ecospirit

The steering committee of Quaker Earthcare Witness met again at a convent in the lovely Lincoln Park area of Chicago April 28-May 1. Geeta and I drove over 700 miles to visit with old Friends, with a strong hope to effectively share the Pisac Minute (see last post) and enlist QEW's support in extending that message through the wider Quaker world in North America. We were scheduled to host a panel Friday night on the making and propagation of the minute.

QEW is an organization primarily made up of liberal Friends, affiliated with Friends General Conference. If you check the link above you will encounter a rich website exploring resources of a group which “seek[s] emerging insights into right relationship with Earth and unity with nature.” It goes on to emphasize the importance of Quaker processes and testimonies in its work, noting that its primary calling is to facilitate personal transformation rather than structural and educational reforms. I have been attending its conferences off and on since the early days (1990's). Geeta has joined me in recent years.

A highlight for me of these gatherings is everyone's sharing the leading edge of their lives the first night (Thursday). The group includes many seasoned Friends, both in terms of ecological activism and contemplative depth. As with all Quaker groups, it tends to be a heady bunch, with a lot of education and a number of published authors. The sharing was both powerful and humbling, showing me examples of colleagues who walked their talk far more than I do. The concern for ecojustice was matched by a tenderness for each other. As I noted during a group sharing on Saturday night, revisiting our statement of purpose, this initial session demonstrated the best of what we human beings have to offer, what this fragile planet would lose should we go extinct.

Though almost all of us are liberal FGC Friends, the group is nevertheless diverse. In its early years, it was named Friends in Unity with Nature, and though the name changed many years ago to make it sound less pagan, there is a continuing tension between those who are passionately connected to the earth and her worship and those of us who are more panentheist than pantheist. Another related fault line is between those who favor immersion in the “nature” that is left to us and those who are willing to set aside that experience in order to participate in direct action and civil disobedience. Of course some of us do both, including this blogger.

Two young people in their twenties joined us, one an evangelical. Their voices were crucial for me. The young man spoke glumly of how the politicians didn't care, and the difficulty of finding hope for his generation, though he had started a service at the restaurant where he worked to compost hundreds of pounds of food scraps at the communal building where he and his companion lived. His companion identified herself as an evangelical with a passion for climate justice, and seemed genuinely thankful to be among us. I knew of only one other person present, another first -timer with deep Quaker roots, who identified himself as a follower of Christ Jesus. Other than a lively woman who had been with Geeta in Pisac, perhaps in her mid-fifties, participants were in their sixties, seventies, and eighties. More young people might help the dialogue and give the organization perspective. Everyone knows this.

Some of the leadership have had a serious split with FCNL (the respected liberal Friends lobbying organization) over their signing a letter from faith organizations in support of the Green Climate Fund. Experienced financial and policy analysts in our group continued to educate us about the false promises and dirty capitalist tricks (carbon markets, for instance, are rigged) that are embedded within this initiative. They argue that REDD, the global effort to protect forests in Third World countries through carbon offsets is deeply flawed, sometimes fraudulent. An old QEW Friend I talked to in Pisac expressed her disillusionment with the UN after a dozen years of being a Quaker observer. She was particularly disheartened when a charismatic Eastern European diplomat in a leadership position with a clear vision of healing the earth and forestalling catastrophic climate change was replaced by an apparatchnik who appeared to be a pawn of the corporate interests present at the table. She said the UN had been hopelessly compromised by bringing global corporate entities into the UNFCCC

The counter-argument from the FCNL climate lobbyist, Jose Aguto, is that one has to remain part of the conversation in a process where nation states have engaged with corporate entities in the efforts to forestall rapid climate change under the aegis of the UN. The compelling presentations in Chicago appeared to seal the better arguments on the side of the anti-global finance people, but the willingness to work with everyone at the table on the part of the coalition of religious groups, including the “enemy,” remains persuasive for me. This is the central struggle in the UNFCCC and other international bodies (like the World Bank and IMF) in the climate wars. Sometimes it is hard to find the God within those who present themselves as other, seemingly diametrically opposed to one's own values. But that is our commitment as Friends. Of course, the question is, where is God in the structures themselves, the committees, organizations, and corporations? Unless there are honest, open personal relations among all sides in these groups, God is unnamed and unrecognized.

The following post goes into detail about our sharing of the Pisac Minute and what then transpired at Business Meeting, “Geeta Answers the Call.”

As the talks in Paris entered their second, crucial week, unresolved issues that have been hanging for years of negotiations remain the sticking points. They center around climate justice, or the obligations of the rich, developed nations to the poor, developing ones. In a rather shocking “non-paper” sent to fellow rich countries before COP 21, the US urged its peers to hold firm against the demands of poor countries, for the main issue remained getting CO2 emissions down, not administering justice, which our government correctly saw as an ongoing (eternal) process, not something that could be resolved by one treaty.

It is a sad, harsh reality that certain nations face earlier climate ruin than others. The Pacific island nations, much of Africa, and Bangla Desh come immediately to mind, as do the South Indians who are being flooded as I write. An international Green Climate Fund has been created, with a goal of $100 billion for helping weaker countries adapt to climate change. As nations entered the Paris talks, this fund was less than 3% funded, though many are encouraged that some private capitalists, notably Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, have committed to the process in a big way in Paris. Current U.S. commitments are paltry, dwarfed by our governments continuing huge subsidies to gas and oil interests.

I agree that firm commitments from the wealthier nations to make this fund a robust instrument of both adaptation and mitigation – as in the accord between France and India to invest $3 billion to supercharge solar energy in India – are absolutely required as part of a document that most of the world's nations could sign. And it is a major gesture, a huge shift since Copenhagen, that China has committed to contributing to this fund.

A key element in the climate justice demands of the G77 block in Paris is the historical carbon debt of the First World. It is true that the Western powers, primarily the UK and the US, have contributed most of the historical CO2 emissions. This historical carbon, as James Hansen recently pointed out, continues to represent the huge bulk of the extra CO2 burdening the carbon cycle. It persists for a long time, most of it a mere 500 years, but a quarter of it lasts essentially forever. See the sobering article in Nature.

The persistence of fossil CO2 in the atmosphere means that we must not only ramp down our emissions as fast as possible, but also find ways to pull it back out of the atmosphere (my post on fixing CO2 in soil last month outlines one pathway). So, yes, our industrial error has proved to be a mammoth one. But at the time of the industrial revolution in England, and later with the rapid industrialization of the US, we simply did not know what we were doing. The consensus was that the inventors were improving the lot of mankind. We now need to leave the platform which fossil fuels built, but we also need to recognize the many aspects of the modern world which were created by, and continue to be fueled by, oil in particular. This is part of the legacy of those who industrialized first to the rest of the world, even as we acknowledge the brave new world of new sources of energy, and new materials (see the current Economist for a fascinating look at the emerging materials universe), one which needs to replace the fossil platform as fast as possible.

In a recent wide-ranging historical overview of climate science, US science advisor John Holdren argued that scientists reporting to the President reached consensus by 1990 that the CO2 burden added by burning fossil fuels was greater than the opposing effect of industrial aerosol pollution (these aerosols, primarily sulfates, ironically hinder the warming effect of greenhouse gases by damping the amount of incoming solar radiation through re-reflection). If political leaders had accepted that scientific consensus, then any fossil-sourced emissions from that point on could be charged as culpable, witting ecological sin. That would of course include most of the cumulative emissions from China and India, as well as the continuing emissions from countries who industrialized first. The fact that the Republican Party continues to deny that climate change is human-driven is probably the greatest moral error in history, given this consensus. Even worse, Exxon scientists had reached the conclusion that fossil carbon would prove catastrophic before 1990.

But given that concerns about fossil greenhouse gases did not lead to any conclusive research until so late in the history of industrialization, I do not think that the US and the UK (plus Russia, Germany, and Japan) owe “reparations” for the historical carbon they dumped into Gaia's system. However, given the clear judgment in hindsight of the dominant role of the Anglo Atlantic partnership in the process of industrialization fueled by fossil carbon, India's argument that they and other developing nations like Indonesia should be alloted the lion's share of the remaining fossil carbon production is a convincing one – much as I would like to see all fossil carbon burning cease in the critically immediate future. China, which has developed faster than India, used to make the same argument, but air quality there, not to mention recognition at the highest levels of state of the imperative to limit global CO2 emissions, has shifted their tone (China has arguably the strongest renewable program in the world, despite the fact that it continues to use a lot of coal, though at a significantly decreasing rate).

What does make sense, which the wealthy nations continue to resist, is to fully fund the Green Climate Fund, with no more dithering. Yes, mitigation, as well as adaptation at this initial level of climate disruption is expensive, but far, far less than what would be required with disastrous BAU. The Stern Review remains the primary source clearly documenting this. At the halfway point in negotiations, it looks as if the wealthy nations will acknowledge some historical responsibility, but only if the issue is never brought up again. That feels like they are ramming through their will once again, and such a demand is unfair, if one looks at it in terms of value statements about justice and responsibility.

Nevertheless, I think the international community needs to put the idea of “reparations” behind it. The West correctly sees that setting any kind of precedent for that opens the door to being given a bill for any future disasters in the Third World, no matter what their cause. Though I have enormous sympathy for those who are on the frontlines of climate disruption, it is too much to expect a blank check accepting blanket responsibilities from the heirs of some innovative tinkerers in the coal country of England 300 years ago.

As for justice, Exxon should be heavily prosecuted for their willful climate change denial, the lynchpin in a strategy previously set by the tobacco industry, which also cynically denied their own internal research. Except that it is not just individual smokers killing themselves in the instance of strategically motivated climate denial, but ecocide. Reparations to extinct species are impossible.