Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

Let’s hope that what happened at the polls yesterday is good news for our planet.  Let’s hope that a new climate, so to speak, will be created in Washington DC that will make it possible for this country to start taking seriously the threat of global warming and climate change.  Let’s hope a real debate can begin about how to proceed — and very soon.

On this day when so many feel relief that this oppressive atmosphere that has been hanging over our political culture for so long may start to lift, may this country start to address the smothering of our very real atmosphere with greenhouse gases and toxic pollution.  It is up to us to get the issue of climate change onto the top of the new Congressional agenda.

This morning, the Washington Post gave space on its op-ed page for United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan to make a passionate plea to all of us:

The question is not whether climate change is happeninig, but whether, in the face of this emergency, we ourselves can change fast enough.

Right now, world leaders are gathered in Nairobi, Kenya, as we have already posted, to talk about how to proceed when the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.  The US needs to get into these climate talks in a meaningful way, because far more than Kyoto is needed if we are to keep our planet from dangerous heating.  But all of us need to get this on the radar screen of the new Congress.

We may not be able to force the Bush administration to take this seriously, but we can sure make it an election issue in 2008.  By then, another 8 years will have passed without a serious US policy on climate change — adding to the three decades we have already squandered since President Jimmy Carter tried to address the reality, only to be thrown out of office by voters who didn’t like his bad news.

Meanwhile, rather than wait for 2009, Congress could start by appropriating some significant funds for the transition away from fossil fuels, work to strengthen emission standards on industry, automobiles and SUVs, start taxing the worst emitters and polluters to the real cost of the environmental damage they cause, provide tax credits to homeowners and small business to help them go green, press the Bush administration to participate meaningfully in the post-Kyoto talks, and use their bully pulpit to make this a national conversation — an urgent one.