wfn.org | Lambeth Daily - Churches must lead the way on reducing carbon emissions

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Lambeth Daily

Churches must lead the way on reducing carbon emissions.
Posted On : August 2, 2008 5:11 PM | Posted By : Webmaster
Related Categories: News

The iconic image of a floodlit Canterbury Cathedral would be a thing 
of the past if the Revd Ian James had his way.

The Revd Professor Ian James is the environment advisor in the 
Diocese of Oxford, and lectures in the Schools of Mathematics, 
Meteorology and Physics at the University of Reading, and he talked 
in a self select session today on the science of climate change.

In his darker moments, he says is very pessimistic about the 
political and social will to avoid catastrophic climate change, and 
he would like to see the church leading the way by reducing 
conspicuous consumption such as floodlit churches.

"I would like to see us taking a lead in our churches, and being very 
serious about auditing our carbon emissions," he said. "Certainly 
such public displays as floodlit churches [are] the worst possible 
witness we could make to a world using too much energy."

Revd James talked about his disappointment with the British 
government in policy development on curbing carbon emissions that 
probably sounds familiar to many around the developed world.

"We were at point where it seemed the government had finally got the 
message and was implementing policies to reduce emissions, and 
suddenly oil prices shot up, and suddenly the government caved in 
over taxes on petrol." Climate sceptics add to the lack of action, he 
said, capitalising on the complexity of climate change research that 
necessarily produced a variety of predictions.

Media reporting was also a barrier, with the adversarial style of 
reporting giving as much column space to the sceptics as the 
mainstream science, which Revd James says is overwhelmingly united on 
the fact of global warming. The question is just how long we have and 
how bad it will be, and according to the data he presented, we have 
about twenty to forty years of "business as usual" before the 
"tipping point is reached" and the global temperature soars to 
literally unbearable levels.

Public consciousness is changing, however, he says.

"In my life time we've gone from a view of the world as an almost 
infinite resource, a dustbin with infinite capacity for our waste, 
and infinite capacity for supplying what we want- oil and coal. It's 
a sobering thought that the atmosphere, this thin skin of air and 
water, which relative to the size of the earth is similar to 
thickness of the skin of an apple, contains everything we have and 
everything we know. That's where all human civilisation has been, all 
art, all science, all living things, all religion. We see now it is 
far from being an infinite dust bin. It is an infinitely precious and 
infinitely vulnerable speck in the vastness of the universe. We have 
to treasure it and nurture it," he said.

We need to reduce our expectations of a technical fix, and be willing 
to adjust our lifestyles accordingly, he said.

"I would like to see the church recognising that our responsibility 
to love our neighbours as ourselves extends not just to the person in 
the house next door, not just to the people throughout the world, but 
to the people of this whole interdependent planet. It doesn't matter 
if it's a tree in the rainforest, or an Eskimo in Greenland, they are 
equally a part of our neighbourhood and we should be equally 
concerned [about them].

> Written by Jane Still.