ecospirit

It would go a great way to caution and direct people in their use of the world, that they were better studied in the creation of it. For how could [they]find the confidence to abuse it, while they should see the Great Creator stare them in the face, in all and every part thereof?
- William Penn, 1693

With climate change from excess burning of carbon hovering like a sword of Damocles over our heads, the way we produce electricity, and how much we use, has become critical. Since it produces CO2 previously locked away from the active carbon cycle, burning fossil fuels is the most damaging way to get our power. The power we use in NC comes chiefly from coal, and most of that coal comes from dynamiting mountaintops in neighboring states. This is a matter of grave injustice.

Though there are promising new technologies available which will gradually close the gap, we are going to still be burning coal for at least a generation, with nuclear and hydropower being the other chief sources of baseload power (available 24 hours a day). But any additional capacity built needs to be as close to carbon-neutral as possible, and building more coal- fired plants is simply suicidal. A study commissioned by the state legislature in 2006 showed that with conservation, efficiency, and a modest growth in renewable energy, we would not need any added capacity in NC for ten years. Despite this finding, Duke Energy is building a mammoth coal-fired plant at Cliffside, near Shelby. Construction at Cliffside had been temporarily halted by federal court order, citing in particular the mercury pollution it would produce, but Duke got around this by simply reclassifying this 800 megawatt plant as a “minor” source of pollution, without changing the plant design. The NC Utility Commission and Governor Perdue went along with this bald-faced lie. The truth is, there is no clean coal, and we must stop building new plants.

On April 20, I joined 350 folks in a well-organized march in Charlotte to protest the Cliffside plant, carrying a Call to Conscience which was read in front of Governor Perdue’s office and outside Duke Energy headquarters, urging Duke CEO Jim Rogers to cancel the project. Rogers has built a reputation as a “green” power executive, speaking articulately about the need to reduce CO2 in power production. Indeed, while we were reading the citizen’s injunction and Call to Conscience outside his headquarters, Rogers was on the West Coast addressing a conference on renewable energy. On many occasions he has touted the “grandchild test,” saying we must steward a world in which our grandchildren have as much chance for a healthy life as we have enjoyed. On Monday I carried a sign reading, “Jim Rogers, you flunked the grandchild test.”

I was among 42 citizens who committed trespass and were arrested at Duke headquarters last Monday. I felt it an honor to be in the Mecklenburg County Jail with grandmothers in their 80’s, students from Appalachian State missing class to be in Charlotte, environmental leaders and clergy, and most of all, victims of mountaintop removal, the most “efficient” but devastating way to mine coal. After being unsuccessful at hearings and having court injunctions circumvented by procedural lies, it’s now in the hands of citizens to proclaim the truth, even if we risk arrest and jail time in the process.

Who is this being built for? Not for us, because if we follow the recommendations of the study mandated by our legislature and the fresh thinking in the executive branch of the federal government, we don’t need Cliffside. Duke is an international corporation, not a public utility answerable to the citizens of this state, and this additional capacity is being built to sell for profit elsewhere. But the truth I went to Duke headquarters to witness was not simply to expose an external enemy. Our own behavior as consumers is the key to reducing demand. Power companies are producing a useful product; they’re just pushed to produce too much of it, and in the absence of legislation capping carbon emissions and fair public utility regulations, in the wrong ways.

This is a justice issue, justice for the poorest among us who are already most impacted by global climate change, and justice for the rest of creation, which we put at risk by our arrogance and foolishness. It is a stewardship issue, not just of Creation put into our care by a loving Creator, but stewardship of our own species. For if we don’t’ radically dampen the accelerating CO2 curve, we are virtually assuring our own extinction, along with countless other species . As far as we know, we are the only beings in the universe where the creature can look within and find the Creator staring back. This is a sacred trust indeed.

So let’s continue to pressure Duke to stop Cliffside and other new coal plants. Urge your congressfolk to support strong legislation to cap carbon emissions. And become aware of your own habits around power use. We could immediately reduce demand by a third simply by conservation and installing more efficient appliances and compact fluorescents. I’m not the only one on trial here.

Robert McGahey, South Toe
(Editorial for Yancey Common Times April 29)

Labels: Cliffside coal plant, Jim Rogers, mountaintop removal

A colleague posed this query a few weeks ago. It accompanied James Hansen’s letter to Jim Rogers, Duke Power CEO, passionately trying to dissuade him from building a huge new coal-fired plant at Cliffside, south of Charlotte, NC. Hansen is one of the worlds’ foremost climate scientists, working tirelessly to inform politicians and corporate leaders of the disastrous consequences of business as usual. Climate change is the key moral issue of our time and the greatest challenge our species has ever faced. Chief among the Pandora’s box of ecological crises unleashed by the global corporate industrial complex, it is worthy of enlisting prophetic voices. But because it is sworn to value neutrality, science itself is not prophetic. Peer review attempts to assure allegiance to the scientific method, but in the public statements which the IPCC releases periodically, it is the politics of careful consensus that determines the averaged truth we hear. What makes the reports of bodies like the IPCC prophetic is that they deliver with considerable authority a truthful view of the world, one which our shackles of habit and comfort resist. Cal DeWitt, legendary environmental science professor, pointed out recently that the job of the scientist, as well as the ordinary citizen, is simply to describe what he sees when he honestly looks at the world we live in. Thus the scientist and the honest citizen play the role of the little boy who pointed out to a kingdom of sycophants that the emperor wore no clothes. Science is descriptive. By its ability to measure concentrations of atmospheric gases, and compare them to other climatic eras, the IPCC is able to make a comprehensive case for the earth’s condition. By taking on the role as arbiter of truthful evidence in the post-Enlightenment world, science plays less the role of prophet than priest. In the case of climate change, it provides an enormous counterweight to industry and the politicians who do its bidding. But in other cases, like the pharmaceutical industry, it is thoroughly complicit in the corporate goal of fleecing the consumer by controlling the means of relief from the mortal reality framing our lives. In the case of the IPCC reports, the sense that science is prophetic comes from its ability to predict future climates based on more and more precise modeling of those from the past and present. Since its models are so powerful, we experience the dawning future like a fearsome wave asymptotic to the present reality; the future is collapsing upon our poorly-defended present. For those with eyes open it feels like prophecy unfolding. Science is also normative, and those norms not only dictate the practice of science, they enshrine it as the technological fix. Running out of food? No problem, we’ll synthesize it in the lab. Too much CO2? Let’s pump it into the ground, perhaps piping it under the ocean. The latter dream reminds me of Goethe’s Faust and his vast scheme for water projects spanning the northern hemisphere. Ignoring Faustus’ fate in the Medieval morality play and in Marlowe’s drama, we honor him as Goethe’s romantic hero, the superscientist who holds the keys to the kingdom of sustainability. Individual scientists take what their science has given them to speak in moral terms. In his letter to Jim Rogers, Hansen speaks of both the tragedy and the dangers to humankind presented by desperate climate refugees. He speaks of the moral imperative to preserve a habitable world for our children and grandchildren. But in the same letter, knowing he’s addressing a businessman, he dwells longest on the liability of building coal-fired plants in a business climate overshadowed by global warming. Hansen acknowledges greed by pointing out the similarity in the disinformation campaign on climate change to the tobacco industry’s use of the same strategy, enabling it to amass huge profits while it diverted society from incontrovertible evidence that smoking caused cancer. But a true prophet would address our common greed, a whole society that has turned away from God’s charge to be stewards of the Garden. We like to blame the politicians and corporate overlords, but we are the ones who elect the politicians and buy the array of plastic from China, demanding food, oil, and electric power anytime from anywhere, at a huge cost to the earth. The prophetic response to climate change emerges not from science but from allegiance to a power deeper than humanity. In the case of the Judeo-Christian tradition, that power resides in the Old Testament land ethic and in Jesus’s social gospel. The prophet would point out the special risk to the poor from climate disruption. To the prophetic ear, the message of the climate scientist leads to an examination of structural sin, a political liberalism that discounts the good of the whole, confident that individual liberty will liberate us all, including the least of these, into the horn of plenty. The mechanism for this is the Market, today’s Mammon enshrined by left and right alike, an economic structure that continues to enrich a minority while the poor remain mired in poverty. A rising tide raises all boats say the other modernist priests, neoliberal economists. Tell this to islanders and coastal dwellers already washed by that tide. “See how Christ's blood streams from the firmament!” says Marlowe’s Faustus, his heart locked against repentance. In the next scene, the demons pull him bodily into hell. In contrast to the cool view of science, the universe is shot through with the divine, and has a moral structure. Faustus looks up and beholds the river of the suffering divine as it enters into relation with the world. Creation may not have taken place by means of the haunting poetry of Genesis, but scripture points out that ours is world structured by the divine, not chance. The Genesis Garden is laid out in quarters by the two rivers flowing through it. Prophecy is rooted in the recognition of this moral structure, and today it proclaims how our ecological sin has damaged it hugely. Fundamentalists are retrograde to deny the atmospheric facts, but they are faithful in their witness to the divine foundation of prophetic speech and action. We need science’s help in getting the facts of Creation right, but all people of faith need to reach for the requisite motivation to preserve this old earth in the face of another great wave of extinction. We must re-affirm our deepest love and stewardship, for this time around, we are the Flood, and must learn again to be Noahs, undoing what our engine of progress has wrought.

Labels: Cliffside coal plant, climate change, Faust, IPCC, James Hansen, Jim Rogers, neoliberal economics, science and prophecy