My jaw dropped last Sunday
when I visited a church in Houston and heard a frank and
scientifically-informed sermon on climate change.This is a rare event here. I’ve lived in Houston nearly four years, and beyond academic circles
I’ve rarely heard this disturbing subject discussed openly in public,
except by conservative denialists intent on discrediting modern climate
science.
Even more rarely do I hear an open acknowledgement of the obvious link between Houston's hydrocarbon-centered economy and anthropogenic or human-generated climate change worldwide. Texas Gov. Rick Perry likes to call Houston the “energy capital of the world,” but in this city “energy” is mostly a euphemism for fossil fuels. And indeed, Houston may well be the world capital of carbon dealers, who prosper by supplying fixes to a nation and world that are, as George W. Bush candidly put it, “addicted to oil.”
Houston's own considerable contribution to global climate change is a sensitive topic here, and so it's rarely brought up in polite society. I call this the Houston Taboo. It’s the dinosaur in our living room, and we’re pretending it’s not here. If we don’t notice or talk about it, maybe it will go away.
It’s almost as though the local Chambers of Commerce have constructed an invisible petrodome over the city to shield its residents from troubling thoughts about its real and increasingly suspect economic role in the world ecosystem. In our media and public forums, the great silence on this subject is deafening.
Meanwhile our globe continues to warm – not just its atmosphere, but its oceans as well -- with consequences that are only now coming into view, brought on largely by the combustion of carbon fuels from Texas and other petrostates around the world.
The Houston Chronicle, our major daily, tiptoes around the subject of climate change in its editorial pages, though it seems to reserve a corporate box seat for op-ed writers who represent major petrochemical interests. Please help me understand why the Chronicle doesn’t run more editorials and op-eds reflecting serious moral concerns about Houston’s pivotal role the world carbon economy, as we slouch toward what may well turn out to be human history’s greatest slow-motion disaster. Acknowledging this looming threat is not alarmism. It’s pragmatic realism waking up.
Houston’s Museum of Natural Science, as I’ve previously noted, is virtually mute on the subject of anthropogenic climate change. Yet it features elaborate displays (and even a children’s cartoon) on the wondrous world of hydrocarbons, funded by several of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies.
And where are the voices of Houston's religious congregations in response to the moral challenges arising from climate change? They can scarcely be heard.
I would be shocked if leaders of our city’s religious right took a moral stand on climate change, except perhaps to fuel skepticism that it's a real problem, or attribute it to divine will and urge a prayerful response to it.
Nor would I expect our local Church of Positive Thinking to confront the issue honestly in the brightening light of 21st-century science. Global warming isn’t a happy-faced subject, after all, and it wouldn’t make good business sense, from the standpoint of customer and donor satisfaction, to confront the subject candidly on the religious stage and televangelist screen.
Maybe the much-maligned Catholic Church, under the fresh and (to me) inspiring leadership of Pope Francis, will heed its own teachings on our stewardship of the earth and begin to ask some hard questions of the carbon industry, as Francis has done recently with reference to unfettered capitalism in general. I hope the new Pope gives more emphasis to environmental and climate concerns than his predecessors did.
Maybe Jewish congregations in Houston, or people of other faiths, or none, will step up and work on behalf of those who will suffer most from a warming planet, including populations most vulnerable to extreme weather events, droughts, floods, famines, and other perils of Biblical proportion.
I hope the few religiously progressive communities in our city will find the courage to join together and meet the issue of climate change straight on -- not just at an individual and psychological level, but also at a more macro or systemic level, asking hard questions about the material and spiritual sustainability of our carbon-driven way of life, and of the institutions that perpetuate it.
Asking hard questions out loud will not be easy in Houston, where many of these congregations’ own members – decent, good-hearted people -- depend on the carbon industry for their financial livelihoods. To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it’s hard to face painful realities when our salaries depend on not facing them.
The thing about painful realities, though, is that they keep coming at us whether we acknowledge them honestly or not. The laws of nature don’t care whether our heads are buried in tar sand or deep shale. Like old man river, they just keep rolling along.
If climate scientists are mostly right about the perils that face us, the laws of nature will eventually force a saner response from all of us, by which time it will be too late to turn back the carbon clock. Already, levels of CO2 in our atmosphere have reached more than 400 parts per million (ppm) of dry air, up from about 280 ppm prior to the industrial revolution. Other heat-trapping gases such as methane are compounding climate problems. Much of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases is being absorbed by the oceans, to uncertain effect. Glaciers continue to melt, and average atmospheric and water temperatures continue to rise, with cascading and sometimes unexpected environmental effects.
What we most need now, I believe, are major fast-track research and development projects (some are already underway at MIT and elsewhere), comparable to the Manhattan Project during World War II, that invest publicly or privately in the urgent pursuit of more economical and efficient ways to capture renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, tidal and geothermal energy. And we shouldn’t rule out, in my view, the development of cleaner and safer sources of nuclear energy, such as thorium, and eventually fusion.These have their own hazards, but their carbon footprint is small.
Building a sustainable future will also urgently require dramatic advances in efficient battery storage to hold the energy we capture from these cleaner sources.
Significant efforts to fund and launch such projects are likely to meet resistance, overt or covert, from entrenched interests in the politically and financially powerful oil and gas industry. But if breakthrough projects of this kind are not pursued now, they'll be far more expensive to pursue later, when there's even more environmental damage to mitigate. Waiting until later isn't just a false economy. It's a fool's economy.
Many of us imagine that solutions to climate problems depend mainly on individual choices. But aggregate changes in individual behavior alone will not suffice to ameliorate climate change. Switching out our light bulbs and inflating our tires for better gas mileage are fine. More communal approaches, such as conservation and recycling programs, are also critically important.
But in the end, the sustainability of civilizations will demand a full-on revolution in the research and development of green energy -- affordable, renewable, and forever sustainable -- and the batteries needed to store it.
These newer technologies are an existential threat to the old fossil-based industrial order, the carbon-industrial complex of which Houston is emblematic. It is now becoming clear that Houston, and other carbon economies like it, are on the wrong side of history.
As we move forward on multiple fronts of sustainable innovation – not hoping for a silver bullet, but for silver buckshot -- we must simultaneously monitor and blow the whistle on efforts by the carbon industry to buy laws and manipulate public opinion to thwart or stall the critical transition from dirty to cleaner, greener energy tech.
Don’t fall for the line that switching from dirtier fuels to less filthy natural gas is the solution to climate change. (This is now Houston’s semi-official mantra.) Moving away from coal and toward cleaner natural gas is a step in the right direction, but it’s a bit like switching from unfiltered to filtered cigarettes and calling it a cure for cancer. Natural gas must realistically serve as a bridge fuel to ease the transition to cleaner alternatives, but beware of carbon companies that covertly try to turn that bridge into an endless causeway, sacrificing the well-being of future generations around the world for the sake of their own present and private gain.
As we rethink Houston’s diversifying but still petrocentric economy, it will take plenty of courage and honesty from our local media, cultural and educational institutions, religious congregations, and diverse citizenry to challenge the carbon goliath. Will that happen from within Houston itself? Forgive me if I'm not too hopeful.
As for the fossil fuel companies themselves, their days are numbered. The laws of nature and their greenhouse effects will inevitably prevail. Nature bats last, and its laws can't be bought. The hidden, external costs of our continued reliance on slick fossils are becoming more apparent with every passing decade, and these costs are not just economically but ecologically unsustainable.
Houston itself could well become the focus of negative national and world attention as climates continue to change, and no amount of public relations or well-lubricated boosterism will make the city attractive until we genuinely redirect our economy away from carbon and toward clean energy industry and innovation. Then we might truly deserve to be known as Energy City, and not just the city of fossilized fuels.
If Houston isn’t prepared for the decline of the carbon dinosaurs, its economy won’t have much of a future in the longer term. Carbon City, with its tall office and refinery towers, could become the heart of the next rust belt.
What impressed me most about the sermon I heard Sunday was its moral courage – the kind of courage it must have taken a few decades ago to speak out from a pulpit in North Carolina against the health ravages of tobacco, or from a pulpit in the antebellum South against the deeply entrenched and profitable institution of slavery.
Now it will take the same kind of courage to risk standing up in Houston, carbon capital of the world, to ask hard questions in public about Houston's future, as we undergo the inevitable transformation from an obsolete fossil economy to a smarter, more sustainable one.
We have to ask ourselves these questions not just for our own sake, but for the sake of future generations.
That’s assuming we care about leaving our posterity a world worth living in, even unto the seventh generation. Can we assume that much?
-- originally posted in Danagram at opensalon.com
For more on the dinosaur in Houston's living room, see "Bill McKibben Violates Houston Taboo," April 25, 2014.
Even more rarely do I hear an open acknowledgement of the obvious link between Houston's hydrocarbon-centered economy and anthropogenic or human-generated climate change worldwide. Texas Gov. Rick Perry likes to call Houston the “energy capital of the world,” but in this city “energy” is mostly a euphemism for fossil fuels. And indeed, Houston may well be the world capital of carbon dealers, who prosper by supplying fixes to a nation and world that are, as George W. Bush candidly put it, “addicted to oil.”
Houston's own considerable contribution to global climate change is a sensitive topic here, and so it's rarely brought up in polite society. I call this the Houston Taboo. It’s the dinosaur in our living room, and we’re pretending it’s not here. If we don’t notice or talk about it, maybe it will go away.
It’s almost as though the local Chambers of Commerce have constructed an invisible petrodome over the city to shield its residents from troubling thoughts about its real and increasingly suspect economic role in the world ecosystem. In our media and public forums, the great silence on this subject is deafening.
Meanwhile our globe continues to warm – not just its atmosphere, but its oceans as well -- with consequences that are only now coming into view, brought on largely by the combustion of carbon fuels from Texas and other petrostates around the world.
The Houston Chronicle, our major daily, tiptoes around the subject of climate change in its editorial pages, though it seems to reserve a corporate box seat for op-ed writers who represent major petrochemical interests. Please help me understand why the Chronicle doesn’t run more editorials and op-eds reflecting serious moral concerns about Houston’s pivotal role the world carbon economy, as we slouch toward what may well turn out to be human history’s greatest slow-motion disaster. Acknowledging this looming threat is not alarmism. It’s pragmatic realism waking up.
Houston’s Museum of Natural Science, as I’ve previously noted, is virtually mute on the subject of anthropogenic climate change. Yet it features elaborate displays (and even a children’s cartoon) on the wondrous world of hydrocarbons, funded by several of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies.
And where are the voices of Houston's religious congregations in response to the moral challenges arising from climate change? They can scarcely be heard.
I would be shocked if leaders of our city’s religious right took a moral stand on climate change, except perhaps to fuel skepticism that it's a real problem, or attribute it to divine will and urge a prayerful response to it.
Nor would I expect our local Church of Positive Thinking to confront the issue honestly in the brightening light of 21st-century science. Global warming isn’t a happy-faced subject, after all, and it wouldn’t make good business sense, from the standpoint of customer and donor satisfaction, to confront the subject candidly on the religious stage and televangelist screen.
Maybe the much-maligned Catholic Church, under the fresh and (to me) inspiring leadership of Pope Francis, will heed its own teachings on our stewardship of the earth and begin to ask some hard questions of the carbon industry, as Francis has done recently with reference to unfettered capitalism in general. I hope the new Pope gives more emphasis to environmental and climate concerns than his predecessors did.
Maybe Jewish congregations in Houston, or people of other faiths, or none, will step up and work on behalf of those who will suffer most from a warming planet, including populations most vulnerable to extreme weather events, droughts, floods, famines, and other perils of Biblical proportion.
I hope the few religiously progressive communities in our city will find the courage to join together and meet the issue of climate change straight on -- not just at an individual and psychological level, but also at a more macro or systemic level, asking hard questions about the material and spiritual sustainability of our carbon-driven way of life, and of the institutions that perpetuate it.
Asking hard questions out loud will not be easy in Houston, where many of these congregations’ own members – decent, good-hearted people -- depend on the carbon industry for their financial livelihoods. To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it’s hard to face painful realities when our salaries depend on not facing them.
The thing about painful realities, though, is that they keep coming at us whether we acknowledge them honestly or not. The laws of nature don’t care whether our heads are buried in tar sand or deep shale. Like old man river, they just keep rolling along.
If climate scientists are mostly right about the perils that face us, the laws of nature will eventually force a saner response from all of us, by which time it will be too late to turn back the carbon clock. Already, levels of CO2 in our atmosphere have reached more than 400 parts per million (ppm) of dry air, up from about 280 ppm prior to the industrial revolution. Other heat-trapping gases such as methane are compounding climate problems. Much of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases is being absorbed by the oceans, to uncertain effect. Glaciers continue to melt, and average atmospheric and water temperatures continue to rise, with cascading and sometimes unexpected environmental effects.
What we most need now, I believe, are major fast-track research and development projects (some are already underway at MIT and elsewhere), comparable to the Manhattan Project during World War II, that invest publicly or privately in the urgent pursuit of more economical and efficient ways to capture renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, tidal and geothermal energy. And we shouldn’t rule out, in my view, the development of cleaner and safer sources of nuclear energy, such as thorium, and eventually fusion.These have their own hazards, but their carbon footprint is small.
Building a sustainable future will also urgently require dramatic advances in efficient battery storage to hold the energy we capture from these cleaner sources.
Significant efforts to fund and launch such projects are likely to meet resistance, overt or covert, from entrenched interests in the politically and financially powerful oil and gas industry. But if breakthrough projects of this kind are not pursued now, they'll be far more expensive to pursue later, when there's even more environmental damage to mitigate. Waiting until later isn't just a false economy. It's a fool's economy.
Many of us imagine that solutions to climate problems depend mainly on individual choices. But aggregate changes in individual behavior alone will not suffice to ameliorate climate change. Switching out our light bulbs and inflating our tires for better gas mileage are fine. More communal approaches, such as conservation and recycling programs, are also critically important.
But in the end, the sustainability of civilizations will demand a full-on revolution in the research and development of green energy -- affordable, renewable, and forever sustainable -- and the batteries needed to store it.
These newer technologies are an existential threat to the old fossil-based industrial order, the carbon-industrial complex of which Houston is emblematic. It is now becoming clear that Houston, and other carbon economies like it, are on the wrong side of history.
As we move forward on multiple fronts of sustainable innovation – not hoping for a silver bullet, but for silver buckshot -- we must simultaneously monitor and blow the whistle on efforts by the carbon industry to buy laws and manipulate public opinion to thwart or stall the critical transition from dirty to cleaner, greener energy tech.
Don’t fall for the line that switching from dirtier fuels to less filthy natural gas is the solution to climate change. (This is now Houston’s semi-official mantra.) Moving away from coal and toward cleaner natural gas is a step in the right direction, but it’s a bit like switching from unfiltered to filtered cigarettes and calling it a cure for cancer. Natural gas must realistically serve as a bridge fuel to ease the transition to cleaner alternatives, but beware of carbon companies that covertly try to turn that bridge into an endless causeway, sacrificing the well-being of future generations around the world for the sake of their own present and private gain.
As we rethink Houston’s diversifying but still petrocentric economy, it will take plenty of courage and honesty from our local media, cultural and educational institutions, religious congregations, and diverse citizenry to challenge the carbon goliath. Will that happen from within Houston itself? Forgive me if I'm not too hopeful.
As for the fossil fuel companies themselves, their days are numbered. The laws of nature and their greenhouse effects will inevitably prevail. Nature bats last, and its laws can't be bought. The hidden, external costs of our continued reliance on slick fossils are becoming more apparent with every passing decade, and these costs are not just economically but ecologically unsustainable.
Houston itself could well become the focus of negative national and world attention as climates continue to change, and no amount of public relations or well-lubricated boosterism will make the city attractive until we genuinely redirect our economy away from carbon and toward clean energy industry and innovation. Then we might truly deserve to be known as Energy City, and not just the city of fossilized fuels.
If Houston isn’t prepared for the decline of the carbon dinosaurs, its economy won’t have much of a future in the longer term. Carbon City, with its tall office and refinery towers, could become the heart of the next rust belt.
What impressed me most about the sermon I heard Sunday was its moral courage – the kind of courage it must have taken a few decades ago to speak out from a pulpit in North Carolina against the health ravages of tobacco, or from a pulpit in the antebellum South against the deeply entrenched and profitable institution of slavery.
Now it will take the same kind of courage to risk standing up in Houston, carbon capital of the world, to ask hard questions in public about Houston's future, as we undergo the inevitable transformation from an obsolete fossil economy to a smarter, more sustainable one.
We have to ask ourselves these questions not just for our own sake, but for the sake of future generations.
That’s assuming we care about leaving our posterity a world worth living in, even unto the seventh generation. Can we assume that much?
-- originally posted in Danagram at opensalon.com
For more on the dinosaur in Houston's living room, see "Bill McKibben Violates Houston Taboo," April 25, 2014.
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