Morality and Climate Change
November 17, 2024 Dr. Roger Ray
The week of my first anniversary of living in Florida was greeted by back to back hurricanes. I live between Ft Lauderdale and Cape Canaveral on the Atlantic coast. While Helene caused massive damage in parts of Florida and as far north as North Carolina, it was nothing but pretty normal rain for me. But Milton was another matter. Living through a hurricane is something like surviving a herd of charging turtles. You know about it for more than a week before it shows up. The news media, dependent upon fear or anger to attract viewers, catastrophizes hurricanes to the point that you might think that there will be no homes and not much sod left behind when it passes through.
For me, even though Milton passed right over us, even Milton was pretty much a non-event. I have a home built to resist hurricanes, with ever hurricane proof windows and roofing. I keep my trees trimmed and thinned to avoid having a threat from falling trees or limbs. My neighborhood maintains storm sewers, there is a retention lake across the street, we have buried utilities, and I am far enough away, and high enough above sea level, to not worry about storm surge.
In short, I survived the hurricane that killed many of my neighbors, destroying homes, tearing off roofs, and closing businesses and knocking out electric and water service to more than 3 million people in the comfort of the insured middle class. I did relief work in the New Orleans area with teams of church volunteers for more than a year after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. I have seen what a hurricane can do, and having lived most of my life in the Midwest, I have seen, firsthand, that a direct hit from a tornado can tear down the strongest of buildings, even a modern hospital. But the building codes developed in Florida following previous disasters can and do work. People may hate regulation of building codes and the requirements of even the nailing patterns for putting shingles on a house, but they make a difference.
Florida’s removal of the words “climate change” and “global warming” from text books, has turned out to not be helpful. J.D. Vance says that he doesn’t want to discuss controversial science but, in spite of controversy created by climate deniers or people who just don’t understand the science involved, government regulation can make a difference.
The conservative government of North Carolina is to blame for much of the loss experienced in the torrential rains dropped by Hurricane Helene in the mountains. The state legislature has rejected legislation to limit construction on steep mountain sides or to require houses to be built at least a foot above anticipated flood levels.
For the first half of my career in ministry, I tried to avoid making any partisan comments in sermons and if circumstances seemed to make it necessary to be critical of one party or another, I always tried to balance that with a criticism of the other party so that I could claim to be above political partisanship. I never had a political sign in my yard or a bumper sticker on my car; but times have changed.
I was critical of the way that the Bush administration handled FEMA’s response to Hurricane Katrina because there were a lot of politically motivated bad decisions being made. But we learned a lot about the changing weather of this century from Hurricane Katrina.
We have done better since then in many ways, but still, we have two political parties, one which may be guilty of occasional exaggeration and one that is regularly guilty of wholesale denial of reality, and, as we have most recently experienced in the lies and conspiracy theories espoused by Trump and Vance regarding FEMA’s response to Helene, we cannot avoid saying that the Democratic party seems to strive to provide meaningful leadership and help and the Republican party seems to be determined to make matters worse, cause more human suffering and death, and to make the worse economic decisions.
What is it that makes climate change politically controversial? Why would anyone be so determined to deny the obvious impacts of a warming earth, seen especially in earthquakes caused by fracking, stronger hurricanes and tornadoes caused by greenhouse gases, and water scarcity caused by deregulation and poor management?
The quote is broadly attributed to the fiction writer, Kurt Vonnegut, though I confess that I cannot find the source, but he is reported to have said that “We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective.” Coal, oil, and gas interests don’t want us to move towards renewable energy sources. Builders don’t want to raise construction costs and labor by being forced to meet safer building codes. Developers don’t want to have to provide for water retention and drainage when they build new neighborhoods and shopping centers.
Electric vehicles are cheaper to build, easier to maintain, and they are, frankly, faster than their gas-powered counterparts. And the evolving self-driving features of EV’s are safer than human operated cars no matter how good you think you are at driving! But we resist the change because so much of the economy, especially in the United States, is tied to gas burning cars and trucks. And, of course, mass transit is more efficient, has less climate impact, and uses up less space than billions of private cars we depend upon now, but that efficiency strikes at the heart of the profit centers of the automobile industry.
High speed rail passes within blocks of my home more than 30 times a day but the nearest train station is more than a hundred miles away because property developers do not want to allow train traffic to stop in the pricy retirement communities along the Atlantic Coast.
We could slow the negative effects of climate change through technological advances if decisions were not so commonly made by monied interests who do not consider the impact this has on the poor and the vulnerable who end up paying the highest percentage of their household income for transportation and who are the most likely to live in manufactured or unsafe housing.
As a pastor, I have mobilized dozens of teams of volunteers to do relief work in Appalachia, the Ozarks, Ecuador, and Nicaragua. I have raised the money to build more than 300 houses for poor families, I have built medical clinics, feeding centers, and emergency shelters. I have provided food for tens of thousands of hungry people, but as Bishop Desmond Tutu said decades ago,
“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.” I am deeply grateful for the opportunities I have had to bring relief to the chronically poor, hungry and unhoused, to those who have been victims of floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes; but what sense does it make for religious people to keep trying to rescue people who are being victimized, generation after generation, century after century, by monied interests to rig the system so that they can be enriched by causing suffering for others.
In some ways, those of us who volunteer and donate to charitable relief efforts are, in effect, empowering the monied interests to go on exploiting the vulnerable. I don’t want to offer an apologetic for those who refuse to donate or volunteer . . . trust me, I am involved with local relief efforts in the wake of these two hurricanes, but I know that it is not merely an accident of nature that kept me and my immediate neighbors safe while several people who live only a few miles away were killed, and many are now homeless after losing absolutely everything in the hurricane.
We must not stop pulling drowning people out of the river but if we know that someone upstream is literally throwing these people into the rushing water, then aren’t we obligated to try to stop them? Climate change is not ethically neutral. There are winners and there are losers. There are forces of oppression and there are victims.
The banner I helped to design when we started our church in 2008 bears a quote from the holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winning author, Elie Wiesel, “Thou shalt not stand idly by.” In his reflections on the holocaust, he concluded that such things are only possible when people refuse to take a moral stand. He explains that neutrality never serves those who are victims of oppression but, in fact, neutrality literally makes you a partner with the oppressor.
My previous career as the pastor of a denominational church had made me sick of the moral relativism of most of mainstream religion . . . always afraid of offending someone, religion is reduced helping the poor to carry their flood damaged furniture and appliances to the curb to be hauled away without ever trying to stem the causes of poverty and extreme weather.
When a group of friends prevailed upon me to start a church for the genuinely progressive people of faith, my primary insistence was that we would no longer try to constantly straddle the fence out of fear of giving offense. There would be no more standing idly by and remaining neutral in the face of injustice.
That hasn’t been an easy row to hoe for us. We gained liberal members when I was critical of George W. Bush and lost many of them when I was critical of Barak Obama. A church cannot remain moral if it aligns itself with a political party. Every employment contract I have negotiated during my entire career has included a passage about the freedom of the pulpit but I found in every instance that most board members stopped believing in freedom of the pulpit when I said something that stepped on their toes.
I will have more to say about this in my next sermon which will be posted on December 1st.
