IPLog

Grace Cathedral Goes Solar

Greater Washington Pastor Honored for Environmental Efforts

The DC-area Sun Gazette writes:

Rev. Janet Parker, pastor for parish life at Rock Spring Congregational United Church of Christ, recently was named winner of the 2008 Earth Day Sermon contest, sponsored by Greater Washington Interfaith Power and Light.

Using the story of Noah, Parker sermonized that people of faith have to take leadership and respond to global changes.

In recent years, the Rock Spring congregation has worked to reduce its energy bills by 15 percent by installing efficient lighting systems, and has started an organic garden that produces vegetables for the Arlington Food Assistance Center.

To honor Parker, the organization is donating compact fluorescent light bulbs to Doorways for Women and Families.

Solar Grace

Yesterday, the Interfaith Power and Light office spent the morning at a quick little press conference and I thought that y’all might enjoy this pictures that Gretchen took. Grace Cathedral in San Francisco will be putting solar panels up in a deal the Rev. Canon Sally Bingham – in the white jacket – worked out with our local utility, Pacific Gas and Electric.

Summer BeAts Fellow Freddie Ghesquiere (not pictured) was also there as well as San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom (the gelled one). I thought that it was a fine example of a Christian public witness.

Al Gore: a truly dysfunctional system

From Gore’s talk, yesterday, at Washington’s Constitution Hall:

“I don’t remember a time in our country when so many things seemed to be going so wrong simultaneously,” Gore said.

To begin to fix all the problems, Gore said, “the answer is to end our reliance on carbon-based fuels.”

Gore called on the country to produce all of its electricity from renewable and carbon-free sources in 10 years, a goal he compared to President Kennedy’s challenge for the country to put a man on the moon in the 1960s.

Gore chastised those who have proposed opening new areas for oil drilling as a solution to U.S. energy problems.

“It is only a truly dysfunctional system that would buy into the perverse logic that the short-term answer to high gasoline prices is drilling for more oil 10 years from now,” Gore said.

Meet Bill Bradlee

By Bill Bradlee

I am the newest staff member of The Regeneration Project. Yet many of you know me as I worked for The Regeneration Project for three years and left in the winter of 2007. I spent much of 2007 on a bicycle. A climate scientist and I bicycled across the USA and talked to people along the way about global warming. We called the project: “Ride for Climate.” We gave over 45 public talks and did 3 dozen newspaper, radio and TV interviews. It was an incredible opportunity to talk with a diverse cross-section of Americans about this issue. And we worked with many of my IPL colleagues along the way. I’ve included my last blog entry I wrote for the Ride below. If you want to know more, I encourage you to check out the website: www.RideforClimate.com/usa

When I was thinking about taking on this project and the USA bicycle tour, someone told me: If you want to hate this country read the newspaper every day; if you want to love this country ride a bicycle across it. They were certainly right about the second part. We live in a country with exquisite physical beauty and amazing human diversity of all kinds. I encourage you to go see it along the back roads at ten miles per hour. It will give you hope.

Ride for Climate is simply a few people who took a bit of their time to tell people about a large problem and encourage action on solutions to the problem. The bulk of the work was done by a handful of people. Many other people supported us along the way. We gave over 45 public talks, kept a website, and reached thousands of other people through newspaper, radio and TV interviews. Anyone could do something similar. It was a lot of work, but a lot of fun too. I’m fairly certain that in 40 years I won?t look back and say “I wish I had done something else with that year of my life.”

One of the most striking things to me on this journey was the interest in enacting solutions to global warming once people understood the nature of the problem and the kinds of solutions that are available to us. When given good information about the problem, the vast majority of people wanted significant action. Yet, too often people were happy that someone else was taking action and speaking out without recognizing their personal responsibility to make changes in their own life and lifestyle. Too many people are still waiting for someone else to come to the rescue without recognizing that each of us can and must be a part of the solution.

Along the journey some people have posed the question “who is your target audience?” You are. Have you changed out a few light bulbs? Great! Change out all of them. Have you purchased a more fuel efficient vehicle? Excellent! Try to leave it parked a couple days a week and find alternative ways to get to work. Have you written to your legislators to tell them that they need to promote solutions to global warming? Don’t wait; do it today.

Some people say that personal action “changing a light bulb or getting a home energy audit” has far too little impact to address this problem. They are certainly correct – we will need to make significant policy changes and changes in the way we create and use energy if we are going to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions by what scientists say is needed: at least 80% by 2050. But all of these larger changes begin with individual action – the action of a student, a soccer mom, a business leader, a politician. Don’t underestimate that first small step. A friend of mine emailed recently to tell us a story. We stopped at the summer camp she helps to run and gave a talk to the kids. One of the kids, she told us, returned home after camp to find that a new coal power plant is proposed on the Zuni reservation where she lives. She has taken it upon herself to organize a campaign to fight this new coal power plant.

We have a choice: we can have a world that is a little bit hotter or one that is a lot hotter. Science tells us that the planet will warm in the next century, but whether it warms a couple degrees or many degrees depends largely on how much carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere through burning fossil fuels. Our actions in the coming years will determine if we give our children a healthy planet or one with a dangerously high fever. It is our choice.

I had never done a bicycle tour before this one. On April 21st, I started this bicycle tour with a ride of 60 miles. That night, tired and very sore, I looked at a map of the USA and saw how little of the ride I had completed and how incredibly far I had left to go. It felt impossible. Yet, the next day we rode 60 miles and then again the day after that. Now, five months later, I have crossed the USA and what is most apparent is not how difficult it was, but how easy it was. And so it is. Take action! You will find it is easy and it will make you happy. You’ll have something to tell your grandkids.

CO2 Solutions

Using carbon dioxide as an ingredient in plastics could help reduce the use of fossil fuels, and be another market for waste CO2. As this ScienCentral News video explains, a Cornell chemist has started up a company that’s now making plastics containing up to 50 percent CO2.

h/t Brethren Priestess.

Oil is Messy

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the US Department of Commerce have created an amazing resource through Google Maps that show the location and details of oil spills in America and on our coastline.

It tracks oil disasters from 1967 to now.

Click here to check it out: http://www.incidentnews.gov/map

It’s incredible how often oil spills happen.

Nuclear Senate Testimony

Joseph Romm, the green machine behind Climate Progress writes that he “will be testifying in front of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Clean Air and Nuclear Safety Subcommittee this Wednesday at 10 am EST.

He notes, “First up are all of the commissioners of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I’m last on the second panel, most certainly after 11 a.m. EST, probably with just one Senator left, chairman Carper. Still, I’ll get my remarks and written testimony on the record. Excellent….”

Read more here.

Sharing the Earth – A Jewish, Evangelical Conversation

Originally published in Sh’ma: A Journal of Jewish Responsibility (www.shma.com) June 2008.

Rabbi Andrea Cohen-Kiener, director of Interreligious Eco-Justice Network, Connecticut’s Interfaith Power and Light is the spiritual leader of Congregation Pnai Or of Central Conn. She is author of Life on Earth: A User’s Guide, and For All Who Call: A Guide to Enhancing Prayer Instruction in the Jewish Community. She is also the translator of Conscious Community, A Guide to Spiritual Development, written in the early years of World War II by Rabbi Kalanymous Kalman Shapira.

Dr. Lowell “Rusty” Pritchard, a resource economist, is the National Director of Outreach for the Evangelical Environmental Network and the editor of Creation Care magazine, a Christian environmental quarterly.

Andrea Cohen-Kiener: Does your mandate for climate change come from Genesis?

Rusty Pritchard: Yes, but as an Evangelical Christian, I often go to John 3:16 which starts off, “for God so loved the world.” Most Evangelicals hear that word “world” and think it means all the people in the world. But the word is cosmos. And it fits with the story of creation in Genesis that God loves his whole creation.

Cohen-Kiener: We need to acknowledge our grandeur and our smallness simultaneously. I’ve experienced a resistance in the Jewish community to environmental efforts; I’ve heard often over the past ten years, “we have more important issues to address.” Have you experienced similar speed bumps?

Pritchard: The biggest speed bump is a limited conception of God, and a comfortable conservatism that is scared of change. I ask people, “what is it that conservatives should be conserving?” Of course we need to conserve natural resources, families and the ability of families to make a living. We need also to conserve beautiful places, including small towns and farms, all that makes human civilization good and beautiful and diverse. We can respect diversity because it’s a blessing from God. That takes us past the shallow conservatism of fearing new ideas and deeper to a conservatism that says we ought to do our best to take care of the natural world.

Cohen-Kiener: In my community, there are primarily two speed bumps. First, my people are a minority and there’s a natural tendency toward particularism — taking care first of oneself, one’s people, one’s family. The universalism of environmental makes some Jews feel it’s not an essentially Jewish issue.

Pritchard: Even though it’s not demographically true, Evangelicals also feel like an embattled minority culture. Our dominant myth is that we’re a faithful remnant that acknowledges the truth even though the world has gone another direction. Until recently, our community viewed environmentalism as a liberal issue, or as a popular fad. But because our theology says that God’s character can be seen in the created world, many conservative Christians are beginning to be concerned about creation care. In that view, destroying creation and permitting ecological degradation are like ripping pages out of scripture.

Cohen-Kiener: Let’s talk about the pervasive value of consumerism in our culture, our deep hungers of the spirit and flesh. Our culture is so illiterate about the hungers of the spirit that we try to fill up that hunger with a new car or fancy vacation. And we’re polluting the planet in that effort. We need a counterbalance to consumerism.

Pritchard: I agree. We have such a fundamental addiction to consuming. The Jewish Sabbath is an antidote to that hunger. It helps us test what we can give up from material culture. The Sabbath idea jumps out of every part of Scripture — the rhythms of rest and satisfaction and enjoyment of the created order are meant to pervade all of our lives. There are weekly rhythms and cycles of seven years and the jubilee cycle of 49 years, all celebrating the sufficiency and the providence of God, where we rest and enjoy and encounter with delight the works of God. The Fourth Commandment requires not only your rest, but the rest of all of your household, including everyone who works for you and all of your animals. And the land itself. It demands we not push to the limits our ecological systems or the people who work for us.

I’ve just returned from a pastors’ conference in New York City where some of the urban churches are trying to reclaim the idea of cities as good places. Evangelicals generally hold an anti-urban bias that comes from a vision of our faith as a remnant existing outside of the mainstream of culture. There’s an inability to see cities as places that need investment and work, as places to build meaningful community. In a highly urbanized culture we have to rethink our environmental work — conserving not only wilderness or endangered species but also building sustainable communities. I wonder whether there’s something to learn there from Jewish tradition, which thrives in cities.

Cohen-Kiener: A city is a manmade place as opposed to the wild. It raises questions about how to create sustainable structures.

Pritchard: The pastor of Church of the Redeemer in New York City, Tim Keller, is trying to redefine a city to include small towns throughout the agricultural landscape. He envisions multiuse, walkable, human settlements that have density and diversity. Those settlements can be megacities or smaller places where people live in community, and where culture is created. God either wants us in the country or in the city, but I’m not sure we should try to mix the two, as in a suburb.

Cohen-Kiener: That brings us to another, related, issue, environmental justice, and questions about air quality, transfer stations, garbage dumps, what’s called source point pollution, which is almost always located around the world in nonwhite population centers.

Pritchard: The worst stuff gets dumped on the poorest communities and on ethnic minorities. Within blocks of our church there’s a toxic waste facility, a trash transfer station, chemical plant, an impoundment lot for towed vehicles.

Cohen-Kiener: When we talk about environmental justice we need to do so in partnership with the poor and with the “other.” If there was a garbage transfer station in the western suburbs of Hartford, Connecticut where I’m sitting right now people would be much more avid in their support of reduce, reuse, recycle and pre-cycle. The technology and the market forces would come into play more quickly if the consequences were borne evenly and appropriately.

Pritchard: Maybe we need a public policy that puts toxic waste treatment facilities and landfills only in the zip codes with the highest per capita income.

Systems and institutions can be sinful in ways different than individuals, who are filled with flaws like jealously, pride, and rage. Environmental issues open a window onto the economic and social systems that are unjust and often racist. As an economist, I think our public policies and the ways businesses operate will change once they face the costs of the pollution that they now get to dispose of largely for free. Climate policy may involve getting the right price on carbon dioxide so that it becomes a
part of the price of all of the goods that we buy and sell and therefore we implicitly take it into account even if we aren’t explicitly looking for the greenest option. It must hit us in our pocketbook. We need to think explicitly about challenging businesses to be not just responsive to price signals and creating value for their shareholders but to think about ethics in a much broader sense and to allow their business models to be contaminated by their sense of morality and not pretend that there is this huge divide that businesses are sort of amoral institutions.

Cohen-Kiener: Influencing minds and hearts is going to open a very powerful, passionate, articulate, empowered wellspring as we reexamine what we really need, what we really want, what really makes us feel wealthy and safe. It’s going to look like spending less and having less. It’s going to feel like more wealth. The root of this sin is disconnection. And the cure is connection.

Bee Says: Global warming as Christian concern? Of course

From the Sunday Waco Tribune:

It takes quite a leap of faith to see Texas as a national leader in global warming solutions.

But if there’s anything Texas has plenty of, it’s faith — from Protestant evangelical fervor to contemplative Catholic spirituality to Eastern mysticism and beyond.

And in growing numbers, communities of faith across Texas are moving by leaps and bounds to respond to the moral imperative of global warming.

They’re moving out of their traditional activities and comfort zones to study, pray and take action, because at its core, global warming is a moral and spiritual hazard. It’s about relationships gone wrong — relationships between people and the natural world, between the privileged few and the disadvantaged many, between believers and God. Taking steps to address global warming means more than cutting carbon emissions—it means claiming our responsibility to restore broken relationships and “mend the world.”

Texas faith communities have taken big steps lately, all the way from the giant Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, which implemented energy efficiency measures that are preventing the release of 10.5 million pounds of CO2 annually, to the small-but-mighty Austin Quaker Meeting, whose members now tout a huge new solar electric system that is powering their place of worship while sending clean, renewable power back into the grid for the rest of Austin to enjoy.

Other faith communities across the state, such as Houston’s 10,000-member Memorial Drive United Methodist Church, are seeing the light when it comes to cost-benefiting energy efficiency measures, and they are encouraging their members to improve efficiency at home. Austin’s Congregation Beth Israel held a unique youth fundraiser — instead of selling breakfast tacos, they sold compact fluorescent lightbulbs. Congregations are also weaving environmental stewardship into their other mission programs: San Antonio’s Episcopal Church of the Resurrection is one of many churches distributing CFLs together with food and other assistance for low-income families.

Texas faith communities are choosing in increasing numbers to power their houses of worship with clean, safe, renewable power — through their own solar installations and through electric providers’ green purchasing programs. The North Texas Conference of the United Methodist Church made headlines last year as the first denominational body in the U.S. to make a bulk contract for green power on behalf of its member churches.

Many Texas faith communities are engaging global warming through their participation in Texas Interfaith Power & Light, one of 28 state “IPL” programs across the United States helping faith communities provide a religious response to global warming that includes both reflection and action. We’re taking direct action to reduce our own global warming emissions, but we’re also advocating for just public policies because we believe that part of caring for the creation means participating in the discussion about public policies affecting it.

We were encouraged to see Texas Rep. Lloyd Doggett taking a significant step last week by introducing the “Climate Matters” Act. It is cause for celebration that a member of our Texas congressional delegation is taking a leadership role in this issue in which Texas looms so large, both as a past offender but even more importantly as a key source of clean energy solutions for the future.

The act addresses global warming, laying out a plan to reduce U.S. emissions by 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050, in part through investment in clean technology and renewable resources. As people of faith, we are glad to see Congressman Doggett balancing the very real environmental protections in his bill with equally real protections for the disadvantaged, especially low-income families.

Addressing global warming is a daunting project for Texas and the U.S. It’s going to take more than science and technology to navigate the next few decades — it’s going to take courage and hope and faith. It’s good news for everyone that Texas faith communities are on the case.

Bee Moorhead is executive director of Texas Interfaith Power & Light and a member of University Presbyterian Church in Austin.