Unitarians talk about the need for an elevator speech.  If you’re riding in an elevator and someone asks you to explain your faith, what do you say before the doors open?   Here’s an elevator speech about climate change. 

 

The elevator runs on electricity, fueled mostly by burning coal which produces heat and carbon dioxide, which puts the fizz in soda pop.  And warms the planet.  Gaia is a metaphor of earth.  The atmosphere is our great organ of interconnection and temperature regulation. We live our lives borrowing the earth’s treasure.  Earth is our interdependent web, our lovely, only home, our landfill, our outhouse. 

 

The litany of climate problems is familiar to all of us: warming, rising oceans, more intense storms and droughts, fires, record-breaking heat—all these are happening now.    The world’s glaciers, storing much of our supply of fresh water, are melting. We cut down 15 million trees a year to provide the US with shopping bags (Al Gore).  Up north, the permafrost is melting.  Tundra travel days for trucks in Alaska have gone from over 200 a year to under 100 (Gore). 

 

Climate change is the overarching moral issue of our times.  It makes worse all the current ills of global society: our health and economic well being; our diets; the distribution of wealth, greed and poverty on the planet; our insularity when confronted with the plight of others; and yes, as a subset of all these, the phenomenon of  terrorism.

 

We have choices:  mitigate, adapt, suffer (Lester Brown).  It’s easier to seize the opportunities than to react to disaster.  Our alliances should be global, our economies can and should become more decentralized, our land use patterns more compact and less coastal, our manufacturing less polluting, our lifestyles less wasteful.  Can we do all that is required of us without inconvenience, even pain?  Each day the costs of inaction seem more obvious.

 

Perhaps the main key is our collective and individual political will, which is, as Gore says, a renewable resource.  It’s up to us to ensure that it’s not a rare commodity.  But regardless of whether our politicians act quickly and decisively, we must.

 

Gore quotes the World War II general Omar Bradley:  “It is time that we steered by the stars, not by the lights of each passing ship.”