Marginal Christianity

September 9, 2017 by Leah D. Schade 2 Comments 44 In August of 2016, Bill McKibben wrote a piece for the New Republic entitled “A War at War” explaining the ways in which climate change is a war that is attacking our human society at every level. The climate war is “a world war aimed at us all,” he said. “And if we lose, we will be as decimated and helpless as the losers in every conflict – except that this time, there will be no winners, and no end to the planet-wide occupation that follows.” He said that the only hope was to mobilize ourselves like we did for WWII. As I read the article, I remember thinking that Hurricane Sandy should have been our “Pearl Harbor moment.”  I had hoped that the 2012 superstorm which attacked the densely populated East Coast, destroying so much of the New Jersey shoreline and putting New York in the path of devastation, would be the wake-up call we needed. I thought this would the one event that would shake the scales of denial f...

  By Bill McKibben June 5 Bill McKibben is a distinguished scholar at Middlebury College and a founder of the group 350.org.     If historians someday need to explain how mankind managed to blow the fight against climate change, they need only point to last month’s shareholder meeting at Exxon Mobil headquarters in Dallas.    The meeting came two days after Texas smashed old rainfall records — almost doubled them , in some cases — and as authorities were still searching for families swept away after rivers crested many feet beyond their previous records. As Exxon Mobil’s Rex Tillerson — the highest-paid chief executive of the richest fossil fuel firm on the planet — gave his talk, the death toll from India’s heat wave mounted and pictures circulated on the Internet of Delhi’s pavement literally melting . Meanwhile, satellite images showed Antarctica’s Larsen B ice shelf on the edge of disintegration.   And how did Tillerson react? By downplayi...