the latest sign that support for an ambitious bill is melting away. Oil giants BP PLC and ConocoPhillips and heavy-equipment maker Caterpillar Inc. said Tuesday they won't renew their membership in the three-year-old U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a broad business-environmental coalition that had been instrumental in building support in Washington for capping emissions of greenhouse gases.

Franciscan Sr. Kathie Uhler has for months been working on a series of panel presentations to the United Nations that will show the damage exploitative mining has had on the indigenous populations of countries like Peru, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. As Uhler has learned in her research, inhabitants of an area are often unaware of mining-for gems, coal, or oil-that is taking place a short distance from their homes, perhaps on a mountaintop, until natural resources have already been polluted.

One reliable way to gauge the impact of a papal message is the amount of energy that pundits invest in analyzing, dissecting and recasting it. The rule of thumb is that the more spin a given statement breeds, the more important it probably is. By that test, Pope Benedict XVI's teaching on the environment, expressed most recently in a message for the church-sponsored "World Day of Peace" on Jan. 1, would seem to be pretty important indeed.

Pope Benedict XVI denounced the failure of world leaders to agree to a new climate change treaty in Copenhagen last month, saying Monday that world peace depends on safeguarding God's creation. He issued the admonition in a speech to ambassadors accredited to the Vatican, an annual appointment during which the pontiff reflects on issues the Vatican wants to highlight to the diplomatic corps.

Mountaintop coal mining -- in which Appalachian peaks are blasted off and stream valleys buried under tons of rubble -- is so destructive that the government should stop giving out new permits to do it, a group of scientists said in a paper released Thursday. The group, headed by a University of Maryland researcher, did one of the most comprehensive studies to date of the controversial practice, also known as "mountaintop removal."

With time running out on the stalled Copenhagen climate negotiations, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton gave new hope that an agreement might still be reached when she announced Thursday that the United States would help raise $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poor nations combat climate change. The talks are scheduled to end Friday, when President Obama and more than 100 other heads of state are due to arrive. Mrs. Clinton's announcement signaled the first time the Obama administration had made a commitment to a medium-term financing effort, even though she did not specify the American contribution to this fund.

The heat is on climate negotiators who are "running out of time" because of differences between developing countries and the world's wealthiest nations, an African observer at the Copenhagen climate conference said. "It's extremely difficult to say what is going to happen now," Stephen Mutiso of the Kenya office of Trocaire, a Catholic aid organization, told Catholic News Service Dec. 14 in a telephone interview from Copenhagen. Talks at the climate conference were suspended for several hours Dec. 14 when African delegates walked out.