This letter was sent out from the CCOP leadership to our teams on the “eve of their depature” to Madrid for COP25. It is a challenge to realism and hope in the face of climate action.
Dear Samuel, Lindsay, Camille, Rich, Rocio, Cara, Carol, Melody, Shana, and Lindsay of Week One.
Dear Emma, Rebecca, Monica, Joanne, Juliana, Alex, Chris, Victoria, Daniel, and Fernando of Week Two.
On behalf of Brian and myself, and of the CCOP Leadership Team, and of our five Sponsoring Partners-- we would like to thank you for the enthusiasm and diligence with which you have engaged CCOP2019 and COP25. The webinars last week, in which you shared your own vision statements and plans, were thrilling. It is our hope that CCOP will establish you in new ways as a climate leader, that your sphere of influence will grow and that your messaging and campaigning will become more and more passionate and effective as a result of your experience in Madrid. It has also been thrilling to hear accounts of various “commissioning services” in your churches. We hope that CCOP will give you and your constituents new insight into the Christian and missional depths of climate action.
We are on the eve of departing for Madrid. I wish to share some thoughts about hope. According to French lay theologian, Jacques Ellul, a profound commitment to realism is one of the pillars on which a radical, biblical hope rests. “Hope,” he writes, “finds its substance in realism and the latter finds its possibility in hope.” We must be realistic about climate change, about the Paris Agreement, about COP25, and also about our influence in “speaking truth to power” at this big global event. Yet, even if that realism will often feel like pessimism at times, please remember that realism about COP25 “finds its possibility in hope.” Let me challenge you with four actions that are built on hope and possibility.
1. Struggle bravely and faithfully for the Paris Agreement
The Paris Agreement is not a perfect document, but I love it nonetheless. I love the Paris Agreement. I love it for being a cooperative good will effort that for once in modern history was able to bring 196 nations together for the sake of, yes, their own national interests, but also for the interests of the poor and the vulnerable. While much climate action happens in the world outside the Paris Agreement, nothing happens without reference to the Paris Agreement. And, as Brian points out in our first newsletter:
Switching light bulbs, carpooling, eating less meat, and supporting good climate policies are essential for all of us. But personal actions will always fall short of solving this crisis unless they are joined by an organized and ambitious global effort. That’s why the Paris Agreement and the annual COP’s are so critical to our progress.
Realistically, the Paris Agreement has been at risk since the moment it was adopted at COP21 in 2015. There is the danger that it will become just a more-sophisticated, more-valiant-attempt than the Copenhagen Accord (COP15). Unless the nations revise their NDCs with ambition to make them more aligned with what the IPCC is saying about carbon budgets, and then actually make the emission reductions, the Paris Agreement risks dying of a lack of being taken seriously. Considering the quickly closing window of preventing climate change impacts, my greater fear is that future historians will look back at the Paris Agreement and put it in the same category as the Versailles Treaty of 1919 and the League of Nations, high-minded global efforts which in the end fail to prevent catastrophe.
One of the flaws of the Paris Agreement is what little attention it pays to the prevention target of a 1.5° C warming. Realism would seem to indicate that we will likely blow past 1.5° C. Another flaw with the Agreement is that it makes it too easy to think of the 2.0° C prevention target as binary: either we “make it” or we don’t. And yet there is an exponential difference in human suffering and eco-system devastation between 1.5° C and 2.0° C, between 2.0° C and 2.5° C, between 2.5° C and 3.0° C, etc. If we blow past 1.5° C, you will want to be able to look a Kiribati islander in the eye and say, “I did not treat COP25 as a European vacation; I did everything in my power.” If we blow past 2.0° C, you will want to look 2.5° C in the eye and say, “Not on my watch; I will not give up.” These are commitments we make now however: to remain faithful to the end, to not give up. Will you make that commitment?
2. Bear witness with your presence: “We are STILL IN!”
At last Thursday’s noon webinar, Jessie Y. (formerly of the State Dept. Climate Bureau, now of Oxfam) informed us of this bit of realism: “The US government doesn’t care about civil society.” This would have been true (likely, and to some degree) with a Hillary Clinton administration too. Our government negotiating teams are too big, too busy, too focused on their small slice of technical expertise, and too aware of domestic politics to treat our small little CCOP group or your genuine, individual eagerness with anything other than the politeness that their professionalism requires. We might claim to speak for “the Creator God”—as Pope Francis did with Laudato Si in the run-up to Paris in 2015—and yet the response is the same: a polite reaction, but failure on our part to “move the needle.”
We have also been challenged by Christian organizations, more veteran than us at the COPs, who have said: “Why do you want to emit all that carbon going to a COP, let alone taking a group with you, when the decisions that you want to influence have all been made weeks and months earlier outside of the COP?” They raise a good question; we must be good stewards of our portion of the carbon budget. However, Jessie provided one of two good answers when he told us of something that is possible for us to accomplish, with hope, at COP25. He said, “We need to let the other NGOs and the other negotiators know: ‘We are still in!’” Jessie was speaking primarily to our American CCOPers and in light of Trump’s withdrawal from the Agreement. He was speaking in reference to the US Climate Action Zone (which will be in Madrid from Dec 6-11), a coalition of states, municipalities, businesses, universities AND faith-based institutions which reflect what Jessie told us: “The American public are 5-to-1 in favor of remaining in the Paris Agreement.”
Nonetheless, Jessie’s message is not only for our American CCOPers nor should we only direct our “We are still in!” message to other NGOs or other governments. We bear witness to the US government (including to the next administration) and to ALL governments that the Paris Agreement is important enough to come here and support. To the extent that we represent evangelical, or have come out of conservative evangelical, backgrounds, we testify to the world that in the same way that YHWH encouraged Elijah (I Kings 19), so now there are likewise “7000 prophets who have not bowed the knee to Baal.” Look, here are 23 of us and our constituents back home who have sent us!
We also bear witness to the forces of darkness, including to whom or to what N.T. Wright calls “the Satan,” that we are still here and that we will not be moved. Revelations 12:11 will figure into one of our morning devotionals at COP25: “They triumphed over [the Satan] by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.” Our presence at COP25 is part of “the word of our testimony.” And finally, we also bear witness to God himself. It may be a lament, or it may be the prayer of hope that Ellul calls the “prayer of protest,” but we declare to God: “Look upon on us and have mercy. We are here because the Paris Agreement is important to us.” When you get your UNFCCC badge at registration, it will come with your name and with your picture on it. It will come with a lanyard. When you put it on for the first time, take a moment to look toward the entrance of COP25 and say: “I am [state your name] and I am here!” Then give a glance up toward heaven and say, “Father God, I wear this badge like I would sackcloth and ashes. I am your child and I am here.”
3. Diligently and enthusiastically communicate back home.
If you can’t realistically influence the negotiators at COP25, then why expend the CO2 to fly to Madrid? The second answer, full of possibility and hope, is that you are about to be in the strongest position ever to report back to your constituency and mobilize them for climate action. There is nothing comparable to reporting about a COP FROM a COP. With your attendance at COP25, you have made yourself newsworthy and your constituents have perked their ears and are listening, some for the very first time. Think of the commissioning services that some of us have had in our churches: that never would have happened if you and I had not been getting on a plane for Madrid in the next couple weeks. Whatever you may be now, when you return from COP25, you will be credible climate leader; you will have a new credential, your words will have added weight.
If some of our well-meaning detractors say that you can only influence a COP before the COP, not at it, well then we can reply: “that’s exactly what we are doing: we are trying to influence COP26, 27, 28 etc. by being here at COP25,” just like we are trying to influence climate action in 2020, the US elections of 2020, whatever lobbying we do with CCL in the future, whatever we teach our students, etc.
The challenge here is that your communication from COP25 is a precious stewardship. It is an opportunity that God’s creation can ill afford for you to squander. Diligently report back. And report back according to best practices. (Remember the admonition from your Communication Plan: “collect and tell well-crafted stories”). But here is an added challenge: don’t catch yourself simply “preaching to the choir.” Your constituency may already be well-established, regular listeners to your climate messages. To avoid COP25 simply being an exercise in “reinforcement,” please consider 1) how to EXPAND your constituency with new contacts, with new names on your contact list, with new organizations in your network, with new listeners and/or readers; and 2) how to DEEPEN your existing constituency. This will require some discernment on your part, but what is the “next step” that your constituency can be called to take in their own commitment to climate action? What is the next insight or paradigm shift that even these “true believers” must make?
4. Allow yourself to be changed by CCOP2019 and COP25.
You may not realistically be able to change the Paris Process or your nation’s NDC ambition at COP 25, but you CAN change yourself. More accurately, you WILL be changed at COP25, so long as you allow yourself to be. It is no accident that you are going to Madrid. God wants you there. He has a gift he wants to give you there. What is it? I don’t know, and neither do you. Nonetheless, go with expectancy and hope.
Do you remember my contribution to our third webinar: how early 20th Century climatologist John Tyndall influenced how mainline and evangelical churches prayed (including about such things as climate change) with his famous “Prayer Gauge” debate? I for one intend to sit in that tension at COP25 as someone who does pray and as someone who hates that old Christian platitude: “Prayer doesn’t change things; prayer changes me.” Of course, prayer changes me, but isn’t it a both/and thing and not simplistically an either/or thing?
Part of allowing yourself to be changed is to widen your field of vision. EVERYTHING that happens in and around a COP is fair game for God to use. It will be part of your COP25 story, and you will need to learn how to interpret these things vis-à-vis climate change. For example, last year, a kidney stone attack and a tour of Auschwitz were part of my COP24 story, however tangential they may have appeared at first glance. Please also remember Leah Kostamo’s teaching at our third webinar: the Welcoming Prayer is not just a tool to prevent burn-out in our activism; it is an interpretative device to inform our activism. The Welcoming Prayer opens us to self-transformation.
Conclusion and a Commission
“Hope,” Jacques Ellul tells us, “is not something to counterbalance pessimism and realism, to counteract reality clearly seen, understood, and grasped. Hope finds its substance in realism, and the latter finds its possibility in hope.” So please go to COP25 will your eyes wide-open, with as few illusions as possible about the reality of our situation there. Ellul warns that “without this realism, hope can only fall back into idealism, and it is my belief that idealism, at whatever level, is the worst of all traps, and represents the greatest danger for [humanity]. . . . Idealism is a source of [humanity’s] continual disillusionment. It is [one’s] temptation to live something other than [one’s self].” There is a lot of idealism at a COP. There is no need however to be afraid of realism, because we have hope. Ellul writes:
Without a living hope there is likewise no human capacity to consider the actual situation. [Humanity] can never stand reality. [One] spends [their] time lying to [one’s self], covering up the real, providing [one’s self] illusions and rationalizations. . . . Without hope, reality becomes an unbearable mechanism, a continual damnation, a source of fear and apprehension which cannot be appeased.”
Ellul continues, “[Humanity] can never look situations squarely in the face, yet [they are] always frustrated and blocked when [they fail] to do so. The person who fails to look at the real, to accept it even in its most threatening aspects, to see the impasse or the fatality in which [one] finds [one’s self], can never find a way out of it either, can never surmount the reality nor in any way get beyond it to make history.”
According to your vision statements, you intend to be a person who uses COP25 in order to “get beyond reality in order to make history.” Ellul will tell you: “Hope then acts to keep the interpretation from being a lie, an illusion, a justification. But more than that, it produces the power whereby we are not conquered by the reality, whereby the experience of the death of a person, of a brother, does not bring me to the point of suicide, or of giving up, but becomes, to the contrary, the point of departure for life and hope.”
We wish you the power of hope as you embark on your journey at COP25. Where does one find hope? Another theologian, Walter Brueggemann, says that the basis of hope is the reality that “God is a real character and an effective agent in the world.” Let that be your mantra at COP25: “God, you are a real character here at COP 25; you are an effective agent in the Paris negotiations.”
I am so glad that my introverted self found the courage to act on Rich’s encouragement and ask my new church for a “commissioning” at yesterday’s service. It is was a meaningful moment for me, made more so by the fact that my “sending church” back in Kansas had a congregational meeting on Thursday night where, by voting on the new budget, they effectively ratified a decision by the elder board to stop supporting our ministry of 26 years because of our “activism.” If you haven’t had a commissioning service from your local church—either because it was not arranged, or because such a thing would never be arranged at your church--then allow me on behalf of Brian and myself, and of our CCOP leadership team, and of our five Sponsoring partners, to do so here at the end of this letter:
We commission you, our dear sister, our dear brother, and send you to Madrid, to COP25, to CCOP2019 in the power of the Holy Spirit to do the work that the Creator God has called you. We send you out with no fear of realism and with a strong assurance of hope. We exhort you to struggle bravely, to bear witness faithfully, to communicate diligently, and to open your hearts trustfully. We bless you now in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
We look forward to seeing you soon in Madrid,
Lowell Bliss
Co-leader with Brian Webb of CCOP2019