On an Earth Day Witness and Commission
The Rev. Dr. Jim Antal, special advisor on climate justice to the United Church of Christ’s general minister and president, gave the keynote address for the denomination’s first annual Earth Day Summit. For the sake of the Earth and all of us, Jim has been on the frontlines of environmental and climate advocacy and civil disobedience for decades, which has included handcuffing himself to a White House fence and getting arrested with Julian Bond, Bill McKibben and other notorious climate advocates. He is known to many of us as a member of Third Act Faith and by his book, Climate Church, Climate World, of which a new edition was just published in March.
Before looking deeply at what it means and takes to do this work honestly and hopefully — and in keeping with the summit’s theme — Jim began by thanking the UCC for its long witness and record as “a leading religious voice” calling for environmental and climate justice. With his permission, we are publishing the rest of his Earth Day address, lightly edited. Please be sure to credit Jim when sharing this with others.
By Jim Antal (c) 2023
Third Act Faith Member
Since the focus of this first UCC Earth Day Summit is “Stories of Hope,” I want to begin by asking, “What’s the story? What’s the story we’re living in?” Then, I want to offer an understanding of the kind of hope I believe people of faith are called to embrace, living as we are amidst the sixth great extinction. Finally, I will try to give some shape to the new, hope-filled story God is calling us to live into.
What’s the Story?
So much depends upon a stable climate
For the better part of 12,000 years, life on Earth has enjoyed a stable climate. That stable climate allowed humans to stop migrating and settle down, grow food, build cities and infrastructure, institute laws, claim territories, and allow for free time. In other words, the stable climate — or what I like to call the continuity of creation — allowed us to create civilization.
But that continuity is now broken. Once the Industrial Era began, it took us only seven generations to de-create the planet.1 Over the past 200 years, humanity has extracted and burned about half the coal, oil and gas that nature took 150 million years to make. That’s how the developed countries built the modern world. In doing so, a tiny percentage of us became unimaginably wealthy, profiting from the control over and abuse of resources that we had nothing to do with creating. At the same time, a majority of people worldwide are living amidst increased inequality, poverty, hunger, homelessness and lack of potable water. These injustices are all casualties of the unjust acquisition, extraction, distribution and profit from the energy stored under our feet.
How bad have things gotten?
In the summers of 2021 and 2022, regions as far as 70 miles above the Arctic Circle were overcome by a daytime high over 50 degrees above normal — hitting an all-time high of 118°F2 — ABOVE THE ARCTIC CIRCLE! The Washington Post reported that in 2018, places in Antarctica were 70°F above normal.
We now know that air pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels kills almost nine million people a year. That’s more than malaria, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis combined. And that doesn’t even include the lives lost due to the impact of increased global warming.
A 2021 study reports that should global warming exceed 1.5°C (2.7°F), the world’s tropics could become uninhabitable. Many climate scientists believe we will cross that threshold in the next 10 years. Imagine what life might be like in 2033 with 2.5 billion refugees.
In other words, the past decade has been the hottest decade since records have been kept — and the past decade will be the coolest decade your children and your grandchildren will ever experience.
It’s not only heat. Last August, unprecedented monsoons flooded 13% of Pakistan, killing over 1,600 people and displacing over 30 million. And between mid-July and mid-August, five states here in the United States experienced 1-in-1,000-year rain events.3 Imagine nine months of rain in a single day!
It’s not just deluge — it’s also drought. That’s why we call it climate chaos. Europe’s drought is the worst in 500 years.
What’s keeping us from taking action?
According to climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, last year at least one in three Americans was personally affected by the way that climate change is making our extreme weather more severe. So, what’s keeping us from taking action?
The reason is simple. Since their inception, fossil fuel corporations have had one and only one goal: to make the most money for their shareholders each quarter.4
Consider this:
In 1975, when fossil-fuel corporations heard that the world was on the brink of global warming, they quickly hired the best climate scientists in the world.5 As early as 1977, those scientists told the Exxon board of directors that climate change is caused by humans burning fossil fuels, it’s getting worse, and while the oceans are absorbing most of the excess CO2, that will not continue indefinitely. A new study in 2023 shows that as far back as 1977, the oil companies predicted exactly the global warming impacts we see today. But instead of releasing the reports, Exxon hired the best ocean scientists, and asked them if the oceans were saving us, and in the mid-1980s the ocean scientists confirmed those findings. At about that same time, Exxon’s engineers reported a breakthrough in their ability to drill horizontally into shale. This allowed Exxon to extract more natural gas than anyone could imagine — what we today refer to as “fracking.”
So, what did Exxon do? First, they fired those climate scientists and buried their reports, and then, Exxon hired a few fake scientists — the same fake scientists that the tobacco industry had hired in 1978. Just as these fake scientists had sown the seeds of doubt about whether smoking caused cancer, they began to sow the seeds of doubt about whether climate change was “real.” Over the past four and a half decades, fossil fuel corporations and their “think tank” partners have spent hundreds of millions of dollars supporting various disinformation campaigns and politicians who do their bidding. To this day, America remains the only place in the world where climate denial has any political or cultural traction.
Is there more to the story?
Thank God that’s not all there is to the story we find ourselves in.
Of course, there’s the climate movement — and I’ll have more to say about that below.
But what needs to be said is that, since 1965, when President Johnson received the first report on global warming, the scientists and engineers have done their jobs! They are providing all the solutions we need to complete the greatest transition humanity has ever attempted — moving from our dependence on fossil fuel to a reliance on renewable and sustainable clean forms of energy.
In February 2021, a group of the world’s top climate scientists issued a report indicating that by 2030 electricity from solar, wind and water could provide all the electricity the world needs. And by 2035, renewable energy could also be the sole energy source for all the world’s heating, cooling, transportation and industry. Furthermore, another study from August 2022, indicates that making this transition will pay for itself in only six years. Not only that, but as we make this transition, we can address economic and racial inequities — and by doing so, we will reap benefits far greater than the costs.
A Frame: The Call to Easter Witness
OK. That’s the story. Now, I want to invite you, as Christians, as people of faith, to receive this story using a familiar frame of reference.
Just as Jesus, before he was killed, told his disciples that they would do even greater acts than he (John 14:12), God is calling us to restore God’s great gift of creation, to remove the millstones that now hang around the necks of our children, and to hasten a just transition to a sustainable economy that recognizes the interdependence of all creation.
And just as Jesus called his disciples to the upper room where they would join their hearts together in a final meal, while they confronted their fears and conjured the courage to face the unimaginable events that were imminent, and then turn the world upside down (Acts 17:6), so too God is calling you and me — our generation — to join our hearts together while we embrace the opportunity to overturn a destructive story of rugged individualism, exploitation, anthropocentrism, racist inequity, colonialist extraction, and environmental degradation. And in its place, create a new understanding of interdependence, resilience, wonder, moral imagination, moderation, justice and vision.
Truth is the foundation of hope
Keeping that frame of reference in mind, I want to offer an understanding of the kind of hope I believe people of faith are called to embrace, living as we are on the hinge of history — amidst the sixth great extinction.
I believe truth is the foundation of hope. For hope to be authentic, it must be founded on truth. If we place our hope on something untrue, we eventually realize it’s a false hope.
To put it another way, facing reality is a precondition of hope. Dr. Jerome Groopman says it well: “Hope, unlike optimism, is rooted in unalloyed reality.”6 He continues, “To hope under the most extreme circumstances is an act of defiance.”7
Because I believe that hope is the most important contribution people of faith can and must make as humanity confronts the climate crisis, it’s critically important for us, as people of faith, to stare reality in the face. We must be willing to face not only the scientific reality of a rapidly warming world but also the political reality that there are individuals, groups and entire industries devoted to spreading misinformation and lies about the climate crisis.
If hope is essential to Christians, then exposing the lies perpetuated by the powers and principalities that deny climate change must become a first-order priority. Christians cannot stand idly by and allow the greatest moral challenge humanity has ever faced to be framed as an ideological dispute by people with unlimited financial resources acquired by the abuse of God’s creation.8
And so, if we are to embrace an authentic hope, here are a few of the truths every congregation should be aware of:
Truth #1: Since the Paris Climate Agreement was adopted in late 2015, JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo and Bank of America have lent over $1 trillion to fossil fuel companies to expand their oil, coal and gas reserves, and build additional fossil fuel infrastructure.
Truth #2: As I pointed out above, the world has no need for more fossil fuels. Energy from solar, wind and water is now cheaper than energy from fossil fuels.
Truth #3: If our world is to remain livable — if we are to keep the increase in global temperature below 2°C — the fossil fuel companies will need to walk away from assets worth about $100 trillion.
These and other truths must not be hung from the scaffold — they must be proclaimed from tens of thousands of pulpits. Only then can hope take hold.
Hope starts with honesty
Once we accept that truth is the foundation of hope, it follows — as Greta Thunberg reminds us — that “hope starts with honesty.”
And if we are honest about the climate crisis, we will acknowledge that our hearts are full of grief. Many of us feel dread about what may lie ahead, outrage at what is happening to our planet, and sadness about what has already been lost. Too often, too many of us keep these feelings to ourselves while we suffer in isolation.
But it turns out that one of the central ministries of the church, the synagogue and the mosque is to welcome people who are grieving, to hear them out and to respond to their pain. My years as a pastor and my reading of scripture have taught me that, in fact, our honest expression of the grief we experience, however overwhelming it may feel, is a precondition of hope.
Let’s make sure that our houses of worship are “safe enough” places for us to honestly share our grief, and by doing so, give rise to a life of hope and action.
Love fuels hope
Now before we move on from grief to a life of hope and action, I have one more brief observation.
It’s my experience that the smoke of grief and the fire of love are inseparable. And love fuels hope.
I want to encourage you — every single day (perhaps multiple times each day) — to take a deep breath and allow love to inhabit your heart — love experienced as gratitude for the beauty, the diversity and the grandeur that surround you. And then allow the fire of that love to cast out all fear (1 John 4:18) and propel you into action.
Hope is kept alive by action
We’ve all heard the expression “Keep hope alive.” Hope is kept alive by action.
In her first public speech — a 2018 TedX talk in Stockholm — 15-year-old Greta Thunberg told the world, “Once we start to act, hope is everywhere.” No one imagined — least of all Greta — that over the next five years, over 18 million young people from 233 countries would walk out of school and into the streets of over 8,000 cities and towns calling for climate action now. These young people understand hope as engagement. For them, hope has no connection with optimism. They realize they can’t control the menacing juggernaut of the climate crisis. For them, hope is not focused on a future state of affairs. Hope is manifest right now:
By refusing to be paralyzed by despair.
By no longer eating meat.
By choosing not to fly.
By confronting those in charge.
In 2012, the climate movement began to call for divestment from fossil fuel corporations. In 2013, our denomination, the UCC, led the way in this effort. When the UCC passed a resolution that I wrote, we became the first religious organization and the first national organization to vote to divest. No one imagined that in only 10 years’ time, portfolios worth over $40 trillion would purge their holdings of fossil fuels stock.
In November 2018, 250 young people filed into Nancy Pelosi’s office and refused to leave. Alongside them, offering support was then-29-year-old U.S. Rep. Alexandria Occasio Cortez. Knowing that Pelosi would soon become Speaker of the House, they were demanding that Congress pass some version of the Green New Deal and focus on environmental justice. Although the police arrested 51 of them, Pelosi welcomed the protest and called on the police “to allow them to continue to organize and participate in our democracy.”
In support of their action, in 2019 the UCC national synod became the first Christian denomination to endorse the Green New Deal. No one imagined, least of all these young climate leaders, that in September 2022, they would be among those honored guests on the lawn of the White House celebrating the signing of the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes over $370 billion dollars of climate- and energy-related projects — by far the biggest commitment our country or any country has ever made to address the climate crisis.
In 2021, Bill McKibben launched a new climate organization called Third Act. It provides elders — people over 60, in their “third act” of life — with an opportunity to join millions of others as they realign their time, their energy, their gifts, their attention and their assets to respond to the call now heard around the world. Bill reminded those elders that they hold about 70 percent of all assets in the US. And then he invited them to tell their banks to stop investing in fossil fuel companies. No one imagined that on March 21, 2023, thousands of gray hairs would protest in front of over 100 bank locations to cut up their credit cards and tell the world that, altogether in the six years since the Paris climate agreement, the 60 largest banks have poured over $4.6 trillion into the fossil fuels industry.
We can’t accept God’s invitation to help create a new story unless we are willing to take action. Let us become partners with God as we explore new and perhaps unfamiliar pathways. And let our actions be guided by a preferred future that embraces:
Resilience in place of growth.
Collaboration in place of consumption.
Wisdom in place of progress.
Balance in place of addiction.
Moderation in place of excess.
Vision in place of convenience.
Accountability in place of disregard.
Self-giving love in place of self-centered fear.
We Are Called to Write a New Story
Imagination extends the horizon of hope
God has given us everything we need to cross the abyss between our current story and the new story that God is calling us to champion. Humanity has all the technology we need to immediately transition to a fossil fuel–free economy.
But to relinquish our dependence on fossil fuel requires us to expand our moral imagination so that we can extend the horizon of hope to embrace this new story. This may be the most essential work of the church, the synagogue and the mosque in a climate crisis world.
Back to Easter witness: We are called to write a new story. But expanding our moral imagination is not enough.
As people of faith, it’s time for us to make God’s call to restore creation and advance climate justice an essential part of our identity — every bit as much as prayer is essential to our identity. The God of many names is calling everyone who is alive today to recognize that our generation — no matter what “generation” we may be part of —has a vocation, a common, universal calling.
Living into our Pentecost commission
This is our Easter witness; this is our Pentecost commission.
Believing that another, more just world is possible, let us become the generation that (finally!) blows the whistle and declares, “Not on my watch!” Let us begin to live into a new story — a story that will leave a fair and stable planet for our kids and grandkids and all future generations — a story shaped by:
The unifying power of shared vulnerability.
The emerging embrace of the challenge of change.
The humbling reward of justice restored.
The expansive fullness of interdependence.
The contagious generosity of caring for the least of these among us.
Our universal calling to protect and restore God’s great gift of creation.
Thank you. Let the people say, “Amen.”
This phrase comes from an interview with Bill McKibben.
See “Ground Temperatures Hit 118 Degrees in the Arctic Circle” (gizmodo.com). Also see Jeff Goodell, “Will We Miss Our Last Chance to Save the World From Climate Change?” Rolling Stone, Dec. 22, 2016. On a larger scale, the Earth's temperature is already well into the range that existed during the Eemian period, 120,000 years ago when the sea level was 20 to 30 feet higher than it is now.
From mid-July to mid-August 2022: St Louis on July 25-26, Eastern Kentucky on July 28, Southern Illinois on Aug. 2, Death Valley on Aug. 5, and Dallas-Fort Worth on Aug. 21-22.
The Marketplace podcast provides a brief history of how maximizing shareholder value was elevated by Milton Friedman (and others) as the #1 priority of corporations.
A fuller version of this history can be found in my book Climate Church, Climate World – Revised and Updated Edition (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), pp. 14ff.
Jerome Groopman, The Anatomy of Hope (New York: Random House, 2004), p. xiii.
ibid., p. 81.
Much of the information in this paragraph can be found in Climate Church, Climate World, p. 189.