with Earth’s climate system.” But President George H. W. Bush became the loudest voice in the room calling for mandatory emissions cuts to be replaced by voluntary ones, and only signed once this revision was made.
He cited “scientific uncertainty” and economic risk, and declared “the American way of life is not up for negotiation.”
Meanwhile, the 1990s found me in seminary, where I celebrated my 50th birthday as a first-year student in 1994. After living in a nine-room, three-bathroom home, I’d moved into one small dorm room, with a community bathroom down the hall. I had no phone and no car, both by choice: I needed silence and solitude to discern what was next in my life.
At the end of the first year, I went home for the summer to end my thirty-year marriage and fully move out of the family home. After selling my relatively new luxury car because it felt obscene to keep it, I returned to Berkeley and made my way to the nearby Saturn dealership.
A spin-off of General Motors, this new company promised a different kind of buying experience, a commitment it more than lived up to—I was treated as an intelligent woman, capable of deciding what best fit my needs, wants, and budget. As an added bonus, I got to finance my first solely owned car and establish a credit history for my new single life.
I promptly named my new car Columba, short for columbine—Latin for dove—the wildflower that had become a metaphor for my new life. Columba was a pale plum color, and could get 28 mpg in the city, 37 on the highway. Meanwhile atmospheric CO2 had reached 360 ppm.
After the previous year’s walking as far as my legs and available time would let me, I now had access to hiking trails up in the Berkeley Hills, and Marin County and the Pacific Coast highway were barely an hour away. My car became my modern monastic cell as it carried me across the Northern Rockies to and from my chaplaincy training summer in Billings, Montana. After graduation, I drove clear across the country for my parish ministry internship in Massachusetts. I was finally back to where I’d started from as a child, and, wanting the chance to spend time with my family of origin as my parents aged, I took a part-time ministry position in a small church south of Boston. Columba was terrific in the traffic congestion while trying to get through the city to my ailing father’s bedside in the late 1990s, and then to conduct his funeral.
CO2 levels were steadily climbing towards 370 ppm and I was still oblivious of this growing problem that I was perpetuating! How could that possibly be? In 1998 the American Petroleum Institute wrote a proposal intended to recruit scientists to convince politicians, the media, and the public that climate science was too uncertain to be taken seriously. This proposal included a five million dollar multi-point strategy to “maximize the impact of scientific views consistent with ours upon Congress, the media, and other key audiences.” Their goal was to raise questions and undercut prevailing scientific wisdom.
By the beginning of the 2000s, the efforts by climate change denial groups were recognized as an organized campaign. Taking a page from the tobacco campaign, these propagandists began receiving funding from oil companies. ExxonMobil led in corporate donations to these think tanks, and between 1998 and 2014 gave nearly 31 million dollars to groups that would deliberately spread climate misinformation.
The ideologically conservative Koch brothers, with their massive petrochemical business interests, donated more than $100 million from 1997 onward to 84 groups promulgating climate denial, all shielded from public scrutiny through financial vehicles known as Donors’ Trusts.
As the money flowed through this dubious network over the decades, its misinformation strategies passed like a baton to a shifting array of coalitions and initiatives that protected fossil fuel interests in the climate debate. Some groups produced reports that cast doubt on the accumulating evidence of manmade climate change, and others amplified the alternative findings. Think tanks in the network held conferences, sponsored panels, wrote op-eds and letters, and created an echo chamber loud enough to command equal time in the mainstream media.
In 2000, environmentally aware and climate savvy Vice President Al Gore ran for president. When the Supreme Court ruled on the contested election results and handed the presidency to oilman George W. Bush, I was in the middle of an interim ministry year in Las Vegas, Nevada.
With my little church back in New England barely able to pay me for part-time work, and aching to do full-time ministry, I had put my name into the interim ministry pool, a group of ministers who undergo special training to serve congregations “in transition” between ministers. But I was surprised and shocked to find myself “banished” to the desert, where brown replaced familiar, comforting green, and trees were scarce.
Because I stay grounded by bonding with my natural surroundings, I had to learn to see and appreciate the desert’s gifts. By mid-year I was smitten, so said yes to the religion reporter from the local paper that wanted to interview me about religion and environmental awareness. Apparently, she had struck out with other local congregations, but my faith tradition includes Emerson and the other Transcendentalists for whom nature is a primary scripture, so I had the theological backing for what the reporter was looking for.
When the article appeared, complete with photos shot during a worship service, the other half of it included an interview with Josh Abbey, representing the Jewish tradition. He stated that his infamous father would have written off Las Vegas long ago for its ecological transgressions. It was at that moment in time that I consciously moved from being a nature lover into becoming an environmental activist.
When a congregant connected with the Sierra Club asked me to do a workshop with the local members who were feeling totally defeated by what was happening in D.C. I said yes. Two months after George W. Bush was sworn in, he renounced the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty which extended the 1992 UN Framework on Climate Change that committed state parties to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Then, under Vice President Cheney, our national energy policy was rewritten behind closed doors to include the Halliburton loophole, thus exempting his old company from clean water regulations, and kick-starting the hydraulic fracturing frenzy to ensure access to the “bottom of the barrel” fossil fuels that would emit even more CO2, plus release methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas. With CO2 emissions climbing through 370s ppm, we were clearly going in the wrong direction!
By 2002, I’d begun to be concerned about my own carbon emissions. If I were going to do interims for my ministry career, I would be driving back and forth across the continent over the next several years. My sweet Saturn was fuel-efficient, but I had heard that the company was developing a hybrid vehicle that would run on battery as well as gasoline.
As I eagerly waited for this option, I did not know that its parent company, General Motors, had developed, produced, and leased electric vehicles (the EV1) between 1996 and 1999. It was the first mass-produced electric car in the modern era by a major automaker, and the only electric passenger car to be marketed under the GM brand name. The decision to mass-produce an electric car came on the heels of a mandate by the California Air Resources Board that required the sale of zero-emissions vehicles from the seven major automakers if they were to continue to sell their vehicles in California.
These EV1s were made available via lease-only agreements to residents in selected western cities and could be serviced only at designated dealerships. Consumer reaction to the electric cars was so positive that GM grew worried that these cars wouldn’t prove profitable enough. After all, without gas motors there is little need for maintenance, or demand for gasoline. They rounded up the leased cars, refused to sell them to the lessees who wanted to purchase them outright, and crushed them.
Meanwhile, the car manufacturers litigated the CARB requirement
