Joining Your Voice with the Movement

Imagine you are living in a village along a stream.  It’s a beautiful community with wonderful neighbors and you’ve all been thriving together for ages.  Then one day people start to get sick – and after a while, it becomes clear that people are getting sick from the water in the stream.  What do you do?

As an individual, you can take care of the sick – and this is a deeply Christian thing to do.  If your neighbor is sick, you are called to love him by caring for him.  So you do this for a while.  But people keep getting sicker and sicker. 

Eventually you and a group of people start meeting together to figure out why the water is making people sick.  You discover that a factory that was recently built upstream to produce products for your community has been pouring waste directly into the stream, poisoning it.  So, having discovered the cause of all the illness, you rally other neighbors together and walk upstream to the factory and tell them they need to stop pouring poison into the water because it’s making your village sick.  When you raise this concern with the factory leadership, they ignore you and continue to poison your water.  So you go to your village and tell everyone this company is poisoning your water and they should stop buying their products.  You spread it around social media.  You take the message to your state capital.  You call, email, and write letters to your local representatives.  Eventually, you build up enough support that the factory’s business gets bad press and they start to lose money.  Finally, they agree to stop poisoning your water. 

This is an example of collective action working to change a systemic problem.

As an individual, if you don’t question why people in your village are getting sick and just keep caring for them on your own, you will burn yourself out and people will keep getting sick – because all your service, as beautiful as it is, is only addressing the symptoms of the problem, and not the systemic problem itself.  And even if you go a step further and do recognize the systemic problem, but then walk up to the factory leadership alone and try to get them to change, they will ignore you – because by yourself you don’t have the collective power needed to make the change.  And so systemic change requires two critical elements: first you must move past the symptoms and target the root cause, and second you must partner with others to build enough collective power that you can bring about the desired change.

I wish a compelling moral message were enough to get the fossil fuel industry to look at itself, recognize the harm it is doing to our present world and future generations, and change their ways – but unfortunately for 40 years that has not been enough, so I don’t expect things to be any different today.  Dr Martin Luther King wrote in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”  Those with power, whether individuals, or groups of people, or corporations, like to hold on to power and almost never give it up unless forced to do so.  The most jarring exception to this rule is Jesus Christ, who, as we read in Philippians 2, chose to give up divine power and glory in order to take on the role of a servant and live with those with the least.  This should be a guiding principle for all Christians – but it is not the way the world works, and so we should expect that collective non-violent power, fueled by prayer, is usually the only thing that can get bad actors in power to change their ways.

So how, practically, can we join with others to build the power necessary to get the fossil fuel industry to transition away from an extremely lucrative business that is destroying our planetary ecosystem?  The answer is most emphatically not to appeal to their moral nature.  The industry, like all industries, is made up of corporations, and all corporations are designed in their most basic structure to maximize shareholder profits – even if it means destroying the world in the process (as insane as that sounds).  They will only change if they believe that a clean energy transition will make them more money than staying in fossil fuels – or if they are forced to change by new laws with effective enforcement.  The carrot and the stick are the only two things that can move the stubborn mule that is the fossil fuel industry.

And so, in order to cultivate this carrot and stick environment, collective action usually aims towards one of four core goals:

1)    educating the public so as to build climate-oriented social tipping points (carrot);

2)    getting representatives elected who will prioritize climate friendly policies that offer benefits for transitioning (carrot) and penalties for continuing to burn carbon (stick);

3)    getting existing representatives to pass new climate friendly laws (carrot/stick); and

4)    getting local or regional government to enforce existing laws that are being ignored by industries (stick).

Let’s go through them one by one.

Educating the public is the most fundamental aspect of collective action that you can be a part of.  Without education, people will not be aware of the devastating planetary harm of continued fossil fuel us, or the amazing opportunities inherent to the clean energy transition.  If they’re not aware, they won’t become concerned, engaged, or active.  If there are not enough people who are engaged, the status quo will simply continue and send the world steadily over a cliff.  With education, however, people can become aware, share their awareness with others, and collective will can start to grow.  When there are enough people who care about something, they can start to move the needle – they can start to build advocacy organizations, strengthen votes for climate-oriented candidates, write to representatives, etc.  Everything begins with people becoming aware and engaged. 

Educating the public can take many forms.  A way anyone can do this is by simply talking to your friends and family about the climate crisis.  You can do this as an individual – but this action is inherently collective because it invests in the building of broader social awareness.  You can then take this to the next level by joining an advocacy group that specializes in building public education and awareness.  My own organization, the Climate Witness Project, is focused on educating the church about the climate crisis as a way to build Christian intentionality towards creation health and human justice issues, and to help build the social will to move the needle on our numerous environmental crises.  This blog and website are designed for just that purpose, particularly our resource page.  You can also find a number of resources on the CWP binational website (www.crcna.org/climate-witness-project), by watching a climate justice documentary we made in Hunting Park in North Philadelphia (www.crcna.org/hunting-park), or by exploring the Evangelical Environmental Network’s website (https://creationcare.org).  There are a million other climate education resources out there – just look around.

Second, we can build collective power by electing representatives into our governments – local, regional, and national – who will prioritize climate concerns and push for climate positive legislation.  In this respect, one of the most powerful collective actions you can do is vote.  We all need to vote as individuals (you can register here) – but we can also partner with organizations that are focused on getting out the vote.  The more people are educated on climate, and the more they vote on climate, the more likely we are to get representatives into office who will pass legislation that can make the kinds of systemic changes we need.  The Inflation Reduction Act is an amazing example of this – it is one of the most sweeping and powerful climate bills (as well as economic stimulus bills) ever passed in our country’s history – and it is a direct result of the climate-orientation of the representatives in government.  How did these representatives get into office?  They were voted in by American citizens, which was in turn informed by widespread climate education efforts.  Your vote matters – which brings us to this November’s election …

If you live in Philadelphia, the power of your vote to impact the course not only of American history, but of our planet and human civilization as a whole … is terrifying.   Philadelphia’s voter turnout will have a huge impact on who wins Pennsylvania, and whoever wins Pennsylvania will almost certainly win the White House.  The two candidates America must choose between could not have more starkly different orientations towards the climate crisis.  One accurately considers it an existential global threat and has a record of taking meaningful action on it.  The other incorrectly believes that the climate crisis is a hoax and intends to continue to invest in the fossil fuel industry, to the detriment of all.  At this moment, our global climate system stands on the edge of a knife.  The world is transitioning away from fossil fuels and towards clean energy at a steadily accelerating rate – and this transition is creating jobs and improving health even as it fights climate change.  But this change isn’t happening fast enough yet, and it is urgent that we accelerate rapidly over the next 4 years in particular.  At this precarious global moment, if we install climate active leadership and everything goes right policy-wise, we may still not transition fast enough – but at least there remains a chance.  However, if we install a climate denier with the power of the presidency over one of the world’s greatest emitters – we will very likely tip our children and grandchildren over into a catastrophic collective future.  It is so very, very important to vote for representative leadership who will speed up the clean energy transition instead of slowing it down – and so we must vote to ensure that that happens.  A great PA organization you can partner with to help get out the vote is POWER Interfaith.  And there are plenty of others.

Third, we can build collective power by telling the representatives that we have elected to push for and pass legislation that is clean-transition-oriented.  It doesn’t matter if you are a Republican, Democrat, Independent, or swing voter – we should all be communicating with our representatives and encouraging them to push for good climate laws that will help our society accelerate our transition away from fossil fuels and towards a clean energy economy.  You can advocate for this kind of change by writing your representatives directly – here’s a link where you can find and contact your federal House and Senate representatives: https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member.  And if you’re in PA, here’s a link where you can find your State House and Senate reps and contact them: https://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/home/findyourlegislator/.  You can also engage your representatives by joining an advocacy organization that is working as a group to strategically influence policy-makers.  Advocacy organizations spend all their time focusing on what the issues are, what bills are on the table, and how best to leverage social power to get the desired changes passed – so by joining them, you can give your voice more strategic influence  Some great PA advocacy organizations are POWER Interfaith, HERE4CJ, and Philly Thrive.  Some great national ones are the Sunrise Movement, EEN Action, and the Sierra Club (to name a few).

Fourth (and finally), you can partner with others to press bad actors to comply with climate laws that have already been passed.  Laws mean very little if they aren’t enforced – and many companies will ignore laws they don’t like if they feel they can get away with it – or if they feel the financial benefit of breaking the law will be greater than the financial cost of fighting lawsuits in court and perhaps being penalized.  Lots of organizations like the ones above do this kind of work – they serve as watchdogs for bad actors and bring attention (and sometimes lawsuits) to them when they violate good environmental laws.  I have personally been involved in watchdog work done by HERE4CJ, POWER Interfaith, and Philly Thrive with the bad actor PGW – Philadelphia’s gas utility.  PGW is a city-owned utility, meaning that it is required to develop its future plans in a way that is in line with the city’s ambitious carbon reduction goals.  Despite this, PGW has belligerently opposed all forms of oversight and has dug its heals in again and again, essentially adopting a long term natural gas (aka methane) plan that will make the city’s climate goals impossible to attain.  They are in violation of their responsibilities – but are not being forced to comply by city council or the mayor (which is another problem).  In light of this, the three organizations I mentioned above as well as others have been working to bring attention to what they are doing in order to pressure them to comply.  It has not worked yet – which is a realistic picture of how dug in and unwilling the fossil fuel industry is as a whole.  But the work will continue – because there is no other choice if we want our children and grandchildren to inherit a habitable world.

Friends, the need is so great – and the movement is building.  But it needs to build faster – which means it needs you.  It doesn’t matter if you are black or white, rich or poor, male or female, Republican or Democrat – you have a voice.  And this movement needs a growing chorus of voices if we are to change our systems at a pace that can turn the tide.  Not long from now, the greed and deception of the fossil fuel industry from the mid 1980s through the 2020s will go down as one of the greatest evils of our time, because of its devastating effects on our world and the people living in it – and the fact that these effects were known, lied about, and ignored for decades in order to make a few people wealthy.  Do you want to be a passive participant in this?  Or do you want to be one of the people who helped turn the tide?

Let’s do this together.

RESOURCES:

CWP Resource Page: www.cwpeasternus.org/resources

CWP binational website: www.crcna.org/climate-witness-project

“This is Hunting Park” climate justice documentary filmed in North Philadelphia and narrated by Grey’s Anatomy actress Sarah Drew: www.crcna.org/hunting-park

Evangelical Environmental Network: https://creationcare.org

Link to find and contact your Federal Senators and Representative: https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member 

If you’re in PA, link to find your State Senator and Representative and contact them: https://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/home/findyourlegislator/ 

Register to vote: https://register.rockthevote.com/registrants/new

EEN Action: www.creationcare-action.com 

HERE4CJ: www.here4climatejustice.org 

POWER Interfaith: www.powerinterfaith.org 

Philly Thrive: www.phillythrive.org 

Sunrise Movement: www.sunrisemovement.org 

Sierra Club: www.sierraclub.org 

A Better Way of Living

So what can we do in our individual and family lives to start changing the weary and destructive story of fossil fuels into one of clean energy, healing, and hope?

Through intentionality. 

Fossil fuels remain highly integrated into nearly every aspect of our economies.  That is changing – and the change is increasing every day as the switch to clean energy accelerates.  However fossil fuel driven processes still remain, in many ways, the “default” or “normal” way of doing things.  But “default” and “normal” do not necessarily mean better.  And in the case of fossil fuels, this is certainly true.  Clean energy technologies are much cheaper, more efficient, heathier for people, healthier for the planet, and have much greater overall capacity.  They are just better.  The only advantage fossil fuels have on renewables is that we’re used to them – and it’s hard to change patterns we’re used to.  But on every other level, a clean energy future is far superior to one mired in the environmentally harmful energy of the past.

We just need to say to ourselves, “Maybe the way I’ve always done things isn’t necessarily the best way available anymore.  Maybe my life might benefit from some changes.”  Are you able to be open to this?  If so, you can start to be intentional about transitioning your household’s life towards a better way of living.

So what are some of the concrete ways we can change?  I will highlight some of the major ones in this post, but for a more thorough look, please go to the “Net Zero Household” resource tab on this website: www.cwpeasternus.org/net-zero-household  In this resource, I have divided aspects of household change into a number of different categories, and I’ve divided each of these categories into stages.  Stage 1 refers to simple and low- or zero-cost changes you can make either immediately or very near term.  Stage 2 refers to changes that may be a bit more costly or involved, but which provide a more substantial long-term reward.  And stage 3 refers to the most ambitious and costly changes, which in turn result in the most significant long-term gains.  One of the main points I make at the top of the resource is that nearly all of the changes you can make to decarbonize your life will benefit you financially (as well as in other ways) – so even if you care nothing about the climate crisis or the collective health and wellbeing of humanity, these decisions will still be in your own immediate and long term self-interest.

So here are some of the main ways you can make intentional changes to improve how your family lives, both for the climate crisis, and for yourselves.

1 - Improve your home energy efficiency.  Studies have shown that energy efficiency work alone done to all the buildings in the US could reduce the energy they use (and hence their carbon footprint) by a full 40%(!).  Different homes need different work.  Some work costs more than other work – but in the end, work done to improve energy efficiency will come back to save you money in the long run.  None of us want to using our money to cool the outdoors in the summer, or heat the snow in the winter – we want to use it only for the spaces we’re living in.  Energy efficiency helps us not to bleed those dollars out our windows.  In addition to this, some of our energy efficiency improvements can come through simple behavioral changes.  We ourselves can live more efficiently – by not leaving lights on when we’re not in the room, or washing our clothes in cold water, or keeping our thermostat a little higher in the summer or lower in the winter.  There are lots of ways that we can live more efficiently – and a long list can be found on the resource page.

2 - Decarbonize your electricity.  There are two main ways to decarbonize your electricity.  The first is to pay a third-party clean energy supplier to provide the electricity to your utility.  Utilities don’t always offer this, but PECO in Philadelphia does.  Doing this essentially disinvests from your utility’s dirty energy mix and instead uses that money to invest in clean power generation.  This can sometimes cost a bit more, but it’s usually comparable, and sometimes it’s cheaper – and ultimately it provides peace of mind knowing that you are helping our world accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels and towards a clean energy economy.  The much more significant way to invest in clean electricity for your household is to install rooftop solar.  There are many good ways to go solar.  If you want to do solar leasing, you will typically pay nothing up front, will experience modest savings, and will have a chance to own the panels for free after about 20-25 years.  This is a great option for people who want simplicity and/or don’t have the upfront capital to purchase solar.  A great company to lease with in the Philadelphia area is Posigen (www.posigen.com), and they will throw in a free home energy efficiency upgrade at the front end.  If you decide to go with them, apply through this link.  HPCSI, a non-profit running a solar installer training program for low-income Philadelphians, will get a referral bonus that supports their work.  If you want to purchase rooftop solar, the upfront cost is more, but the long-term benefits are much more substantial than with leasing.  Furthermore, the Inflation Reduction Act provides a 30% savings off the total cost of your installation that you can get back when you do your taxes.  When you combine this savings with your home equity increase from the solar, your SREC (solar renewable energy credit) revenue, and your savings over the course of 25 years, your initial investment will come back to you about 350-400%.  And your electricity generation will be carbon free.  If you’re interested in this, a great Philly-based company is Solar States (www.solar-states.com), and if you want to get solar in a way that supports that same work of HPCSI, go to www.solar-states.com/hpsolar).

3 - Decarbonize your heating and cooling.  Many homes use traditional AC to cool during the summers, and natural gas or oil to heat in the winters.  A better alternative by far – particularly when combined with either rooftop solar or a clean energy provider – is a heat pump system.  Heat pumps are a highly efficient electric technology that uses heat transfer to both cool and heat your home.  There are multiple ways to retrofit your home – they can be added to your existing central air system, or they can be installed as wall units.  I have wall units and I do all my cooling and heating for the year in Philadelphia with them – I don’t turn on my gas radiator heat at all.  Finally, if you are a renter, there are actually really good heat pump window units that are starting to make their way into the market and are worth looking into (click here for one that’s gotten some press).  Heat pumps, especially when combined with rooftop solar, can save you money steadily even as they clean your energy production as well as your home environment.  Natural gas, it turns out, is not healthy to have burning in your home – whether through your furnace, your water heater, or your gas stove.  So the more you can reduce it, the better.

4 - Reduce your household waste.  There are so many ways to reduce our waste.  There is a long and detailed list in the resource page.  Wasting excessively is bad enough as it is, but what we often don’t think about is how waste also has a carbon footprint.  Carbon is typically burned to produce and transport products.  The more we waste, the more extra products have to be produced, and the greater the carbon footprint will be.  Also, how we deal with our waste is significant.  Trash goes into a landfill, where everything is buried.  Buried trash decomposes through anaerobic respiration processes, which produces methane (aka natural gas).  Methane is 80X(!) more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.  When items are recycled, they are not put into the landfill, and they are reused for new products, reducing the carbon that would go into making a new product from scratch.  And when food scraps and other organic material are composted, rather than trashed, they decompose through aerobic respiration processes, which produce carbon dioxide, rather than the much more potent methane.  (They also create great soil if you like to garden.)  So it is important to both recycle and compost as much of your waste as you can.  But the holy grail of reducing your waste is reducing your buying – trying to buy as few single use things as possible and repairing and reusing everything you can.  Buying fewer new clothes helps counteract the destructive trends of fast fashion.  Buying reusable and plastics-free household items from companies like Blueland can significantly reduce your waste. Buying less food at a time and organizing your fridge so food doesn’t go bad helps with food waste (Americans waste 33%(!) of the food produced).  There are so many ways to live less wastefully – take a look at the resource for more ideas.

5 - Be conscious of where you invest and bank.  Did you ever think of your savings as a form of investment?  When you put money in a savings account with a bank, that bank is using your money for all sorts of things you may not be aware of.  When you put your money in a retirement account, those funds are being invested in a lot of different businesses doing a lot of different things.  Do you know what your money is being used to do in the world?  One of the great ironies is that many of our retirement funds are being invested in fossil fuel (and other) companies that are literally destroying the world we are hoping to retire into one day.  Our savings, retirement, and investments are, for many of us, our largest concentrations of financial power.  It’s important that we be putting that power in companies that, as they build our savings for us, are building it out of good and sustainable work.  The normalization of fossil fuel investments needs to end.  It needed to end back in the 1980s – but now is the next best time.  A few years ago, I transferred all my retirement over to an ESG investment firm called Parnassus.  They have strong sustainability guidelines for what they invest in, and they’ve brought me a great return over the years.  Another great place to invest is Calvert Impact Capital – they do really amazing mission driven work and offer investment notes with guaranteed rates of return over time. Take a look at the resource for more information on this.

6 - Decarbonize your transportation as much as possible.  There are so many ways to decarbonize your travel.  Get into biking – your body and mind will grow healthier, you’ll be happier, and you’ll be travelling cleanly.  Use public transit as much as possible – public transit burns far less carbon per person than individual gas-powered vehicles.  Make your next car an electric vehicle (EV).  I have a 2013 Chevy Volt which has an electric engine that runs 30 miles on a full charge and gets me everywhere I need to be in Philly.  It has a gas tank for extended travel, which is helpful – but the Volt is an old hybrid EV.  Today’s full EVs typically will get you 350 miles on a full charge, and the charging infrastructure is spreading all over the place and getting faster and faster.  I charge my Volt on the side of my house, using solar power from my roof – and I fill the gas tank of my car maybe 4 times a year, depending on how often I use it for long trips.  EVs save a ton of money on gas, they’re cleaner, they perform better, and the infrastructure is steadily building itself out to a place where people aren’t going to be worrying about range anxiety any more.  As more people buy EVs, gas companies will have fewer and fewer customers, the prices will be subject to volatility, and more and more gas stations will start closing (or transitioning to being EV charging stations).  EVs are very comparable in cost to gas cars these days, and there are tons of used EVs.  It doesn’t make sense to put another gas powered vehicle on the road – make your next vehicle an EV.

7 - Carbon offset what you can’t change.  Despite all our best efforts, there are still many aspects of our lives that will remain carbon-infused until our broader systems change more completely.  One of these is air travel.  There is a great deal of work being done on cleaner fuels and EV aircraft, but for the near term, flying burns carbon intensively.  In fact, you can change tons of the household systems mentioned above and greatly reduce your household carbon footprint for a year, but then go on one long flight and essentially eliminate all the savings you made.  So with flights in particular, it is important to offset your carbon.  Carbon offsetting is investing in legitimate and accountable organizations that can take your dollar, invest it in carbon reduction projects they are doing, and confirm that your dollar will remove a certain amount of carbon from the atmosphere through their program.  In this way, you can pay for an offset company to remove the amount of carbon you were responsible for by participating in a flight.  There are some illegitimate companies out there claiming offsets, but there are also some very good ones.  For flight carbon calculations and offsets, I highly recommend Atmosfair, a German company that is doing great carbon reduction work around the world that not only reduces emissions, but is meaningfully impacting people’s lives.  I use them whenever I go on flights.  They add cost to the overall flight, but the way to think of this is that this is the true cost of flying.  Flying without offsetting is exporting the unpaid climate costs of your flight to future generations.  In addition to flying, there are also some of the daily and unavoidable carbon realities of living in a fossil fuel infused economy, buying fossil fuel infused products, and travelling on fossil fuel powered systems.  Many of these simply cannot be avoided, and so a way to address them is through a more general monthly carbon offset payment meant to cover the estimated emissions you can’t cover.  A great company that does this through simple monthly subscriptions is Terrapass, and as a US company, these offsets are (I believe) tax-deductible. Take a look at them and see what you think – they are a legitimate company doing good carbon reduction work at scale, and your monthly payment to offset what you can’t through personal changes may surprise you by how low it is.  It’s worth it.

8 - Advocate for systemic change. This final topic will lead us into the next post.  The burning of fossil fuels to power our economy is a systemic and global problem.  Because of this, individual actions can only take us so far.  We need collective changes, changes in cultural mindset, changes in Church mindset, and changes in our laws to empower and accelerate the transitions we and our world so desperately need.  Our next post will focus on how we can work together to reduce the use of fossil fuels in the ever expanding collective circles beyond our own households. 

***

At the end of the day, transitioning our lives away from fossil fuels and towards cleaner and more sustainable systems will not only participate in the global effort to reduce emissions and fight climate change – it will also provide us and our families with systems that are better for our budgets, our health, and our overall well-being.  We just need to be open to shifting away from “what we’ve always done” and towards the many new (and sometimes old) options that are, simply, better.

RESOURCE:

“Net Zero Household” Resource Page - https://www.cwpeasternus.org/net-zero-household

We Need New Stories ...

Over the past few years, I’ve been involved with several different advocacy groups in collaborative efforts to press Philadelphia’s municipally-owned gas utility, Philadelphia Gas Works (PGW), to transition away from being a gas-powered heating company, to being a clean energy heating and cooling company through a process called networked geothermal.  (You can learn more about this technology by going to HEET’s website – they’re working on a project in Boston.)

We’ve made our case to PGW multiple ways: 

First, we’ve shared with them a market perspective.  Simply put, the writing is on the wall globally for fossil fuels and the transition away from them is at this point inevitable.  Renewable energy sources are cleaner, healthier, much more efficient, much more advanced, and much cheaper.  They are simply better technologies – and because of this fossil fuel businesses are on their way out.  And so, we argue, it is in PGW’s interest, if they want to have a viable business that employs people 10 years from now, to begin to urgently transition.

Second, we’ve shared with them a human perspective.  Right now, new construction in Philadelphia is becoming increasingly electric, heat pumps (which can both cool and heat your home electrically) and rooftop solar are springing up everywhere, and as a result PGW’s customer base is shrinking.  However, it is not shrinking evenly across the city’s population.  Middle and upper income people are far more often the ones purchasing rooftop solar and heat pumps, and low income people are therefore the ones being stuck behind with gas heat.  Low income people in Philadelphia have one of the highest energy burdens in the country – meaning that their utility costs to heat and cool their homes are a very high percentage of their total income.  As middle and upper income people transition away from PGW, PGW will have to increase their rates to make up for the lost customers, which will increase the energy burden on their increasingly low income customer base.  As the customer base continues to decline and rates continue to increase, more and more low income Philadelphians will go into default, making the rates even higher.  More will ask for city programs like LIHEAP to help subsidize their utility bills, but that will fall on tax payers and will eventually become untenable for the city.  And so the system will steadily collapse in on itself, with those with the least being hurt the most.  This process is what people are calling PGW’s “death spiral,” and it has already begun. 

Third (and finally), we’ve shared a climate perspective.  We’ve reminded PGW that they are a municipally-owned utility and therefore must shape their own business to fall in line with the city’s robust climate goals, which include reducing greenhouse gases by 50% by 2030 and arriving at carbon neutrality by 2050, in accordance with the recommendation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  Continuing to operate a methane-producing power system is utterly incompatible with the city’s – and humanity’s – urgent climate goals.  A transition to a clean energy system, on the other hand, would enable PGW to be a meaningful partner in our collective work to fight climate change.

These are the perspectives we’ve tried with PGW, and in the end, they’re all stories.  There’s the story of the market, its journey towards new technologies, and PGW’s opportunity to participate in it.  There’s the story of the human injustice and suffering that will play out if PGW continues to do business as it always has.  And there’s the enormous, global, even existential story of the climate crisis.

We have hoped that some – even just one – of these stories might gain some traction.  Yet, despite so many conversations, city council hearings, and gas commission hearings, PGW has refused to engage them.  At the most recent gas commission hearing, PGW tried to get the commission to pass a rule that would effectively eliminate the public’s ability to participate meaningfully in their budgeting process.  The message was clear – up to this point, PGW is not interested in joining us in a new and hopeful story, but is committed to digging its heals into its own story.

And what is PGW’s story?  It’s a story common to the fossil fuel industry.  Fossil fuels have built society.  There is no better technology for continuing to drive society forward.  We know how this technology works – it’s simple and reliable – and we believe the best way forward for everyone is more of the same.  As for climate change, it’s fine – we’ll figure it out.

As with all good lies, there are elements of truth in the story of fossil fuels.  It has indeed played a major role in the progression of businesses, technologies, and the development of societies.  It has indeed been a reliable technology and one that we understand well how to use.  However, their story does not engage that fact that fossil fuels have severely damaged the natural world and steadily poisoned the predominantly low income black and brown communities in which they have built their refineries, power plants, and highways.  Their story doesn’t recognize the inherent complexity and inefficiency of the technology, particularly as compared to new renewables.  Is it simpler, more efficient, healthier, cleaner, and cheaper to power your home by drilling deep into the ground, drawing up crude oil, refining it in a big machine, transporting it to a power plant, burning it to spin a turbine, capturing electricity from that turbine, and sending it along power lines to you?  Or is it simpler to install solar panels on your roof and receive free energy directly from the sun to power your home, heat and cool your home, and charge your vehicle?  And as for the “climate change isn’t a big deal and it will be fine” story – this is nonsensical, and is in fact a blatant and intentional lie.  The fossil fuel industry has known very clearly the impacts of the climate crisis since the mid-1980s – and so this part of their story is just intentional avoidance designed to increase short term profits regardless of the long term cost. 

And this really gets at the heart of the PGW story – and the story of the fossil fuel industry more generally.  It is a short story – a very short story.  It’s a story that is so consumed with getting near term profits that it doesn’t have the capacity to step back from its immediate frantic spinning and consider the long term impacts.  What does money mean in a collapsed society?  What good does oil do for people if the ecosystem is so damaged they can’t grow food?  And is pursing financial gain for oneself while poisoning families and crashing the ecosystem a good and meaningful life?

The short story of the fossil fuel industry is the same as the short story of so much of the capitalist mindset.  It doesn’t have to be – and there are a growing number of companies out there that are trying to build their businesses in ways that are ecologically sustainable, that care for their employees, and that benefit everyone involved.  But there is still a dominant – and phenomenally perverse – short story out there that believes, quite religiously, in the ultimate good of near term financial gain and the fantasy of growth that never stops.

This short story will turn the human story into a short story if we let it.  But we don’t have to.  We can tell different stories – stories that prioritize long term health and balance, rather than short term gain and unrelenting growth.  Stories that prioritize human well-being over money.  Stories that imagine a hopeful journey into a new relationship of mutual flourishing between humanity and the rest of the living system.

Stories change people – far more than facts.  What stories have you internalized?  What stories are you living out?  What stories are you telling to others?  Right now, a hopeful and healthy future for people and planet is in urgent need of new stories.  What new story can you help build into the imaginings of our collective conscience?

RESOURCES:

“Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall-Kimmerer – one of the best re-tellings of the story of our relationship with creation that I’ve ever read.  https://milkweed.org/book/braiding-sweetgrass

“This is Hunting Park” Episode “Nobody Important Lives There” – story about the fight to stop the Nicetown gas plant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WQ3atOv_7U&t=2s

HEET – go here to learn about networked geothermal: www.heet.org