Auditing progress with climate responsibility

Religious leadership is providing the moral case to take care of our planet and qualified climate experts are auditing the initiatives of government to assess their action.

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Mallory McDuff wasn’t expecting to weep at a conference. Something about this gathering was different. Maybe it was the venue in the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Ga., the sanctuary filled with 2,000 people — brown, black, white, indigenous, and immigrant. Maybe it was the Rev. William Barber II’s preaching that touched me with the moral call to climate justice, in partnership with Al Gore, whose organization Climate Reality Project brought this audience together for a three-day training.

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 “The right time to do good is right now,” Barber repeated, interspersing history lessons as a compass. He reminded us of the moral costs as fossil fuel industries have been allowed to poison people and places: “This is the wrong use of our humanity. It’s not good. It’s sin. It’s wrong, and we must challenge it, because the right time to do good is right now.” And everyone repeated that refrain with him, jumping to their feet with a public joy I’d never witnessed at any environmental meeting in the past 30 years. It might take the force of a revival to wake us to our present reality.

“Don’t you forget it’s always been about fusion,” he bellowed, leaning into the podium, elaborating on his theory of fusion politics that avoided labels like liberal and conservative, left or right. He urged us to reclaim the narrative and build a movement of solidarity in order to face the enormity of the climate crisis.
As I drove, I thought of the retired Lt. General Russel Honoré, founder of the GreenARMY in Louisiana, who told us, “Do you like drinking polluted water? Eating polluted fish? Nobody wants dirty water and air. That’s how you find common ground.”1

Carl Meyer asks: “Are you skeptical that the Trudeau government’s price on carbon pollution is the best way to lower emissions?”

Ontario Environment Minister Rod Phillips and Ontario Energy Minister Greg Rickford apply a "gasoline transparency sticker" to a gas pump in Oakville, Ont. on April 8, 2019. Rickford Twitter Photo

Blair Feltmate has a solution for you. The head of the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation at the University of Waterloo is chairing an arm of a new independent watchdog that will hold Ottawa to account on its climate change commitments and policies.

Feltmate said in an interview that the new institute, which is being called the Pan-Canadian Expert Collaboration, will help Canadians see if their federal government is making decisions in their best interests when it comes to tackling global warming.
The institute will be a multimillion dollar organization, funded by government but expected to set its own agenda and operate independently. It will have three main areas of focus: clean energy, carbon pricing and adaptation...
The Trudeau government’s climate plan, the Pan-Canadian Framework “sets out the goals and the aspirations,” said Feltmate, and “what this organization will do, is apply the intellectual framework to execute on that commitment.”
“How do we actually proceed to put an optimal price on carbon, to minimize carbon emissions? How do we proceed to embrace energy efficiency and renewable power, electricity storage? How do we proceed on those fronts, in a manner that will collectively benefit the country well?”2 

Brian Roewe comments that so far, science alone has not been able to provide the spark to overcome political inertia that has resisted such massive change. More and more, a prevailing belief is that a moral force is needed.

 Despite all that energy, there's still a feeling, with scientific forecasts firmly in mind, that the church has the potential to do more in how the world responds to climate change.
Perhaps a lot more.
"There's a lot of education that needs to happen still," said Dan Misleh, executive director of Catholic Climate Covenant, which has driven much of the encyclical's implementation in the United States. "Laudato Si' has been out there for going on four years, but there's still not enough Catholics or Catholic leaders who are paying attention to this."
Francis himself offered somewhat of a stock take in remarks at an early March interreligious Vatican conference in support of the United Nations' sustainable development goals, adopted three months after his encyclical's release.
"After three and a half years since the adoption of the sustainable development goals, we must be even more acutely aware of the importance of accelerating and adapting our actions in responding adequately to both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor — they are connected," he said.3

Individual citizens make a significant contribution to mitigation of climate change effects by being knowledgeable of what has to be done and working to see that the people we elect to government are committed to implementing the measures recommended by climate experts and endorsed by the people.

References

1	(2019, March 29). Toward a New Conversation on Climate Justice | Sojourners. Retrieved March 30, 2019, from https://sojo.net/articles/toward-new-conversation-climate-justice
2	(2019, April 9). Skeptical of Trudeau's carbon pricing? There's an institute for that .... Retrieved April 9, 2019, from https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/04/09/news/skeptical-trudeaus-carbon-pricing-theres-institute
3	(2019, April 8). Where science warnings fail, can moral force push us out of climate .... Retrieved April 9, 2019, from https://www.ncronline.org/news/environment/where-science-warnings-fail-can-moral-force-push-us-out-climate-inertia