On “Alarmism”

One of the most frequent push-backs I get from Christians is that I need to be more “positive and hopeful”; to suggest more things that individuals can do. ( I got this from a denominational news person when I was suggesting that they cover an upcoming local Earth Care conference hosted by a large church of their denomination. They implied Continue Reading

Overshoot via hubris

Somehow, we as a church need to find our way through to the recognition of how this crisis has unfolded through a long, but even more so more recent history of human trespassing of limits, through hubris and pride. This takes us back, theologically and existentially, to “the fall”, to the eating of the fruit of the tree of the Continue Reading

Do what it takes

I take issue with one thing in this quote: “Agree with Ocasio-Cortez’s solutions or not, it’s to her credit that, in such a short time, she has helped change the terms of the debate. “Radicalism pushes the bonds of what liberals will jump on board with,” Saikat Chakrabarti, the representative’s chief of staff, said. “Every major social movement has worked Continue Reading

What’s really broken?

I think there is more brokenness in focusing on sexual identity differences rather than on trying to confront and heal the broken systems which harm people and planet.

Why should Climate Change matter to me?

“To care about a changing climate, we don’t have to be a scientist or an environmentalist or a liberal political activist. We just have to be a human who wants this planet, the only one we have, to be a safe home for all of us.” — Katharine Hayhoe

interlocking effects; still being discovered

So, in a paragraph soon to follow the pieces I just challenged, regarding how they seem to be unaware of the “baked in” effects of 1 or 2 decades ago, he writes this: “Carbon hangs in the air for decades, with some of the most terrifying feedbacks unspooling over even longer time horizons—which gives warming the eerie shimmer of an Continue Reading

The danger of placing too much hope in “Geo-engineering”

Wallace-Wells follows that notion I just “cautioned” about, with another not so helpful notion: “We found a way to engineer devastation, and we can find a way to engineer our way out of it—or, rather, engineer our way toward a degraded muddle, but one that nevertheless extends forward the promise of new generations finding their own way forward, perhaps toward Continue Reading

What the hell have we been thinking?

“The United Nations established its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988, signaling to all the world a scientific consensus about the problem. Since then, we have done more damage, knowingly, than we did over preceding centuries, in ignorance.” This needs to be realized, so we can get a grasp on the recognition that causes us to ask: “What the Continue Reading

“in two generations, the entire story of human civilization”

This guy writes very well. And sees very well. And processes very well. “climate change is .. an “existential crisis”—a drama we are now haphazardly improvising between two hellish poles, in which our best-case outcome is death and suffering at the scale of twenty-five Holocausts, and the worst-case outcome puts us on the brink of extinction. Rhetoric often fails us Continue Reading

A Basic Fact of Ecological Economics

I’m gonna have to stop reading soon. I need to go to bed, and I will need to be able to sleep then. “Every degree of warming, it’s been estimated, costs a temperate country like the United States about one percentage point of GDP, and according to one recent paper, at 1.5 degrees the world would be $20 trillion richer Continue Reading