It’s Now or Never on Climate Change

IT'S EASY to get discouraged. The Paris climate accord is the most significant multinational agreement yet to address climate change. Every country in the world, and Palestine, signed it. “That’s a lot of countries!” said former President Obama.

But on June 1, 2017, President Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement. By abdicating U.S. presidential leadership, Trump left it to the rest of the world’s governments to address the greatest crisis humanity has ever seen.

The depressing actions of the current administration are legion. Using federal agencies and executive orders, Trump is dismantling the climate progress so many have worked for. In September, federal agencies deregulated the release of methane gas, which traps about 25 times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide does. The Trump administration has allowed land set aside as national monuments to be pillaged for oil and gas drilling and mineral extraction. A fossil fuel corporate lawyer now working for the Environmental Protection Agency has dismantled our clean air regulations. The EPA has established incentives to encourage more than 300 coal plants to continue polluting our air and land.

If human-induced atmospheric warming continues at the current rate, the world will cross the 1.5-degree Celsius threshold of global temperature increase around 2040, much earlier than previously estimated, according to an October 2018 report from the International Panel on Climate Change, the first update since the Paris Agreement. Without aggressive action, food shortages and wildfires will worsen, water shortages will hit urban areas, killer heatwaves and violent storms will be more frequent, coastal areas will experience sea level rise, and populations will migrate. Humanity must become laser focused on achieving net zero emissions if creation as we know it is to survive. In other words, it’s now or never on climate change.

But as poet Theodore Roethke reminds us, “In a dark time, the eye begins to see.”

Millions of courageous people throughout the world are acting to save our future. Individually these actions may seem small and inconsequential. But they are seeds, and, as Jesus taught, seeds are powerful, the source of something much larger. And just as important, as any gardener trying to beat back midsummer weeds can tell you: Seeds are made to spread and multiply.

“Like a mustard seed ...”

Most Americans are committed to building climate resiliency. Some 79 percent foresee a serious problem for the U.S. if nothing is done to prevent global warming, according to a July 2018 survey by ABC News, Stanford University, and Resources for the Future. Ordinary Americans, governors, mayors, business leaders, and community institutions are working to accelerate and make inevitable a quick transition to clean, renewable energy.

Following Trump’s announcement to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, California Gov. Jerry Brown and Michael Bloomberg, the U.N. special envoy for climate action, launched America’s Pledge. This initiative documents and encourages efforts by nonfederal U.S. organizations to drive down greenhouse gas emissions in keeping with the goals set in Paris. In a parallel movement, companies, universities, environmental organizations, and other regional bodies initiated We Are Still In. As of August, more than 2,800 signatories (representing more than 150 million people, 17 states, 400 cities, and GDP totaling $9.6 trillion) have pledged to meet the goal of limiting global warming to “well below 2 degrees Celsius.” The U.S. Climate Alliance and U.S. Climate Mayors are also offering leadership.

“[T]his ‘bottom up’ movement will put us within striking distance of the U.S. commitment to the Paris Agreement, even with zero support from our federal government,” said Bloomberg.

“Fulfilling America’s Pledge,” a 2018 study funded by Bloomberg and conducted by independent researchers, indicates that the U.S. is almost halfway to the Paris target of reducing, by 2025, CO2 emissions by 26 to 28 percent below what they were in 2005.

“This momentum in turn sets the stage for more rapid decarbonization in the 2025-2030 period. This analysis demonstrates that essential deep decarbonization (80 percent or more by 2050) can be led by the bottom-up efforts of real economy actors—but only with deep collaboration and engagement,” the Bloomberg study reports.

Ahead of the September Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco, Gov. Brown signed an executive order calling for California to achieve “zero carbon emissions by 2045.” Brown also signed SB100 into law, committing California—the world’s fifth-largest economy—to receiving 100 percent of its electricity from noncarbon renewable sources by 2045. Combined, these bold actions extend California’s carbon reduction beyond the electricity sector and into the whole economy, including transportation, agriculture, and construction.

Hawaii has also committed to transitioning to 100 percent renewable energy. Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Washington, D.C., will likely follow.

These important actions in response to the Paris pledge are only the beginning.

“Someone took the seed and sowed it ...”

People of faith are realizing that we need to have an impact on both the demand side and the supply side of the energy market. The cost of wind and solar power is plummeting, becoming even cheaper in some places than fossil fuel power. Several Christian denominations are leading in this necessary and inevitable transition.

In 2013, the United Church of Christ became the first religious body and first national body in the U.S. to vote to divest from fossil fuel companies. Other religious groups soon followed. Around the world, philanthropic organizations, colleges, universities, cities, pension programs, and the entire country of Ireland have joined the movement. Thus far, nearly 900 institutions, with total assets of more than $6 trillion, have committed to divest from fossil fuel holdings.

In 2016, 30,000 members of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church passed its first climate resolution. The AME Church is committed to supporting climate policies that protect families, create healthy and safe communities, and build a clean energy future.

In 2017, the Disciples of Christ voted unanimously to commit its individual members, congregations, and ministries to achieve carbon neutrality in their individual and communal lives by the year 2030.

In addition, a total of 122 Catholic institutions have announced their commitment to step away from fossil fuels, according to the Global Catholic Climate Movement.

In June 2018, Western and Eastern religious leaders, representing 1.6 billion people, convened to confront the climate crisis. Bartholomew I, ecumenical patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church, gathered 200 leaders from the fields of science, government, public policy, business, and religion in Greece to examine the most up-to-date climate science, current climate-change threats, and the most promising strategic responses.

As the gathering concluded, Pope Francis took the unprecedented step of summoning the CEOs of the top oil and gas companies (ExxonMobil, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Pemex, and others), as well as the money managers of major financial institutions, for a meeting in Rome. The pope acknowledged that we face a challenge “of epochal proportions” and urged industry leaders to embrace this immense opportunity for a rapid transition to renewable forms of energy. We have a duty “toward millions of our brothers and sisters around the world, poorer countries and generations yet to come,” said Pope Francis.

Also in 2018, the revival of the Poor People’s Campaign in the U.S. helped thousands to recognize the intersectionality of all justice issues, asserting that clean water, air, and a healthy environment are fundamental human rights. They called for public resources to be used to reverse the polluting impacts of the fossil fuel industry. The terrible truth is that the most economically vulnerable are hit first and worst by the ravages of climate change.

“It is the smallest of all the seeds, but ...”

Bottom-up efforts by people of faith and others are germinating substantive social change. Over the past decade, thousands have risked arrest by blocking the expansion of the fossil fuel infrastructure as part of a “keep it in the ground” movement.

In 2017, 20 to 30 percent of delegates at the United Church of Christ national synod indicated that they had engaged in civil disobedience to stop government actions they considered morally wrong.

In Pennsylvania, an order of Catholic nuns was told by the government that a field they owned would be claimed by eminent domain for a fracked-gas pipeline. The nuns responded by building a chapel in that field—right in the path of the proposed pipeline.

The Indigenous Peoples of Canada won a temporary victory in August 2017 when Canada’s federal court overturned the approval of Kinder Morgan Canada’s Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project.

Here’s how we can know that these and other actions of civil disobedience are having a profound impact:

In August, Louisiana made it a felony to trespass at a pipeline site. Thirty-one states have considered similar legislation. The Department of Homeland Security and Federal Emergency Management Agency have organized “field force operations” to teach “mass-arrest procedures,” “riot-control formations,” and other “crowd-control methods,” specifically for pipeline protests.

Just as Jesus’ first-century followers resisted the oppression of the Roman Empire, people of faith today are speaking truth to power. In these dark times, nonviolent civil disobedience must become a normative expression of discipleship in Christian communities. And we must support one another in enduring the cost of this discipleship.

When the Trump administration initiated its withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, the United Church of Christ responded by passing (by 97 percent) a resolution declaring the need for a new moral era on climate change, naming three moral imperatives.

First, clergy must accept the mantle of moral leadership and preach on climate change.

Second, all people of faith need to “incarnate the changes we long for” by “making decisions of integrity in our energy choices” and by “undoing the disproportionate impact of climate change on communities of color, Indigenous communities, and poor white communities around the world.”

Third, all must “proclaim truth in the public square.” We must “resist all expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure and demand new sources of renewable energy that are accessible to all communities.” One year later, the Presbyterian General Assembly passed a nearly identical resolution.

We can take heart. People of faith are providing moral leadership, prophesying a course of action, experimenting with its implementation, and living into God’s future.

“When it has grown ...”

The “future”—represented by a courageous, unrelenting group of teenagers—is also suing the federal government and corporations for their failure to mitigate climate change.

Our Children’s Trust filed Juliana v. United States in 2015, a constitutional climate-change lawsuit against the federal government. The 21 youth plaintiffs argue that it is the government’s duty to protect the climate and that the plaintiffs have a constitutional right to a future not wrecked by climate change. When the court case was filed, the children were between 7 and 18 years old.

Over the past three years, these young people defeated numerous attempts to block the trial by the fossil fuel industry, the Obama administration, and the Trump administration. This is the first time global warming is getting a full hearing in a high court.

In U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken’s 2016 ruling on the case, she said, “Exercising my ‘reasoned judgment,’ I have no doubt that the right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life is fundamental to a free and ordered society ... a stable climate system is quite literally the foundation ‘of society, without which there would be neither civilization nor progress.’”

In November, the Supreme Court overruled the Trump administration’s most recent attempt to dismiss the case. The trial is proceeding and has become the model for similar cases in 13 other countries.

“It is the greatest of shrubs ...”

As biblical scholar Walter Wink explained: This is how we write the future, this is how history is made: by envisioning new alternative possibilities and acting on them as if they were inevitable.

Reshaping history is a daunting task, especially when the corporate and financial “powers and principalities” oppose our goals. We are living on the hinge of history, the first generation to foresee, and the final generation with an opportunity to forestall, the most catastrophic consequences of climate change.

“And becomes a tree, so that the birds make nests in its branches.”

Each of us—and all of us together—must decide what role we will play in the life God has given us. Can we become the generation that answers God’s call to restore creation?

We can. We are the mustard seed Jesus spoke of, the tiny seed that has germinated and is becoming a large and sturdy plant. But wait. During Jesus’ time, the mustard plant was considered a weed!

We all know what weeds are like. You can’t get rid of them. No matter how hard you try, they rise again. Weeds are unstoppable. And so are we.