Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

As we have noted before, we have a new opportunity in the US Congress.  Representatives and Senators with fairly good track records on environmental and energy issues will be holding key hearings and setting an agenda to address global warming and the urgent need to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are bringing about our climate crisis.

In the Senate, the change is stark.  Outgoing chair of the Senate’s Environment and Energy Committee, Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhofe, once called global warming “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” an attempt on the part of environmental organizations to raise money.  He even accused environmentalists of raising the issue to the level of religious faith.

Sigh…  What can you do with an attitude like that?  Not much, as we know.

He is replaced by Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, who has a pretty long list of credentials on environmental issues, which you can view here.  She has already announced that she will hold hearings on the question of putting caps on carbon dioxide emissions and passing on the costs of emissions to those who produce them.   This is good news, and the need on the part of constituents is to push farther, much farther. 

In their lead editorial today, the NY Times editorial board notes recent troubling trends in the warming of the globe, urging Boxer and her colleagues to be firm and to move quickly to real policy changes.  The hope is that caps on carbon emissions, or, heaven forbid, carbon taxes, would provide the incentive for the development of “cleaner fuels, cleaner cars, and cleaner factories.”

On the question of hearings, they write:

There has been enough noise, from the Inhofe right and from the doomsayers who see each hurricane as a sign the apocalypse is upon us.  But it is also important that Ms. Boxer and her colleagues not lose sight of a fundamental reality: Saturating the atmosphere with greenhouse gases is loading the dice in a dangerous game.

Dr. James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, one of our leading climate scientists, said last year that we have ten years to act, a ten-year window of opportunity to avoid passing the ‘tipping point’ of catastrophic climate change, ten years to bring about drastic cuts in carbon dioxide emissions to stave off real disaster.   Bush administration political appointees at NASA tried to silence him.  It will be satisfying to see him sworn-in to testify before Boxer’s committee. 

So now that we have new leadership in Congress, it is up to all of us to make sure our government acts in our interests, in the interests of our children and our children’s children, and on behalf of the entire Earth community of biodiverse life in which we live and breathe and have our being.  We cannot sit back and assume that this Congress, without citizen pressure, will take the drastic and painful actions that the crisis demands.

Maybe in this year that British scientists predict will be the warmest ever, we can raise the requisite consciousness, along with the spur to action, that this crisis sorely needs in this country.