Curious Reads: God's Hot Earth & the Climate Backsliders
Curious Reads: God's Hot Earth & the Climate Backsliders
Is the fight against climate change losing momentum?
Hello friend, Liz here.
#1 Today’s top of the fold story is the backsliders—that is, the big banking institutions who are retracting their pledges to lower emissions, setting the entire planet back by decades in the effort to reverse global warming.
I know, it sucks to read bad news. And it’s tempting for me to down on evangelicalism in every newsletter (‘cause it’s popular 😜). But I hardly ever see news about the climate… and if, news junkie that I am, I never see climate news, I’m guessing you don’t either.
And this spring has been the hottest on record here in Colorado! Actually, since last June, every single month everywhere has been the hottest on record. 🥵
So, I think we may need to have a family discussion, don’t you?
Read “Is the fight against climate change losing momentum?” by Bill McKibben at the New Yorker magazine
…and its accompanying report, “UBS Banker’s Frustration Exposes Cracks in World of Climate Finance” by Alastair Marsh and Natasha White at Bloomberg
(Psst… if at first you can’t succeed in seeing either essay, might I suggest opening an “incognito” tab?)
For a refresher, read Wired’s guide to climate change. (Video by Radio for Wired Magazine)
The Highlights:
In February, several big banks announced they were leaving the Climate Action 100+ group, the largest investor group of those divesting in climate-harming industries and corporations. These banks had formerly signed on voluntarily at Glasgow’s 2021 COP26 summit, where they’d also made “broad but vague commitments to support energy transition with their lending practices.”
But the bankers have recently realized that cutting emissions—as they promised to do as part of the Paris climate accords—will cost them business.
They’ll lose clients like oil and gas execs (duh) and they’ll have to cease lending to economies and other corporations that rely upon dirty energy. They’ll say goodbye to profits from power, automobiles, aviation, steel, coal, shipping, and cement—the sectors that make them rich. They’ll lose business, in other words.
So they’ve walked back their promises.
No surprise, the ones backsliding are the big fish in the world of finance—Deutsche Bank AG, HSBC Holdings, Bank of America, Black Rock, and JP Morgan.
“Divestment isn’t going to be the solution,” said one of Mitsubishi’s UFJ Financial group’s head investors.
He’s not the only one to grumble. A Bloomberg report describes how “senior bankers… [complain in private] about unrealistic expectations from regulators, civil society and climate activists around the industry’s role in getting the planet to net zero.”
One UBG Group AG banker supposedly burst out in a recent closed-door meeting with Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank officials, saying, “‘Banks are living and lending on planet earth, not planet NGFS,’ …alluding to the Network for Greening the Financial System, a collection of central bankers that creates model scenarios for how the energy transition may evolve.”
Hearing that banker’s exasperation, I want to talk back: duh, yes, exactly, we’re living on planet Earth, the one and only. We are living on the sole planet available to us, the goldilocks in our solar system, the lone outpost where liquid water is accessible and life is plentiful. So, living here and now, shouldn’t we take the real needs of this planet seriously?
The U.S. has recently made progress in reducing emissions thanks to President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act—Biden 2024!!. But worldwide, we’re still burning more fossil fuels as a planet every year.
Globally, our carbon emissions are growing, not shrinking.
And now, the bankers who were once starry-eyed about joining the international community in reversing the catastrophe upon us have reversed course, worsening the situation. (Their clients, by the way, seem to be planning their business for adaptation to even more dramatic rises in atmospheric temperature, and banks aren’t blinking.)
This is tragic and infuriating.
Turns out, banks had to do the math to realize that reigning in capitalism isn’t lucrative.
Chief investment officer for the Church of England’s pensions, Adam Matthews, explained that there’s been a “gradual peeling away of flaky members as the penny has dropped that this is much harder than a photo call and press release.”
“It was always convenient for finance to be projected as the savior on climate, when in reality, finance can only go so far if the enabling policy environment isn’t there."
Climate is the government’s problem now.
But, while this news about banks is TERRIBLE, I do have some good news: the public popularity of solar energy has grown. Last fall, an international survey of 21,000 thousand people in 21 nations showed that 2/3 respondents preferred solar power to fossil fuels (only favored by 14%).
“Despite all the scoffing from Big Oil and its associated politicians, people seem to recognize a potential beauty in relying on the sun which is entirely practical—entirely realistic—now that it’s not only the cleanest way to produce energy but also the cheapest.”
That’s right: solar energy is cheaper than coal or oil. (Halleluiah! Take note, big banks!)
We have a long way to go before clean energy supplants our favorite carbon-emitting alternatives. And what will make the difference is policy and what will change policy is the action of ordinary people like me and you.
Reflections:
Obviously, it’s tough for me not to be biased on this issue. (I know my tone can be severe! Though I never want to be unkind!) Frankly, I believe these bankers are following their greed and that, yet again, a powerful human institution has waved its true colors. The moral failures of capitalism mean that when it comes to a communal decision that loses the powerful money, the poor are trampled and the planet continues to be exploited. Not surprising, but still heart-breaking and wrong.
What’s strange about this move is that the investment gained by banks is fleeting. Bill McKibben writes in the New Yorker essay,
“In a business-as-usual scenario global fossil-fuel assets would be valued at twenty-five trillion dollars by the middle of the next decade, but in a world that was serious about going net zero that number would fall by about half. Call it a twelve-trillion-dollar loss—a treasure worth fighting for, but one dwarfed by the economic damage that burning that fossil fuel would produce as it overheats the planet.”
The irony is that the effects of climate change will certainly be more expensive for the world economy (and banks) than the gains brought to investors by oil and gas in the next decade. In other words, if this were really, purely about capitalism, about steadily increasing accounts, then it would be most profitable over the longterm for banks to invest in green energy.
But these bankers aren’t making decision purely because of money. They are reinvesting in industries like oil and gas because doing so brings them power. They can exploit loopholes and win big today because of it. They can ignore the future and slough off the cost onto the next generation.
Most of them won’t be alive to experience the worst of climate change. Likely, you and I will though. It will be our problem to solve. So how will we do it, I wonder?
I understand that pausing global warming—let alone reversing it—feels impossible. I, too, have watched the depressing documentaries and despaired.Because I’m not a politician, a banker, or a institutional leader either. My power to change things is so minute, my bank account negligible, my influence even to make a difference on my hole in the atmosphere, minimal. But I can vote. And I can live differently.
Here is a hard to believe fact: policies change because peoples’ lives have already changed to match the world they want to live in. The policy follows after. This isn’t a pollyanna-ism; it’s how governments and cultures change, person by person. Movements happen from the ground up.
For myself, everyday environmentalism has become an imperative. I do not claim to do this perfectly or to be a model for anyone, but my life looks different than it used to. I feed my family more intentionally, I reuse, I thrift shop religiously, and my husband DIYs much of what we need with what we already have on-hand in the garage or the closet beneath the stairs.
Yes, living like this is time-consuming, and sometimes (in the case of local, organic food), it’s more expensive. But I believe that spending the time to follow my conscience is always worth the extra effort.
In fact, I have discovered the Bible to be a handbook for environmentalism. My faith inspires my intentional living as an expression of gratitude for this world and of belief.
Caring for this world is agreeing with the story the Bible tells about God and creation. The Bible says that God made and upholds every created thing, that God called and made the planet ontologically good, and that our role as human beings at the top of the food chain is to nurture God’s good creation as God told us to do, rather than to exploit and dominate it. (I could go on and on about dominionism. How about I save that for my next book though?)
So, this earth month, I am committing to pray for this planet every day. (Will you consider joining me?)
I am praying that we Christians take the divine imperative to nurture the planet seriously. I am praying that the Christian church would prioritize our poor neighbors, the ones who experience the worst effects of climate catastrophe, and repent of our hardness of heart. I am praying that America would repent of our exploitation and that policies would change.
I am also planting a garden or two this year. You’ll be hearing more about that in the coming months.
But in the meantime, as I wait for God and my neighbors to change the world, I’ll be over here beating my tiny drum for the sake of God’s hot Earth.
…Here’s to resurrection!
Thanks for reading. Warmly, Liz Charlotte Grant
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More Curious Reads
#2 An adorable modern love story about learning to use dating apps after divorce. (Featuring plants!)—The New York Times
#3 How religions have reacted to solar eclipses throughout the centuries.—Religion News Service
#4 Remember how we thought all the honey bees were dying? Just kidding!! They’re booming now!! —The Washington Post
#5 So, you think you’ve been gaslit? This is what happens when a niche clinical concept becomes a ubiquitous cultural diagnosis. —The New Yorker
Guess who’s on Ozempic now?
Yup, that extra special Republican. Slate
I appreciate your insight into what is happening with climate change and it is interesting how we have a hard time moving the needle as it always ladders back to money. I wonder what would happen if our governments actually charged the banks and oil companies with the cost of the clean up every time there is another wild fire or flood. Thank you for a great read - from Canada.....