This is horrific:“In just the last forty years, according to the World Wildlife Fund, more than half of the world’s vertebrate animals have died; in just the last twenty-five, one study of German nature preserves found, the flying insect population declined by three-quarters.” Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth (pp. 25-26). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition. This just in from a phone call Continue Reading
“If you had to invent a threat grand enough, and global enough, to plausibly conjure into being a system of true international cooperation, climate change would be it—the threat everywhere, and overwhelming, and total. And yet now, just as the need for that kind of cooperation is paramount, indeed necessary for anything like the world we know to survive, we Continue Reading
Back to the Wallace-Wells book, on “Feedback loops”: “A warming planet leads to melting Arctic ice, which means less sunlight reflected back to the sun and more absorbed by a planet warming faster still, which means an ocean less able to absorb atmospheric carbon and so a planet warming faster still. A warming planet will also melt Arctic permafrost, which Continue Reading
“This is what is often called the problem of environmental justice; a sharper, less gauzy phrase would be “climate caste system.” The problem is acute within countries, even wealthy ones, where the poorest are those who live in the marshes, the swamps, the floodplains, the inadequately irrigated places with the most vulnerable infrastructure—altogether an unwitting environmental apartheid. Wallace-Wells, David. The Continue Reading
So I am wondering about what may be ahead for the UMC** in terms of the need to focus more of our energies on the Ecological Crisis as a theological crisis and call to responsibility; a close kin and perhaps central tenet of what God is doing amongst us as our moral failings as humanity now threaten, in a most Continue Reading
“It is important to mobilize people who at the moment are concerned, but basically complacent, and turn them into people who are much more activated and essentially voting about climate as a first-order political priority rather than a third- or fourth-order priority – judging politicians on the basis of their climate policy.”— David Wallace-Wells in an interview in The Guardian Continue Reading
“The majority of the burning has come since the premiere of Seinfeld. Since the end of World War II, the figure is about 85 percent. The story of the industrial world’s kamikaze mission is the story of a single lifetime—the planet brought from seeming stability to the brink of catastrophe in the years between a baptism or bar mitzvah and Continue Reading
“more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades. Which means we have done as much damage to the fate of the planet and its ability to sustain human life and civilization since Al Gore published his first book on climate than in all Continue Reading
Feinstein: “Ive been doing this for 30 years”.What? Putting off meaningful and sufficient action on the mess we’re making? Voting to kick the can down the road? I think it’s enough (and too much). Please step aside. (My comments inspired by McKibben’s article in the New Yorder, and observation that it’s been 30 years since James Hansen testified before Congress Continue Reading
“We need people in every organized workplace to be getting together and imagining what their workplace would look like if they took rapid de-carbonization seriously. And asking how could it improve lives? How could it lead to a fairer economy?” — Naomi Klein https://buff.ly/2Nomqt0 She is so awesome!
Another twitter exchange re: AOC and Climate:
My reply to a twitter commenter making what he thought was a joke about the “the world is going to end in 12 years”: https://twitter.com/Acool2Minutes/status/1096812647520108545
“I think the brilliance of the Green New Deal framework is that it doesn’t ask people to choose. It says, “We all care about the end of the world. But we also care about the end of the month. So how do we design policies that simultaneously lower emissions and lower that economic strain?” And that’s exactly what they’re trying Continue Reading
I have a “problem” with Naomi Klein in that I can never stop succumbing to the temptation to quote too much of her articles. No surprise that her book “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate” was THE one I point to that really did set me on a new path in my theological mission and focus: To help enable Continue Reading
“Of course it mattered to have FDR in power instead of Herbert Hoover, but it mattered even more to have an organized population which was flexing its muscles in every conceivable way in the 1930s—from sit-down strikes in auto plants, to shutting down the ports on the West Coast, to shutting down entire cities with general strikes. And it mattered Continue Reading