Climate change

AMONG THE MANY postures toward climate change, I am in the “alarmed” camp. I see indicators of a planet on the verge of widespread ecosystem collapse and want to sound the bells for everyone else to wake up and do something. Unfortunately, writes climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, some of the ways we try to wake people up can have the opposite effect.

Saving Us expands on Hayhoe’s popular TED Talk on the most important thing you can do about climate change: talk about it. The book explores why piling on sobering facts and predictions can make someone dismissive about climate change even more antagonistic, and even make those who are concerned and alarmed check out in despair. Though Hayhoe includes plenty of climate science, what makes this book worth reading are the insights she shares from social science.

This week, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report on the state of the climate crisis. It is a report that frames, in the cautious language of science, the dire state of the world. This panel of experts from around the world found that warming of 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius in the next century is certain unless there are extreme and immediate cuts in greenhouse gases. This level of warming would spread and intensify the kinds of extreme weather — hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and heat waves — we have seen unfold for over a decade. This report shows us the reality that our actions will not be enough to prevent catastrophic climate change. Immediate action on climate can prevent the worst effects of climate change — but catastrophe has already happened. Catastrophes are happening all around us.

Modernity claims humans are the only citizens — the owners and rulers of nature – thus fracturing our relationship with nature and with one another as we compete to amass or inherit resources. This voracious system is built to protect those with wealth and their resources rather than to protect human and natural life. The deadly consequences of this paradigm are evident: Last month, the United States experienced the hottest June on record since we began keeping track 127 years ago.

Texas ought to have a climate plan because that's the loving thing to do.

TRUMP IS BEHIND us now—four years of constant provocation and useless cruelty are over, which means ... we have about nine years left for the most important task any civilization has ever taken on. I want to lay out the basic math of our situation, because if we are at all serious about taking care of the earth God gave us (and we should be, since that was literally our first instruction), that math rules the day.

1) We are currently on a path to raise the temperature of the planet 3 degrees Celsius or more by century’s end. If we do that, we can’t have civilizations like the ones we’re used to—already, at barely more than 1 degree, wildfires and hurricanes have begun to strain our ability to respond.

2) In 2015, the world’s governments pledged in Paris to try and hold the rise in temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The United States, shamefully, exited that agreement for a time, but now we’re back in.

3) To meet that target, scientists say we need to cut emissions in half by 2030 and then go on cutting until, by 2050, we’ve stopped burning fossil fuel altogether. But the crucial year is not 2050. It’s 2030—if we haven’t made huge cuts by then, we’ll miss the chance to stop short of utter catastrophe.

Kyle Meyaard-Schaap is the national organizer and spokesperson for Young Evangelicals for Climate Action. He spoke with Sojourners' Jenna Barnett.

“IN 2017, Young Evangelicals for Climate Action marched in the People’s Climate March. [The next day] we invited God’s spirit to go with us into the halls of Congress. After we shared why climate change is important to us as young Christians, Sen. Mitch McConnell’s staffer asked, ‘How many of you identify as conservative or Republican?’ Nobody raised their hand. The staffer smiled, like he suspected this was a Trojan horse kind of deal where we were bringing young progressives in here and pretending like we were evangelicals. One by one the young people told the staffer how they had grown up in conservative Christian households and that many of them still held those values. But because the party had left them behind on climate change, they could no longer claim the party.

Speculative futurism isn’t mentally escaping into a future that is either far more dystopic than our present or far more utopic than we should expect — nihilistically leaning into our sense of dread and doom, or engaging an escapist fantasy that all will be better someday and calling this ungrounded vision “hope” can both be momentarily comforting. A speculative futurist ecclesiology looks at every fault line exposed by this pandemic alongside every gift and grace it illuminates. 

The One Trillion Trees Initiative, launched by the World Economic Forum and led by led by the U.N. Environment Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization, is, as its name implies, an afforestation/reforestation effort. It was designed to support the U.N. Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021-2030 announced in March 2019, offered as a “proven measure to fight the climate crisis and enhance food security, water supply and biodiversity.”

The religious community shares a moral responsibility to protect others from the harms of methane pollution and the devastation of climate change. it is our moral responsibility to act now. We must stand for the health of all humanity and work to limit methane pollution in our communities, especially among the most vulnerable.