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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.

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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 ...

Updated: Sep 18

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

A Spirituality of Fossil Fuels

Right now, one of the worst things you can do for the planet, for people, for justice, and for democracy, is be invested in fossil fuels. I know this may sound dramatic, but it’s true – and I will do my best in this post to explain why.

First off, it’s important to say that fossil fuels are not, in and of themselves, evil. They’re simply an energy source. And for about 130 years (from the mid 1800s to the 1980s) they were a clear source of economic and societal growth around the world. They made possible the steam engine, which linked continents by rail; the diesel and gasoline engines, which made car travel and ultimately air travel possible; and they formed a consistent and reliable source of power generation for electricity grids that has spread the benefits of electricity all over the world.

And so we need to give fossil fuels their due. They should be thanked for their service.

However, since the 1980s, the scientific community – including the scientists working for the fossil fuel industry – have known that the carbon byproducts of burning fossil fuels (whether CO2 or methane) have been steadily filling our atmosphere with heat trapping gases and creating a growing fever for our planet. This fever, as we’ve said elsewhere, is causing the finely tuned ecological systems of our planet to go out of balance, building the steady progression of climate impacts we are already seeing today – increasing frequency and intensity of storms, droughts, fires, floods, extreme heatwaves, etc. These impacts, if they continue to progress unmitigated, will result in sea level rise that makes major population centers unlivable, widespread crop failures and increases in global hunger, heatwaves strong enough to black out power grids and kill large populations in short periods of time, massive blows to economies due to unrelenting natural disasters, climate refugee migrations on a scale never seen before, and a subsequent rise in political instability, anti-immigrant sentiment, and authoritarianism. We are already seeing the beginnings of this today.

Yet despite these realities, the fossil fuel industry, like the tobacco industry, the whale oil industry, and many others before it, has been pouring money since the 1980s into campaigns of deception to keep people dependent on fossil fuels, and the money flowing into their pockets. We should not be surprised by this. People in power lie all the time in order to preserve their power. This is just human sin. And so I say “thank you for your service” to the fossil fuel industry for its contributions up until the 1980s – but not beyond. From that point to the present, their industry has shifted from helping to harming.

Fortunately, as followers of Jesus, we do not need to passively participate in the normalized insanity of fossil fuel living. Indeed, we must not. Which brings me back to my original statement: Right now, one of the worst things you can do for the planet, for people, for justice, and for democracy, is be invested in fossil fuels.

For planet, the science is clear. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that we need to reduce our global carbon emissions by half by 2030, and entirely by 2050 in order to avoid the most catastrophic unravelling of our planet’s global ecological system. If we care about preserving this world and the life living in it for future generations, we must be transitioning away from fossil fuels urgently and rapidly. Full stop.

For people, the situation is no different. I think we sometimes imagine that the “environment” is somehow this thing “out there” and external to human beings. But the environment runs right through us. Our bodies are built out of what we eat, drink, and breathe. The plastic pollution we are pouring into the environment is being broken down into microplastics and finding its way back into all our bodies. The toxins our industries pour into our water, and the chemicals we put on the food we grow are impacting our sperm counts and showing up in our breastmilk. And so an unravelling ecological world accelerated by the burning of fossil fuels won’t be a world that is somehow external to us – it will be a world that will run right through our physical bodies and we will have to try to find a way to survive in it. Where the world goes, there we go as well.

Furthermore, the burning of fossil fuels is not only causing the earth to heat up – it’s also directly toxic to human health. Coal power plants and gas refineries are regularly (and intentionally) built next to low income, black and brown neighborhoods, and the impacts on the people living in those communities are horrible. They have significantly increased rates of ADHD, autism, birth defects, miscarriages, and cancer. Threre’s an 85 mi stretch of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, LA, that is called “Cancer Alley” because it is packed with fossil fuel refineries and cancer rates for the people living there are through the roof. Research is now even showing that the gas stovetop you use to cook your dinner is having steady carcinogenic impacts on your body. And so fossil fuels, on multiple levels, are not good for people.

For justice, there are numerous layers here. First, it is wealthy individuals, communities, and nations who are most responsible for the burning of fossil fuels and the acceleration of climate change while it is poor individuals, communities and nations who are the least. Yet the dark irony is that it is the rich, because they are rich, who will be most able to build resilience to the impacts they have caused – while it is the poor who will be most vulnerable. This is fundamentally unjust. Second, fossil fuels as an energy infrastructure are designed to benefit the wealthy the most. Drill rigs, oil refineries, and power plants all require an enormous amount of capital to build and operate. When a population is trained into dependence on oil, it is only a select few who have the capital to control those pieces of infrastructure, and who therefore have the power to dictate what people have to pay for gasoline, for heating, and for electricity. This consolidation of power among a few and control of the many through energy dependence forms the basis for the final threat of fossil fuels – the challenge to democracy.

Fossil fuels have been historically – and notoriously – used to consolidate power around authoritarian and corrupt governments. Think of countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela, Iran – many of their people are quite opposed to their governments, but oil provides a major source of power consolidation for them and enables entirely undemocratic regimes to remain in control. Fossil fuels also form the (often unacknowledged) backdrop for war. The US invaded Iraq twice over oil – different reasons were given each time, but Iraq and Kuwait are both major producers of oil, which the US is hungry for. Wars involving oil producers regularly shock energy prices – the Russian invasion of Ukraine resulted in major energy challenges for Europe as Russian gas became unavailable. Ugly alliances are made over fossil fuels that result in human rights compromises – the US has failed repeatedly to challenge Saudi Arabia for human rights abuses because the Saudis have oil and the US wants access to it. And oil power is in the regular business, in dictatorships and democracies, of buying politicians. Here in the US, the oil lobby is extremely powerful and has gotten numerous politicians to speak and vote how the industry wants them to, amplifying their lies to the public and legislating in the interest of fossil fuel executives rather than the public good. In short, fossil fuels consolidate far too much power among too few – and consistently serve as an anti-democratic force in the global struggle for universal self-governance.

God has called us in Gen 1-2 to care for creation. We can’t care for creation if we’re participating in a technology that is destroying it. Jesus has called us in Matthew 22 to love our neighbors as ourselves. We can’t care for our neighbors if we’re participating in a technology that is unravelling the ecological system that sustains us and poisoning people directly who are near it. The God of the Bible is consistently a God of justice – particularly for those with the least power. We can’t be agents of God’s justice in this world if we are at the same time participating in an energy infrastructure that consolidates power among a rich few, builds energy dependence among the many, and accelerates climate devastation that will most severely impact those least responsible for it. And while the Bible doesn’t speak specifically about democracy, we know that of the current political systems available, democracy is the best imperfect option for nurturing freedom of speech and belief, maintaining checks and balances to power, and creating the space for people and communities to grow and flourish. And so if a particular technology is so tied to buying politicians and corrupting legislation, consolidating power in authoritarian governments, and creating a basis for wars, participating in it runs counter to advancing political systems more suitable for shalom.

For these reasons, I would argue that participation in fossil fuels is antithetical to following Jesus and building for the Kingdom of God. Because fossil fuels are still so embedded in our societies, it is nearly impossible to detach ourselves completely. But passively accepting the status quo is not an option. We need to try to work against them. And there are many ways we can, which we’ll talk about in future posts.

Finally – and this wasn’t in the original statement – fossil fuels at this point just make no economic sense. Global policies are all moving in the direction of clean energy. The slow and steady work of the UN COP meetings is sending consistent and strengthening signals to the world and the market as to where things are going. The auto industry is moving steadily and deliberately towards EVs. Technology for renewable energy, battery storage, heat pumps, etc is getting better every day. Renewable energy is now cheaper than fossil fuels and creates more jobs. With solar panels, heat pumps, and an EV, you can electrify, heat, and cool your home, as well as charge all your travel, from your roof for free. Why on earth would you want to keep paying at the pump, and paying a gas company, and paying an electric company when you could save all that money by owning your own rooftop power plant? And so, moving away from fossil fuels is simply better stewardship of the resources God has given you.