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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.

Building Heat Resilience Together

In the last post, we looked at some specific ways you can work to adapt your own home to the growing frequency and intensity of heat waves. In this post, we will look at ways that you can work locally and collectively to reduce heat in your community.

One of the simplest and most effective ways is to plant trees. Trees draw water and nutrients from the soil through a process called evapotranspiration. In this process, water evaporates from the surface of eaves, creating a suction effect that draws water up from below. The evaporation creates a cooling effect in the air around trees. Not only this, but trees create shade protecting everything underneath them from the intensity of the sun’s rays. The result of these two factors is that the more trees you have in an area, the cooler it is. I live in Mt Airy, which is full of trees and is one of the cooler neighborhoods in Philadelphia. A 15 minute drive away from me is Hunting Park, where I work a lot. It has far fewer trees and as a result experiences heatwave temperatures that are a full 22 F hotter than in my neighborhood.

In the last post, we mentioned planting trees in your yard as a way to cool your own property – but this is also a collective action, since those trees work with others to help cool the neighborhood as a whole. That being said, your yard space restricts significantly how much cooling you can offer your community – however there are some great programs in Philadelphia through which you can contribute to broader tree planting efforts around you.

Tree Tenders is a program run by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. It has chapters in neighborhoods all over the greater Philadelphia area where it trains people for street tree plantings and organizes planting days. Street trees are shared trees, lining public spaces and benefiting the community as a whole. There are countless blocks and spaces throughout Philadelphia that are treeless and in need of planting – so there is a lot you can do! Another critical aspect of the Tree Tenders training is that it teaches people how to care for trees after they’ve been planted. Leaving recently planted trees on their own, particularly in cities, can often lead to them dying. Ongoing care, particularly for their first year, is crucial for them to become established and thrive. Check here to see if there’s a tree tender’s group near you.

Tree Philly is another program run by Philadelphia Parks and Recreation. This program provides free yard trees to people who want them. This is a great benefit for low-income people, as young trees aren’t cheap. You can also volunteer to canvas and let people know about the Tree Philly trees and sign up for them, helping to spread trees to yards around the city.

Wherever you are, tree planting is one of the simplest and most effective ways to increase cooling in your community. Trees also suck carbon out of the atmosphere and sequester it in the ground – so the more trees we have, the more nature will be at work fighting climate change. Philadelphia has a citywide tree plan which you can access here.

The less simple – yet absolutely crucial – task needed to make communities more heat resilient is the transformation of housing. Climate resilient housing adaptations save significant money long term, but they also involve up front capital that can be challenging for middle income people to come up with. For lower income people, the cost is usually prohibitive. Add to this the fact that lower income urban communities already tend to experience higher heat extremes because they have fewer trees in them due to historic disinvestment. So the hotter communities are the ones that have fewer resources to make the changes needed for their homes to become heat resilient. This is fundamentally unjust.

So how can we help improve the heat resilience of homes in low-income communities? The answer is by organizing and pressing for policies and funding that will help accelerate these crucial home adaptations.

As we looked at in the last post, white roof coatings, heat pump installations, and rooftop solar are three core adaptations that will make your home heat resistant, even in the event of a heatwave induced power blackout. An additional adaptation that we didn’t look at is energy efficiency upgrades – like improved insulation, windows, repairs to cracks that are leaking air, etc. The more efficient your home is at trapping the heat or cool inside it, the less hard your systems have to work and the less you have to pay for power.

Wherever you are, there are probably groups working on low-income housing challenges. Here in Philadelphia, I will talk about two specific entities – a public program and an advocacy coalition.

The public program is Built to Last. Built to Last is a citywide initiative focused on coordinating existing programs into a one stop shop that will repair systems, improve energy efficiency, apply white roof coatings, weatherize, solarize, and install heat pumps for low-income Philadelphia homes. For low-income people, energy burden is a vicious cycle. People who have low income rarely have the funds necessary to repair their homes. As a result, their homes fall steadily into disrepair, becoming increasingly energy inefficient and causing them to pay more to heat and cool their homes. As they pay more, they have even less to repair or improve their homes, which makes them more inefficient, and the cycle continues. Add to this the fact that we have already entered into the economic inevitability of the phase out of fossil fuels. Clean sources of power, though they cost more up front to install, are much cheaper than fossil fuels over time, which means that individuals and businesses that are able are steadily moving in that direction – and the transition is accelerating. The challenge for low-income people is that as those with the income switch away from (for example) gas and start heating their homes with heat pumps, the customer base of gas producers is getting lower and lower. In order to keep making their dying model work, they will have to raise rates higher and higher on their remaining customers, who will in turn be made up only by the low income people who couldn’t switch away in the first place. Their energy costs will weigh on them until they go into default, and apply for utility assistance, which will be carried by taxpayers. This will not be tenable long term for anyone, and the system will collapse. Advocates in my circles who are working to pressure Philly’s gas utility, PGW, to transition into a clean energy heating and cooling utility, refer to this vicious cycle openly and regularly as the “death spiral” for PGW. Many believe it has already begun.

Built to Last is crucial because it is stabilizes low-income homes with public funding that low-income people simply can’t amass themselves. The stabilization greatly reduces their energy burden, makes their homes more functional and healthy, helps families improve their own financial health and preserve generational wealth through their property, and (per the specific topic of this post), enables them to preserve a cool space during heat waves – with solar power to keep their cooling running even if the electric grid goes down.

This is an amazing program that has been very successful at a pilot level and is now shifting into its next stage. A documentary was made about 6 homeowners in Hunting Park who had their homes transformed through Built to Last – you can view it here. However, the need is much greater than the current funding. The program has finished 50 homes in Philadelphia through its pilot project, but there is currently a wait list of over 1,000. Fortunately, $5M in funding is coming to the program this fiscal year – and this is the direct result of advocacy.

This brings us to the second entity mentioned above – a Philadelphia-based climate-oriented housing justice advocacy coalition called HERE 4 Climate Justice, (or HERE4CJ). HERE4CJ is a coalition I’m involved with that is bringing together a number of really amazing local, regional, and national organizations who are pressing for legislative change that will make homes more healthy, affordable, and climate resilient for low-income people in our city. We have several different campaigns we’re working on, but our first big win was to pressure Philadelphia city council into giving Built to Last more funding in the FY 24-25 budget. We pressed for $5M and got enough councilmembers on board to win the full amount. That $5M will add 400 new Built to Last low-income home resilience projects to the 50 they’ve already done. But we need to keep pressing for more funding.

This, then, is where so much of the heart of collective climate resilience must arise – through public advocacy. There are so many ways you can get involved. You can reach out to your representatives (find your state rep and senator here, federal rep here, and federal senators here) and tell them what you want. Your calls really do matter. You can also join coalitions like HERE4CJ to press for these changes. The Evangelical Environmental Action Network (EEN Action) is constantly working on PA climate policies and has regular, simple, and guided ways to add your voice to different policy proposals. POWER Interfaith is highly involved locally and regionally pressing for climate solutions for low-income families. And you can also reach out to me – Allen Drew – to learn more about ways to get involved.

Finally, vote for climate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience that prioritizes communities with the least power. Climate policy prioritization must be at the heart of our votes locally, statewide, and federal. The transition towards clean energy, climate resilience, and ecological restoration is accelerating, but it needs to accelerate faster. We are very close to global climate tipping points, beyond which global heating will accelerate beyond our ability to change it. The next 5 years are absolutely crucial in pressing these transitions forward through the support of climate aggressive legislation. Voting for officials this November who do not prioritize climate action – or who ignore it or even actively resist it and support fossil fuel proliferation – would be a crushing act of collective self-harm, given the climate realities we are facing. It is crucial – absolutely crucial – that we all get out and vote for lawmakers who will move climate policy forward, for the good of humanity, and particularly for sake of the most vulnerable among us.

RESOURCES:

Tree Tenders: https://phsonline.org/programs/tree-programs

Tree Philly: https://treephilly.org/

Philly Tree Plan: https://www.phila.gov/programs/philly-tree-plan/

Built to Last: https://philaenergy.org/programs-initiatives/built-to-last/

Built to Last documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjlRfPXcUME&t=24s

HERE 4 Climate Justice: www.here4climatejustice.org

EEN Action: https://www.creationcare-action.com/

POWER Interfaith: www.powerinterfaith.org

Adapting Your Home to the Heat

So how can you as an individual (or a household) prepare for the impacts of longer and more intense extreme heat waves? What you do all depends on what kind of home you live in and how heat adapted it already is, but here are some concrete approaches.

If you rent an apartment, there isn’t much you can do to the property itself. But what you should do, if you haven’t already done this, is get one or more air conditioning window units. The kinds of heat waves we will be increasingly experiencing will be dangerous to try to ride out with a fan (as our parents and grandparents were able to do) – electric cooling will be critical.

AC units are relatively inexpensive up front (you can easily get them for $100-$200) and are an important first step to ensure you have access to cool air in a heat wave. However, they are not very efficient and can ramp up your electric bill substantially during heat waves. They also contain refrigerant chemicals that, when they leak, are significant greenhouse gas contributors.

Fortunately, there is a better and far more efficient way to electrically cool (and also heat!) your home using a window unit – it’s with a heat pump window unit. Heat pump window units use highly efficient electric heat pump technology to either heat or cool your home, as needed. Heat pumps are most commonly seen in the form of an outside unit that sends the cool into your home through either a central air system or installed wall units – but window units are starting to come on the market now, with a main focus on apartment buildings. You can read a story about them here. You can also find a link to the Gradient unit that story is about here. The upfront cost of a heat pump window unit is more expensive than an AC unit. Gradient’s unit is currently $2,000, though as the technology and adoption proliferates prices are likely to come down. Furthermore, the Inflation Reduction Act will return you 30% off your total heat pump installation cost up to a maximum of $2,000 at tax time. And the savings (20-40% annually) in both cooling and heating costs will return your money to you in a few years and save you far more over time.

As a renter, that’s pretty much the extent of what you can do to cool your space. As a homeowner, however, there are a number of other options.

The first, and most cost efficient (if you haven’t done it already), is to apply a cool roof coating to your roof. A friend of mine, Rory Stout, runs a company called Cool Roof Coatings and they can apply a high quality, water sealing, and highly sun reflective product from a company called Acrylabs. Many old Philadelphia buildings have dark black roofs, which was the standard procedure a while ago. These roofs, however, absorb the heat of the sun tremendously and turn your home into an oven. White roofs are an ancient practice in heat prone cultures – they passively reflect heat so that your cooling system doesn’t have to work nearly as hard.

Second, if you have AC window units or an AC central air system, replace that system with a heat pump system. If you don’t have central air, your best option will be a ductless mini-split system, which sets the unit outside and installs wall units in the rooms you want heated and cooled. This is an investment upfront, but it will save you money on AC electricity as well as on gas or oil heating. I installed a heat pump system in my home in Philadelphia and I don’t run the gas heating at all in the winter – all heating and cooling is electric and is quite efficient and I’m saving a lot of money. A good company I’ve used, which has an excellent business rating and I’ve found to be substantially less expensive than other options, is New Spirit HVAC.

Third (and finally), install solar on your roof. Solar is an excellent financial investment. With the 30% Federal tax credit on solar installations, the savings generated, and the income produced by Solar Renewable Energy Credits (SRECs), the return on your investment is 300-400% over 25 years. This is like putting your money away into a CD at an unheard of rate of 4-5%. If you can’t pay for solar upfront, there are also good financing options available so you can have your solar savings help pay off the loan right from the start. Still, for many others, the up front cost is too much for solar ownership to be an option for them. That’s still not a problem, however, because there are great solar leasing options available. You have to be careful with these – they can sometimes be predatory – but there are plenty that are not. I would personally recommend Posigen’s 25-year fixed rate solar leasing program. To get solar on your roof through them, you pay $0 up front, get a free home energy efficiency upgrade, get repairs and maintenance covered, are guaranteed savings as compared to your utility’s rates the first year (and are very likely to have those rates increase over time as utilities increase rates and yours remains fixed), and are able to purchase the panels for next to nothing at the end of your lease, when they will still be 85% efficient. Also, if you sign on through the following link, your lease will be credited as a lead for HPCSI and Posigen will donate $400 to our climate justice work in Hunting Park if it goes to contract. Here’s that link: https://bit.ly/posigen-hpcsi-lead

Having solar is a great financial investment and it fights climate change – but it also has a particular value with respect to heat. One of the greatest dangers of the progression of climate-induced heat waves is that if they get too intense, all the extra AC usage in an area can blow out the power grid. Or, if a major storm or hurricane comes through a region and downs a lot of power lines (which is another major aspect of the climate crisis), and this is in turn followed by extreme heat, people can get in real trouble because there is no power to run their cooling systems. These are very real threats, as “wet bulb” 95 F (or 95 F at 100%) is the upper limit of human survival and current heat waves are getting dangerously close to this. As an example, there are currently 300 heat-related deaths under investigation in Phoenix, AZ due to recent extreme heat. With solar – whether you own the panels or are renting them – the power from your panels will always go to meet your home’s needs first, and so it can keep your cooling system running during an extreme heat wave, even if the grid goes down.

Extreme heat waves are already here, and they are going to get steadily stronger during the course of our lifetimes. How strong they get will have everything to do with how quickly we reduce carbon emissions over the next two decades, in particular the next 6 years. Whatever we will be facing in the future, it will be more intense and more dangerous. Because of this we need to start preparing now for a different world. More than that, as Christians we need to be preparing now, so that when the times comes we will be able to offer shelter to other others in need.

RESOURCES:

Be Cool Roof Coatings:

https://www.becoolroofcoatings.com/about/rory-stout-owner/

Acrylabs Cool Roof Coatings:

https://acrylabs.com/Roofing_Systems_Products.php

New Spirit HVAC (heat pump installation):

www.newspirithvac.com

Window Heat Pump Unit Story:

https://www.wired.com/story/the-next-heat-pump-frontier-nyc-apartment-windows/

Gradient Window Heat Pump:

https://www.gradientcomfort.com/products/gradient-window-heat-pump

Posigen Solar: