and hybrids instead of going the all-electric route. When the EV1 program was discontinued in 2002, the oil companies, along with the oil-drenched executive branch of the federal government, had played a huge role.
By 2002 I was in my third interim ministry, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. I’d spent my second interim year with a congregation in Vermont that was steeped in environmental awareness: I went there because I had so much to learn! But before that year barely started, 9/11 happened.
Our national response to the horror was to bomb Afghanistan; that it is an oil, gas, and coal-rich country was probably just coincidental in our determination to punish someone for our national tragedy. Yet the decision to bomb Iraq in the spring of 2003 was different. It was widely suspected that we were after their oil, and demonstrations were held worldwide, including in the community where I was living.
Months before that unpopular invasion, I had given up on waiting for Saturn to market its hybrid, suspecting but not knowing for sure that GM had opted for making the more profitable Hummer instead.
Wading through the grief of giving up my faithful companion, I traded Columba in for a Toyota Prius that wanted to be named Gaia. She was the soft aqua shade of earth and water and sky combined, and promised to get 50 mpg in town, somewhat less on the highway, with super-low CO2 emissions. The reverse of gas burning cars, the hybrid gets better mileage when constant braking at stoplights recharges its lithium battery. This takes some getting used to: whenever I stopped at a light, and the engine went silent, I worried it had shut down completely.
I’d checked out the Honda hybrid as well, but it didn’t have the super low emissions rating that Toyota’s did. The early Prius I owned still had the Corolla body, not the unique one seen on our roads today. I would have preferred buying American had there been any way to do so. Only U.S. dealerships whose mechanics had received special training in Japan were allowed to carry the Prius. I came to feel like a pioneer, as glitches worked themselves out—or not. But these annoyances were worth it to me to be doing the right thing. I was a minister, after all!
My commitment was unexpectedly confirmed at a stoplight in Santé Fe, New Mexico, as I headed back to Colorado after an annual interim ministers meeting. The driver of the pickup truck beside me rolled down his window and shouted, “What mileage do you get in that thing?” When I told him, he whistled, then declared, “I’m gonna get me one of those. Let them Arabs keep their damn oil!”
That we the people were catching on became hopeful during my next interim ministry, in Flagstaff, where it seemed that every other car was a Prius in this progressive college town in northern Arizona, just 70 miles from the south rim of the Grand Canyon. I agreed to stay on for a second year, part-time, so I could have sabbatical time up at the Canyon.
The second autumn I was there found me standing at the checkout counter at the nearby Albertson’s, leafing through the September 2004 issue of the National Geographic. Its title, “Global Warning, Bulletins from a Warmer World,” had caught my attention, and the inside note from the editor piqued my interest enough to buy the copy on the spot.
Essentially, he claimed that, after a decade as editor in chief, he had a good idea what articles would provoke a lot of angry letters, and even terminate memberships, yet he wouldn’t be able to look at himself in the mirror if he didn’t bring readers the “biggest story in geology today.”
Seventy-four pages of stunning photographs from across the planet showed rising sea levels, melting glaciers, thawing permafrost, increasing wildfires, lingering droughts, shrinking lakes, changing habitats and migration habits, bleaching coral reefs, invading exotic species, disappearing amphibians, eroding coastlines, and ice shelves collapsing. Then he challenged even those who don’t believe the Earth is getting warmer and that human behavior is a contributing factor to take a look at the hard truth as scientists were seeing it. CO2 levels had passed 380 ppm by then. Would the public finally wake up?
At that exact moment in our country’s history, the billionaire oil-baron Koch brothers began building an assembly line to manufacture political change that included think tanks which produced papers, advocacy groups that pushed for policies, and PACs that donated money to candidates. By putting these all together, the Kochs were able to push back against doing anything about climate change on those three fronts all at once. “You get papers that look like they’re real scientific opinions doubting that climate change is real, you get advocacy groups saying we can’t afford to do anything about it, and you get candidates who are told if you want to get money from Koch donors you have to sign a pledge saying that, if elected, you will do nothing about climate change that requires spending any money on the problem.”
No wonder that when I went back east for my fifth interim ministry, this time in Charleston, South Carolina, hybrids were few and far between, and I could count them on one hand while driving route 95 for two days from the southeast to the northeast to visit my ailing mother.
In fact, the neighbor next door to my rented townhouse on the Ashley River drove a honking huge SUV, mainly because her tax advisor recommended it. As a real estate agent, she would get a tax advantage that would be foolish to refuse: her expensive sports utility vehicle could be depreciated more rapidly than anything under 6000 pounds. What was its gas mileage and carbon footprint? Why should/would she care?
Then Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans! Surely now people would pay attention to what was coming to pass as we wantonly dump CO2 into the atmosphere, warm the earth and alter the climate, thus creating such a superstorm surge. But the national media never once connected those dots during their massive coverage of the unfolding disaster in Louisiana.
Why not! What was going on here? Was there an unspoken conspiracy between news outlets and their fossil fuel industry and car company sponsors? How could that be happening in a nation built upon the foundations of reason, logic, and science?! After all, CO2 had just surpassed 380 ppm! Yet when astronaut Sheila Collins returned from space that fall, and felt compelled to report what she had been seeing over time—shrinking glaciers, expanding deserts, disappearing forests—no one paid attention. The major news story on that day was about the risk of driving while wearing flip-flops.
After a frustrating year being mired in obliviousness, I was off to Maine for a final interim ministry year. It was 2006, and An Inconvenient Truth was being made available to selected congregations through Interfaith Power and Light. I borrowed the video to show at our church and share with the Yarmouth community. In the graphic film he had created and produced, Al Gore re-emerged on the public scene to set out the science of climate change and discuss concerns around global warming. Even before he lost the 2000 presidential election, Gore had been internationally involved in trying to deal with the greatest challenge to ever face humanity. Now, he was about to be awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize jointly with the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about manmade climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures needed to counteract such change.’
Also in 2007, a Newsweek cover story reported, “the denial machine is running at full throttle.” This well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks, and industry had “created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change.” CO2 emissions were nearing 390 parts per million.
In 2007, I finished up my interim ministry career and took a settled position, back in Las Vegas, where it had first begun. I desperately needed to stay put in one place, put down roots, buy a home of my own, and not move every summer. The desert spoke to me as no other place had, and so I settled there. By 2008, the Bush presidency ended and the Obama one began, and I felt we could take a deep breath. Surely now our government would see the light and do the right thing.
But
