11/05/2021

(AU The Guardian) Ashes To Ashes: Pentecostalism, The PM And The Climate Crisis

The Guardian - 

Scott Morrison’s recent speech to a Christian conference draws fresh attention to Pentecostal churches’ lack of climate evangelism
Scott Morrison at a Horizon church service in Sydney. Religious scholars say many Pentecostal Christians believe God will take care of the climate. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP
Guardian Environmental Investigations
“We are called, all of us, for a time and for a season and God would have us use it wisely.”

Scott Morrison, Australia’s prime minister and a Pentecostal Christian, flew in on a taxpayer-funded plane to deliver those words to a church on the Gold Coast.

His sermon-like speech was given to the national conference of Australian Christian Churches – the umbrella body for the majority of churches in the country’s only Christian denomination showing growth: Pentecostalism.

Pentecostalism, including the more than 1,000 churches under ACC’s umbrella – which includes the Morrison family’s Horizon church in south Sydney – has, by some reports, the largest number of active churchgoers after Catholicism.

But when Morrison tells Pentecostals to use their season wisely, there are some religious scholars worried that acting on climate change has not been a feature of that season.

Speaking to Guardian Australia, some argue the historical guiding principles of Pentecostalism – its focus on personal salvation with a strong consumerist vibe – has not lent itself to conjuring a congregation of climate evangelists.

The Australian Religious Response to Climate Change has among its members organisations belonging to an array of faiths – from Catholics and Quakers to Buddhists and Muslims. Members have blockaded coalmining sites and campaigned hard for rapid cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.

“We have 41 member organisations,” says the ARRCC president and Catholic, Thea Ormerod. “None are Pentecostal. We have occasionally asked leaders in the Pentecostal tradition to sign on to our letters to government. They have declined the invitations.”

In March ARRCC organised more than 120 silent protests outside the offices of government figures. Jews, Christians, Buddhists and Muslims were among the activists. The protests were a short verse in a lengthening chapter of faith-based groups’ response to the climate crisis.

The Church of England has been pulling investments out of fossil fuel companies. The Pope says climate change is a “challenge of civilisation”. Islamic leaders have issued calls for a 100% renewable energy strategy.

In Australia, the National Council of Churches wrote to Morrison last week asking him to announce more ambitious targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

There is no grand body of research on what different Christian groups think about climate change, but what there is suggests that Pentecostals are among the least concerned.

According to 2016 research on Australian Christians “it appears to be Pentecostalism in particular where skepticism about the causes of climate change is prevalent”.

Other research has suggested that people belonging to faiths with a more literal view of religious texts – including Pentecostals and Evangelicals – were more likely to doubt the need to act on climate change. They were also less likely to think global heating was caused by humans.

‘The end isn’t coming tomorrow’

Dr Mark Jennings, an expert on the sociology of religion at the University of Divinity, says Pentecostalism is still shaking off its early incarnation as a denomination coloured by fears and hopes of an end times and a renewal ushered in by God.

“They started with the idea that the world would end soon and so this stuff [climate change] doesn’t make any sense,” he says. “That was from the origins of the movement, but now they are starting to be more comfortable with the idea the end isn’t coming tomorrow and those attitudes have adjusted.”

Jennings says Pentecostalism is not on its own in taking a strong cue from the Bible’s first chapter, Genesis, where the Christian God tells Adam and Eve to “fill the earth and subdue it”.

“They take that as the world being the property of humans and we should bring nature to subjugation,” he says.

Focus on personal salvation

Growth in Pentecostalism in Australia is part of a global boom of so-called charismatic Christians that now stands at 655 million people out of 1.5 billion Christians worldwide.

Ormerod says the apparent absence of many Pentecostals in speaking up about the climate crisis “has to do with how they tend, as a culture, to interpret the Gospel message”.

“They tend to believe God will take care of the climate,” she says. “Their focus overall is on personal salvation.” She worries that a prime minister “who shares Pentecostal beliefs puts Australians in further danger”.

Ormerod’s husband is Neil Ormerod, a retired professor of theology at the Australian Catholic University who had a 20-year association with ACC’s training and theology centre, Alphacrucis College.
It’s a form of religion for an individualistic modern consumerist age
He knows several Pentecostals concerned about climate change. But he says many tend not to see a link between between social and political contexts and their own personal salvation.

“It’s a form of religion for an individualistic modern consumerist age,” he says. “There is no critique of, say, modern neoliberal economics or the consumerist society.”

One Pentecostal leader with a public profile – albeit much smaller than Morrison’s – is James Macpherson, a pastor and vice-president on the executive board of Alphacrucis College.

Macpherson writes for the conservative magazine the Spectator, where climate science and environmentalists are an object of ridicule.

At the start of the global pandemic, Macpherson wrote how “leftists” and “environmental doomsayers” were pushing for a reaction to the Covid crisis that mirrored the “fabled climate emergency”.

He describes the public broadcaster, the ABC, as the “national purveyor of climate doom” and calls the teenage Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg the “goblin of doom”.
Pastors have been reflecting upon the concept of new creation ... not as a disposing of the old ... but actually as a transformation
The Rev Prof Jacqui Grey is the dean of theology at Alphacrucis. She says Macpherson is voicing personal opinions and writes in a personal capacity.

She accepts that there is an absence of strong voices for climate action among Pentecostals but puts this down to the relative youthfulness of the denomination (it has roots from the early 20th century) and the lack of a hierarchical structure that means most leadership is local.

Young Pentecostals, she says, are passionate about caring for the environment and there is change afoot.

The strong emphasis on achieving “personal salvation” is a “fair critique”, she says, but one the church’s theologians have been “rethinking”.

Some of that rethinking “is yet to be reflected in the everyday life of the church”, she says. “It is not just the individual, but the individual is part of the community both human and non-human.”

The Pentecostal movement has matured, she says, beyond the belief that an “end times” would come and Jesus would establish a new kingdom.

File photo of Hillsong church members. Former US congressman Bob Inglis says he has ‘found a receptiveness there’ on the need for climate action. Photograph: Tracey Nearmy/AAP

“Scholars and pastors have been reflecting upon the concept of new creation to understand it not as a disposing of the old with a new and separate creation, but actually as a transformation.

“We are still working through the full implications of our understanding of faith and how that applies to many different social issues including climate change.”

One sign of a strong shift among Pentecostal theologians could come with the release of a special issue of the church’s academic journal – Australian Pentecostal Studies – which Grey edits. The June issue is dedicated to caring for the environment and climate change.

“As far as I know, no other Pentecostal journal globally has ever had a dedicated issue,” Grey says.

‘Young Christians want action’

That slow shift among Pentecostals will be gospel music to the ears of a former US Republican congressman, Bob Inglis.

Inglis was treated as heathen by Republicans when, in the early 2000s, he began to call for action on climate change and, later, a tax on carbon in a party shot through with climate science denial.

“It wasn’t the only heresy I committed, but it’s the most enduring,” he says.

The Christian from South Carolina now spends most of his time trying to convince the reluctant rump of Republicans that climate change is real, is human-caused, and it’s a Christian duty to act on it.

He says the idea “the Earth is going to burn up away and so it doesn’t matter” is prevalent among the Pentecostals he speaks to.

Inglis did a speaking tour of Australia in 2017, a few months after Morrison, then treasurer, held up a lump of coal in parliament, telling his leftwing opposition not to be scared of it.

Inglis met representatives from Hillsong – another large grouping of Pentecostals that has since broken away from ACC – and says “we found a receptiveness there”.

Australia is a special place for Inglis. A snorkel on the Great Barrier Reef with a scientist, he says, helped him see how marvelling in the corals and the ecosystem was, to him, a form of worship.

In the US, Inglis says, the most challenging hurdle he finds is the belief that because “God is sovereign” humans can’t be responsible for changing the climate.

“You can’t just dump into the air and say God cleans it up,” he says. “That’s not right. We have to be fully accountable and if we are, blessings flow from that accountability.

“Young Christians want action on climate change. It’s the older ones that have the hesitancy on action.”

In a statement, ACC said: “Caring for the environment and God’s creation is viewed as an important responsibility for all people, including the Church.”

Congregation members “reflect a broad demographic” and “there are certainly many who are strong advocates for environmental concerns and climate change within the Pentecostal church”.

“For the record, while the ACC does not have a specific policy regarding climate change, our Missions arm has a very strong environmental policy on Creation Care that serves our commitment to the nations we work in and includes our local communities in Australia.”

Guardian Australia has approached Morrison’s office for comment.

Links
at No comments:

(AU SMH) ‘The Media Uses It To Scare People’: Survey Detects Climate Change Scepticism In Young People

Sydney Morning Herald - Caitlin Fitzsimmons

More 16 and 17 year-olds believe the media has exaggerated the issue of climate change than recent school leavers and scepticism in this age group has grown in the past two years.

However, four out of five 16- and 17-year-olds in a recent survey do not believe the issue is exaggerated, while most polls show young people generally are overwhelmingly concerned about climate change.

The findings are from a wide-ranging report on Generation Z by research organisation Millennial Future, based on a nationally representative survey of 1018 Australians aged 16-20 conducted in April.

Maria Tynan, 17, says the media “just make it seem so bad that it seems completely unbelievable”. Credit: Nikola Kinder

In one question survey respondents were asked to agree or disagree with the statement: “I believe the science of environmental issues such as climate change has been exaggerated and is less of an issue than what we are led to believe in the media”.

Mission to save Sydney’s rarest eucalyptus species from extinction

Among the Generation Z minors (age 16 or 17), 21.7 per cent agreed the media exaggerated climate change.

This was significantly higher than 16.1 per cent for the Generation Z adults (aged 18 to 20) in the same survey or 17.2 per cent for Millennials (aged 21 to 38) who were asked the same question in a separate survey in January.

Scepticism appears to have increased over time - when the same research was done in 2019 only 16.1 per cent of 16 and 17-year-olds agreed with the statement.

Only 13.4 per cent of young people in metropolitan areas believed the media had exaggerated the issue, compared with 22.1 per cent for young people in the regions. It also skewed male; for young women aged 16 to 20, it was 16.3 per cent, compared with 21.8 per cent for young men.

These reported differences are outside the poll’s margin of error.

Maria Tynan, 17, a student at St Francis De Sales Regional College in Leeton in the Riverina, agrees the media tends to exaggerate the severity of climate change.

“They take scientific information, and then they extrapolate on that and they just make it seem so bad that it seems completely unbelievable,” Maria said.

“This isn’t to downplay the severity of climate change or anything but the media uses it to make people scared, instead of focusing on what can be done about it.”

She said this was counter-productive because it pushed people into either denial or a sense of hopelessness.

Maria, who was a representative in the NSW Youth Parliament two years ago, went through “depression and despair” thinking about the issue of climate change when she was younger. She felt better after she researched the problem and realised we had so many of the solutions already with existing technology, let alone future inventions.

Hunter coal miners don’t have enough funds for land rehabilitation

Maria describes herself as “fairly optimistic this going to be something that humanity, like it always does, will push through”.

Associate Professor David Holmes, the director of the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub, said effective climate communication combined the warnings about the risks with the solutions about how to fix it.

“The message of hope is that by reducing or eliminating the greenhouse emissions that we have today, which is largely a policy area, we can dramatically minimise the dangers that climate change poses to the whole planet,” he said.

Associate Professor Holmes said there had been targeted attempts to seed climate denial among young people and counteract the Greta Thunberg effect. For example, until last year US-based right-wing think-tank the Heartland Institute had funded a young German climate denier Naomi Seibt as an “anti Greta”.

Social researcher Rebecca Huntley, author of How to Talk About Climate Change, who has conducted her own research on climate change attitudes, said the Millennial Future survey was a good sample size, including the breakdown into the two age groups, and the findings could not be dismissed. But she said it also posed further questions.

“It’s not just measuring how people feel about climate change, but how the media reports on it,” Dr Huntley said. “There’s a high level of cynicism about the agenda of the media.”

Report co-author Tom McGillick said the average trust in media was slightly lower for 16-20 year olds than 21-38 year olds, but average trust in media was not falling as steeply as scepticism of climate change was climbing.

“My interpretation is that it’s a little of both, but primarily a growing scepticism of climate change independent of media cynicism,” he said.

Bailey Linton-Simpkins, who is in year 11, says: “I think what the media is presenting are the facts.” Credit: James Brickwood

Bailey Linton-Simpkins, 16, a student at Epping Boys High School in Sydney, said he was very concerned about climate change because we have known about the problem for so long and leaders have consistently failed to act.

“Based on me going to different sources and reading scientific reports, I think what the media is presenting are the facts, and they’re not being alarmist about it,” he said.

It stores pollution 30 times faster than forest. What is blue carbon?

But Bailey said his generation was definitely cynical about the media because “they’ve been trained that way”, with constant teaching about how the truth can be manipulated.

The Lowy Institute has run questions about attitudes to climate change in its polls for many years and will be releasing a standalone study later this month, though only polling Australians aged 18 and up.

Natasha Kassam, director of the Lowy Institute’s Public Opinion and Foreign Policy Program, said the results consistently showed higher concern about climate change among younger Australians.

Links
at No comments:

(China CNN) China's Annual Emissions Surpass Those Of All Developed Nations Combined, Report Finds

CNN - Laura Smith-Spark | Ivana Kottasová

In this June 2017 file photo, a state-owned coal-fired power plant is seen in Huainan, China.

China's annual emissions exceeded those of all developed nations combined in 2019, the first time this has happened since national greenhouse gas emissions have been measured, according to a new report from the Rhodium Group.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has vowed to make his country carbon neutral by 2060, and climate policy is seen as a major area of cooperation -- and even competition -- between the United States and China.

But the new report highlights how difficult reducing China's impact on the climate could be.

According to the researchers, global emissions reached 52 gigatons of CO2-equivalent in 2019, an increase of 11.4% over the past decade. And China's share is growing fast.

While China's emissions were less than a quarter of developed country emissions in 1990, they have more than tripled over the past three decades, the report said. In 2019, they exceeded 14 gigatons of CO2-equivalent for the first time.

"China alone contributed over 27% of total global emissions, far exceeding the US -- the second highest emitter -- which contributed 11% of the global total," the report said. "For the first time, India edged out the EU-27 for third place, coming in at 6.6% of global emissions."

China is a large country, with a population of 1.4 billion, and up to now its per capita emissions have remained considerably lower than those in the developed world, the researchers note. But that, too, is changing fast.

"In 2019, China's per capita emissions reached 10.1 tons, nearly tripling over the past two decades," the report said.

While they remained lower in 2019 than the US -- 17.6 tons a person -- the report predicts that when full 2020 data is available, China's per capita output will have overtaken the OECD average of 10.5 tons, even as the emissions "from almost all other nations declined sharply in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic."

Nonetheless, China still has a way to go before it catches up with the total amount of carbon dioxide that has been spewed into the atmosphere by developed nations. The report notes that "since 1750, members of the OECD bloc have emitted four times more CO2 on a cumulative basis than China."

Greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere like a blanket, trapping radiation that would otherwise escape into space. This causes temperatures on Earth to rise, which is linked to more extreme weather, ice melt and a rise in sea levels. And the more carbon emitted into the atmosphere, the more the planet will warm.

Reinhard Steurer, a climate scientist and associate professor at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, told CNN that those in the West shouldn't be congratulating themselves just yet.

"A lot of the stuff we [in the West] consume is produced in China and the emissions are counted into the Chinese carbon emissions record," he said.

"If you take into account those consumption-based emissions, our record isn't that good... We should never really blame China as the worst emitter on earth, because quite a lot of their emissions go into our consumption."

Links
at No comments: