February 11thReading Recommendation by Brenda MacDonald, Wildwood Mennonite Church.
Reading Recommendation by Brenda MacDonald, Wildwood Mennonite Church.
We know that the biggest culprit in Climate Change is oil. It fuels our houses, our transportation, our economy. How can we transition away? How can we live without this energy that extracts, pollutes, causes imbalanced wealth, acquisition, and wars and keeps burning up, towards depletion, needing constant replacement? We need an energy source that is accessible to all, is not owned by a few rich corporations, that does work for us, without burning up, without extraction or damage to the earth. In his latest book, Here Comes the Sun, Bill McKibben injects hope for our planet, reminding us of the obvious answer: The Sun, the Wind, there for the taking, as needed!
McKibben is known for his long-time activity around climate change. His message has not always been easy to absorb. Now we have surpassed our commitment made in Paris to keep global average temperatures from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius. But, according to McKibben, there is hope to save the planet and to survive the ravages we are already experiencing from Climate Change.
Solar energy is not a sideline alternative to oil, or to nuclear energy that offers the same extraction problems and creates new problems in waste management. The example of Pakistan demonstrates that politicians need only open the gates to the flood of electrical energy that is available to us all; a third of the electrical grid in the country is made up of informal solar installations by ordinary people. Other examples, within the United States, are compelling!
Mennonites hold peace dear to their hearts and practice. If this is true for us, these words from Bill McKibben, quoted from the Yale University Climate Connections Newsletter, will resonate with us:
... renewable energy is a tool for peace: It’s going to be hard to figure out how to fight wars over sunshine...What I’m trying to say is, if you’re for peace and democracy, then a solar panel is a valuable tool (and a valuable symbol, a peace sign for our age). Every one (solar panel) that goes up incrementally reduces the attractiveness of the oil that underlies so much conflict and tyranny. Right at the moment treaties and charters and constitutions offer limited protection at best; we should work to restore the national and global consensus that makes them valuable, but we should also work to push out the kind of energy that can’t be hoarded or controlled.
Here Comes the Sun is a book that looks realistically at the despair of Climate Change and offers real hope with solar power.