A resource for faith-based organizations as they transition to sustainable energy and zero GHG emissions

Initial Conference Summary – 2019 Highlights

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(Click here for the complete Conference Details)

The initial 2019 Interfaith Green Building and Grounds Conference brought 22 different faith-based organizations together to share their response to the climate crisis. This year’s focus was on envisioning a path to zero GHG emissions.
Around 40 individuals attended the one and a half-day Conference.

Nine of the 22 organizations have taken the first step toward zero GHG emissions and installed solar photovoltaic systems. Their combined efforts have reduced GHG emissions by 334 metric tonnes of CO2.

The conference was sponsored by Colorado Interfaith Power & Light, GreenFaith, Eco-Justice Ministry, Hazon, and First Universalist Church Denver.

Dr. Scott Denning, CSU Climate Scientist, was the keynote speaker. Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, addressed the Conference via a videotaped greeting. Over 20 presenters/panelist offered their experiences during panel discussions and breakout sessions during the event. Sessions were videotaped.

12 exhibitor tables provided detailed information about products and services now available to assist faith-based organization transition to renewable energy.

The conference aimed to be a zero-waste event and meals were locally sourced.

The conference was hosted by the First Universalist Church of Denver in their newly renovated worship facility designed with a 100% sustainable energy system for zero GHG emissions. (Details of the Energy System Project were documented in an Abbreviated “GreenNotes” Version and a Detailed Version.)

A Pre-Conference workshop on “Ball Park” estimating for solar and heat pump systems was attended by a dozen people.

The Post-Conference Evaluation Forms submitted by the attendees will help define the direction of the Interfaith Green Building and Grounds initiative.

What’s slowing us down?

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How are you feeling about the climate crisis these days? I have been a little more worried than usual lately. You see, my daughter lives in the Bay Area. She’s a healthy 23-year-old and a recent college grad, excited about a new job and new apartment. But she had to live in wildlife smoke-filled air for weeks and was texting me that her chest hurt when she got up in the morning. My niece, a college freshman in Portland, was confined to her single dorm room due to wildfire smoke just a few weeks after arriving on campus — and with her parent’s home in California also under threat. And tonight, the smell of wildfire smoke hangs heavily in the air when I step out my back door in Denver. So my family joins those many people around the world for whom the consequences of climate change have become deeply personal. How about you? Have the consequences of climate change caught up with your family?

I just read a recent poll that 72% of all American voters support climate action. But less than 20% of Forbes’ 100 most sustainable companies in 2020 are located in the US. We’re all well aware of the models, predictions, and statistics about the disastrous impacts of a warming climate. We all understand the many political, economic, and social obstacles to action in this country. But I need a better explanation. Why aren’t individual Americans doing more to protect ourselves from wildfires, hurricanes, floods, and drought? What’s really slowing us down? What do you think? How can we change it? 

In the Beginning… (Initial Post)

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NOTE: The following is a place holder

The Interfaith Green Building and Grounds Network is comprised of faith-based organizations and mission-oriented non-profits who are working together in response to the climate crisis.

This diverse group of organizations shares something in common that can be described as “creation care.”   They are equally concerned about the existential harm to all that has been created here on earth.  They join together in their concern about our sustainable stewardship of life on Earth.

Each denomination of this Interfaith alliance has its own unique expression of “creation care” but all can agree on certain frightening observations that are linked to anthropocentric behavior.   7.5 billion souls are currently engaged in burning hydrocarbons as a source of energy, creating combustion waste (in the form of CO2 and other greenhouse gases), that is trapping heat and increasing the temperature of the atmosphere.  Some are contribution harm more than others.  Three political entities are responsible for 50% of today’s GHG emissions.   10 entities are the source of 80% of the root cause of the climate crisis. 

A warmer atmosphere, in turn, is warming the surface of the Earth – both land and ocean.   We now understand this ecocidal behavior and if it is not eliminated quickly will result in a collapse of the interdependent web of life on planet Earth.

This simple alteration of the Earth’s thermal blanket has far-reaching ramifications including warming oceans cause water to expand and sea level to rise, warmer ocean surface temperatures create larger and more powerful typhoons and hurricanes.  A warmer atmosphere alters global air circulation patterns and is observed as extreme weather events (e.g. new record temperatures, pressures, wind, rain, lack of rain).  A warmer atmosphere is causing irreparable glacial and polar ice melt contributing to sea level rise.  A warming atmosphere is causing a migration of terrestrial biomes to higher latitudes that is faster than species can adapt – the result is species extinctions.   

The solution is simple.  Anthropocentric greenhouse gas emission must be reduced to zero as quickly as possible – no less than 50% by 2030 and 100% by 2040.

There are viable sustainable alternative sources of energy that do not add CO2 and other GHG to our common atmosphere.   The transition from burning ancient hydrocarbons to harvesting renewable energy is not only feasible but it is less expensive and certainly less harmful to all of creation.

Some faith-based organizations have already initiated this transition to sustainable energy for operating their gathering and worship facilities – their buildings.   Some have even extended this emerging consciousness of sustainable stewardship to their whole property (i.e. their grounds.)

There are a number of unique technical and financial issues encountered by faith-based organizations that can be resolved by collaborating and sharing experiences – both success and failures.   For example, there are financial incentives for homeowners and businesses to transition to renewable energy. These tax-based these incentives are not directly available to non-profit organizations.   Another example is the energy usage profile for a faith-based organization often shows a large demand one day a week with extremes on certain holidays  – utility rates are currently based on peak demand during a billing period, not average demands. 

The IGBG network/coalition/alliance is intended to be a resource for a faith-based organization starting on the path to zero GHG emissions.

It’s Starting To Look Like God Won’t Save Us From Global Warming

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“There is no sign of religious people saving us from climate change.”

Dan Vergano BuzzFeed News Reporter, Posted on April 24, 2019,

God help us, but it looks like religion isn’t the answer to climate change.

Nearly four years ago, Pope Francis released a groundbreaking letter, Laudato Si, On the Care of Our Common Home, calling on the world — and its 1.2 billion Catholics — to curb manmade global warming.

“We are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system,” said the 2015 letter, known as an encyclical. “Humanity is called to recognize the need for changes of lifestyle, production and consumption, in order to combat this warming or at least the human causes.”

The Pope got to hang out with Leonardo DiCaprio, an environmentalist, and the United States Congress, where he enjoyed mixed applause as he also called for the end the death penalty, more kindness to immigrants, and better relations with Cuba.

“Deniers haven’t got a prayer,” said environmental groups at the time, hoping the encyclical, along with similar statements from many religious communities, would steer the devout toward supporting environmental action on moral grounds.

In hindsight, we can say that didn’t work out too well. Despite the relentless climb of global carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels, worse wildfires, higher-powered hurricanes, widespread floods, and higher global temperatures since 2015, a mass religious movement fighting to cut emissions hasn’t manifested.

“A lot of good-hearted people put a lot of effort into this, but there is no sign of religious people saving us from climate change,” sociologist Bernard Zaleha of the University of California, Santa Cruz, told BuzzFeed News. “I say this as someone who used to think, Wow, if this takes off, it could really make a difference.”

Even in 2015, early opinion polls on the encyclical had mixed results. One, released five months after the Pope’s pronouncement, showed a “Francis Effect” of increased public concern about climate change. But by October 2016, an Annenberg Public Policy Center poll found no evidence of increased public concern about climate among Catholics (or non-Catholics).

Then came the 2016 US election, where 60% of US Catholics who regularly attend mass, and presumably got an earful from the Pope on climate, favored Donald Trump. The president largely sees fixing climate change as “a waste of money,” according to his acting chief of staff, or as a “hoax,” according to his tweets. Trump has rolled back Obama administration steps to limit greenhouse gas emissions from smokestacks and tailpipes, and intends to withdraw the US from the Paris Climate Agreement — precisely the sort of unified, global response to climate change that the Pope was calling for in 2015.

A less-than-immaculate conception of global warming is likewise evident in more recent polls of US Catholics. Overall, there was an increase in those who said that the Earth is warming due to human activity, from 47% in 2015 to 56% in 2017, according to the Pew Research Center. “However, while these data are pre- and post-encyclical, we don’t have any data showing that the Pope’s encyclical is the reason for the change,” Pew’s Anna Schiller told BuzzFeed News by email.

What’s more, the way Catholics responded to that question depended highly on their politics. The share of Catholic Democrats (or leaning that way) who said the Earth is warming due to human activity has increased from 63% in 2015 to 80% in 2017, according to Pew. But the change among Catholic Republicans (or leaners) was not significant, from 26% in 2015 and 22% in 2017). People’s politics pulled more weight than the Pope.

The divide looks even more stark when you separate Latino Catholics from the rest, with immigrants more likely than non-immigrants to accept that climate change is a problem, Zaleha said. “Basically everyone south of the border accepts the huge weight of evidence for climate change, like the rest of the world except for the US, so they come here with those attitudes.”

To give the Pope his due, US Catholics are more likely (74%) than white evangelical Protestants (52%) to say the Earth is getting warmer (about which there is zero doubt; this is like polling whether the planet circles the sun). And some religion scholars say that although the hierarchy of the US and Canadian church is conservative and hasn’t embraced the encyclical, Catholic schools and hospitals have.

2Pope Francis greets Swedish teenage environmental activist Greta Thunberg on April 17

.“Schools see it as a way to have children hold on to their religious identity by showing them the Pope is invested in something they care a lot about, the environment,” sociologist Randolph Haluza-DeLay of the King’s University in Alberta, Canada, told BuzzFeed News. “There’s more to the Catholic Church than polls taken every six months.”

But others say that the “greening” of religion seems highly unlikely in today’s polarized political climate. Evangelical Christians and conservative Catholics have largely signed on to voting for the Republican party because of its anti-abortion stance (and opposition to same-sex marriage), said Bron Taylor, a University of Florida scholar of religion and the environment. Bucking that to vote for political leaders who would address climate change is a tough ask. Some see Republican politicians such as former congressman Bob Inglis of South Carolina, who lost his seat after he said he wanted to curb global warming, as a warning to others in his party.

Moreover, Taylor said, the outlook of most religions, Eastern and Western alike, is overwhelmingly predisposed to put the environment second to human interests. “The Earth is, at best, a way station to something better, or an encumbrance to be put aside, in many religions,” he said. “The Pope did his best to put his arguments in the spiritual terms of his church, but fundamentally, these are organizations devoted to putting people first.”

Aside from some parishes and denominations that have embraced solar panels and recycling, he said, the business of most Christian pastors and preachers is ministering to the flock— seeing them through divorces, funerals, and other pitfalls. “That’s why we have more priests than prophets,” Taylor said. “Being a prophet sucks, frankly. People yell at you, and don’t believe you.”

The Pope got a little taste of that from his encyclical, with everyone from Republican presidential wannabe Jeb Bush to coal lobbyists throwing grenades at him. “The Pope ought to stay with his job,” Republican Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma said at a climate denier conference in 2015.

It’s possible the pope’s climate message will have a long shelf life; Haluza-DeLay noted that a papal encyclical released in the 1890s still informs how the Church talks about labor relations today. But even if it doesn’t, Catholic influence isn’t what it used to be. People without adherence to any religion are the fastest-growing segment of the US population, beating Catholics and evangelicals according to the latest survey. Not coincidentally, they are also among those most likely to see the environment as important, and environmental regulation as worthwhile.

“There will be a tipping point on climate change,” Taylor said, most likely as extreme weather forecasted by climate scientists gets worse. “But it won’t be religious people leading the charge.” ●