The Planet-Protecting Church
from the desk of Rev. Dr. Cindi Love, Executive Director

Earth Day.  2008 April 22

Today is Earth Day and our operational team is using today as a time to mark the official start for our denominational offices regarding our role as a planet-protecting movement.  Sustainability requires us to do three things:

1. Reduce waste
2. Reduce use of chemicals
3. Reduce reliance on irreplaceable fossil fuels

Our truth as a denomination is that we have lagged behind our local churches in implementation of legitimate work in sustainability.  As I visit our congregants throughout the world, I see the evidence of recycling, energy and water conservation as well as interest in construction and use of “green” facilities as well as zeroscaping.  I want to commend these churches for these efforts and let you know how we are joining them.

Some of the recommendations for sustainability that I convey in this memorandum are common to local church experiences and some will not be familiar at all.   I want to invite people throughout our denomination to share their “best practices” for recycling, conservation and planetary care with peer congregations.  Please send these to kathybeasley@mccchurch.net in order that we can summarize and feature these in Around the Fellowship and other broad-reaching communications.

Overview

As a citizen of the United States and the person responsible for administrative operations for Metropolitan Community Church worldwide, I am deeply concerned about the reality that the dependence of the United States on carbon.  This addiction has eroded our moral character, catalyzed our greed and, therefore, our willingness to bring harm to those who hold resources that we believe we must have.  As a justice-seeking organization, I believe that Metropolitan Community Church must participate actively in doing what we can do to stop this harm.  Part of that work is protest, part of it is preaching, part of it is prophecy and part of it is putting policy into practice. 

Today, I want to talk about the policy and practice part of our work and ask you to consider adoption of these at the local level if not already in place.

In 2006, we started a ten-year focus a goal to reduce our organizational dependency on carbon by 75 percent with our transition to virtual offices for the majority of our teams worldwide.  Most of our offices were located in the United States.

Since one-third of all emissions in the United States come from travel by car, truck and airplanes and 90 percent of this is caused by automobiles, the quickest and smartest thing we could do to lower our dependency was drive less!  The average car in the United States releases about one pound of carbon dioxide for every mile driven.  Avoiding just 20 miles of driving per week eliminates 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide.  By implementing telecommuting, we effectively cut the number of driving hours by MCC employees by 80,000 hours and 800,000 miles hours per year with this one change in policy.   You can also imagine the reduction in stress and increase in number of hours of productive work time.

Further, we relocated five of our employees to Taylor County, Texas in Abilene, home of the world’s largest wind farm installation.  Within this decade, the entire county electrical needs will be provided by this supply. 

The leased facility in Abilene is located on the corner of an Audubon golf facility, where irrigation and chemical application systems have been optimized to reduce use of pesticides by 50 percent.  We use this facility for meetings not only to ensure that we support their conservation programs, but because they are committed to use of glass containers that minimize demand for plastic and Styrofoam.

And, not related to the environment, but to our witness, Abilene is one of the top ten most conservative cities in America.  We feel it is vitally important for our denominational presence to be felt in places like this.  For this reason, while we will continue to stand in solidarity with our friends and allies in gayborhoods, most of our operational offices will rest in places where people don’t expect us.  The Region 7 office is located in Farmer’s Branch, Texas (Dallas) where they can be a “light shining on the hill” in the midst of some very real darkness of oppression.  We will gather with them in a few days at the Soul Force Action at the United Methodist General Conference.

The semi-annual meetings of our Boards of Administration and Elders have been held at Stasney-Cook Ranch and the Abilene State Park in Texas, both eco-sustainability facilities.
We now use flash drives for downloading the agendas and supporting papers for these meetings, thus eliminating an estimated 850 pages of paper.  We asked General Conference participants to download business packets in advance of the meeting, again in an attempt to save 25,000 sheets of paper, the ink to print the, bindings and the fossil fuel required to ship them.  We have acquired our own internal high-volume printing system for larger publications such as Creating a Life that Matters (CLM) to ensure control of paper content (25 percent post-recyclable) and binding material.

We utilized the Fairmont Princess facility in Scottsdale for General Conference for its compliance with the Audubon requirements.  Some of you experienced the naturalized golf course at our tournament.

To achieve the highest level of action regarding these three things, in addition to:

1. Telecommuting
2. Moving our two operational offices out of high-traffic density locations

We are adopting the following policies and practices and encourage our local congregants and churches to review them and adopt them as well:
To the maximum extent feasible:

• Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) operational offices will be fully compliant with the Energy Star standard for all new equipment purchases/leases effective June 1, 2008 (www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c+ofc_equip.pr_office_equipment).  Laptop computers are 90 percent more energy efficient than desktop models and inkjet printers consume 90 percent less energy than laser printers.  Multi-function devices that print/fax/copy and scan use less energy than individual units.  We will demonstrate a preference for these technologies.
• All operational offices will switch to green power effective June 1, 2008 (www.eere.energy.gov/consumer/renewable_energy). 
• All operational offices will use the on-line TAP system and SKYPE for conferencing and reduce flights per annum by two per employee.  Flying is another form of transportation that produces large amounts of carbon dioxide although automobiles account for 90 percent of the emissions in the United States.  We have reduced air travel by an average of two flights per employee this year and we are evaluating the purchase of carbon offsets to compensate for those emissions caused by our air travel (www.betterworldclub.com/travel/index.htm).
• All operational offices will reduce temperature settings in winter at operational offices by two degrees and increase temperature settings in evenings by two degrees.  If we turn down the thermostat in the winter two degrees and turn it up in the summer two degrees, we can save up to 8 percent in our monthly heating and cooling bills. 
• All operational offices will replace standard light bulbs with compact fluorescent light, thus gaining 10,000 additional hours of use.  If we change out the five most recently use bulbs in our offices and homes, we will all save $60 per year in energy costs.  And, did you know that compact fluorescents have full spectrum light that research indicates will improve mood and affect?   Experts say that if every household (and every church) replaced just three standard light bulbs with compact fluorescents, the energy savings would be the equivalent of taking 3.5 million cars of f the road.  If you turn them off when not in use, you save more and reduce total energy consumption.
• All operational offices will use the criteria of “reduce, reuse and recycle” as the lens for our purchasing decisions.  There is a growing movement to produce less waste, reduce emissions by buying less and choosing durable items over disposable ones, repairing rather than discarding and passing on times that are no longer needed to someone who can make use of them.  For more information about the three Rs, visit www.epa.gov/msw/reduce.htm.
• All operational offices will give preference to those packages that use recycled packaging, those that don’t use excess packaging, buying in bulk and using things that come in refillable glass containers. Discarded packaging materials makes up about one-third of the waste clogging our landfills.  By minimizing use of paper, plastic, aluminum, glass and Styrofoam, we can reduce our contribution to the land-fill.  We can’t eliminate all packaging, but we can “reduce, reuse and recycle” and hope you will do the same when you receive packages from us. 

By converting to glass instead of water and soft drink bottles and using ceramic coffee cups instead of Styrofoam cups, those of us in the United States would save 244 billion bottles and cups made out of chemical-based plastics from entering the U.S. water system each year.  The average American produces 1,609 pounds of waste each year.  Those of us in the United States can cut this up to 75 percent by recycling paper, glass and metal alone, cutting 162 million tons of material from entering American land fills each year. 

We now recycle 27 percent of our trash, a big improvement, but if we increase that to 35 percent, the EPA says our greenhouse gases would be reduced as much as 7 million cars getting off the roads.  Can you recycle 10 percent more of your household and church trash?  This would make a huge difference.  If you don’t have local recycling centers or curb-side recycling, call 1-800-CLEANUP or visit www.earth 911.org for information. 

• All operational offices will use low or no water consumption landscaping for lawns, playgrounds and home lawns and eliminate chemical fertilizers and pesticides.  If each citizen of the United States insists on this standard, we can cut 1 billion pounds of synthetic products from entering the environment each year. Collectively, we dump 32 million pounds of toxic chemistry down our drains each day, from household cleaning chemicals and this does not count what goes into our in door air.
• All operational offices will buy recycled paper.  If every household and church in America replaces just one box of facial tissue with 100 percent recycled ones we save 200,000 trees. If every household replaced just one roll of toilet paper with 100 percent recyclable toilet paper, we would save 423,900 trees.    Ditto for paper towels and paper napkins—replace just one roll and one package and we save 2 million trees.  Add them all up and we save 2+ million trees with these simple changes and conversing trees have a powerful protective effect on our planetary ecosystem.  Go to www.nrdc.org for resources.
• All operational offices will convert use of toxic cleaning materials to natural solutions.  We will use basic cleaning products like baking soda, white vinegar, lemon juice, borax, vegetable based liquid soap and washing soda that are easy to obtain and use.  It doesn’t require any more work to disinfect a counter top or toilet with a solution of borax, vinegar and water than a spray bottle of something blue or green.  Seventh Generation and Ecover also provide these products at your local health or natural foods grocery story. 
• Effective June 1, 2008, we will be fully compliant with the local recycling center recommendations in Abilene and Sarasota, where we have two office locations.
  

Summary
The most important thing that each of us can do individually and as communities of faith is increase consciousness.  Before we buy anything, from packaged foods to computers, we need to consider its recyclability (p. 81) Living Green:  A Practical Guide to Sustainability. 

Consider this idea---print your local church logo on large-style cotton fiber bags with handles and ask your church members to use these instead of paper or plastic disposable bags in stores.  You’ll advertise your church and help save the environment in one step. 

We know that we have to “decarbonize” our operations to be successful in harm reduction.  And, we have to raise the prophetic voice of MCC again in the political realm.  Robert Kennedy, Jr. has written a brilliant summary of recommendations for the next President of the United States.  I want to close with those and encourage you to “cut and paste” them in your correspondence with local, state and federal officials.

Kennedy says:
There are a number of things the new USA president should immediately do to hasten the approaching boom in energy innovation. A carbon cap-and-trade system designed to put downward pressure on carbon emissions is quite simply a no-brainer. Already endorsed by Senators McCain, Clinton, and Obama, such a system would measure national carbon emissions and create a market to auction emissions credits. The supply of credits is then reduced each year to meet pre-determined carbon-reduction targets. As supply tightens, credit value increases, providing rich monetary rewards for innovators who reduce carbon. Since it is precisely targeted, cap-and-trade is more effective than a carbon tax. It is also more palatable to politicians, who despise taxes and love markets. Industry likes the system's clear goals. This market-based approach has a proven track record.
There's a second thing the next president should do, and it would be a strategic masterstroke: push to revamp the nation's antiquated high-voltage power-transmission system so that it can deliver solar, wind, geothermal, and other renewable energy across the country. Right now, a Texas wind-farm manager who wants to get his electrons to market faces two huge impediments. First, our regional power grids are overstressed and misaligned. The biggest renewable-energy opportunities - for instance, Southwest solar and Midwest wind - are outside the grids' reach. Furthermore, traveling via alternating-current (AC) lines, too much of that wind farmer's energy would dissipate before it crossed the country. The nation urgently needs more investment in its backbone transmission grid, including new direct-current (DC) power lines for efficient long-haul transmission. Even more important, we need to build in "smart" features, including storage points and computerized management overlays, allowing the new grid to intelligently deploy the energy along the way. Construction of this new grid will create a marketplace where utilities, established businesses, and entrepreneurs can sell energy and efficiency.

The other obstacle is the web of arcane and conflicting state rules that currently restrict access to the grid. The federal government needs to work with state authorities to open up the grids, allowing clean-energy innovators to fairly compete for investment, space, and customers. We need open markets where hundreds of local and national power producers can scramble to deliver economic and environmental solutions at the lowest possible price. The energy sector, in other words, needs an initiative analogous to the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which required open access to all the nation's telephone lines. Marketplace competition among national and local phone companies instantly precipitated the historic explosion in telecom activity.

Construction of efficient and open-transmission marketplaces and green-power-plant infrastructure would require about a trillion dollars over the next 15 years. For roughly a third of the projected cost of the Iraq war we could wean the country from carbon. And the good news is that the government doesn't actually have to pay for all of this. If the president works with governors to lift constraints and encourage investment, utilities and private entrepreneurs will quickly step in to revitalize the grid and recover their investment through royalties collected for transporting green electrons. Businesses and homes will become power plants as individuals cash in by installing solar panels and wind turbines on their buildings, and by selling the stored energy in their plug-in hybrids back to the grid at peak hours.

Energy expert and former CIA director R. James Woolsey predicts: "With rational market incentives and a smart backbone, you'll see capital and entrepreneurs flooding this field with lightning speed." Ten percent of venture-capital dollars are already deployed in the clean-tech sector, and the world's biggest companies are crowding the space with capital and scrambling for position.

The president's final priority must be to connect a much smarter power grid to vastly more efficient buildings and machines. We have barely scratched the surface here. Washington is a decade behind its obligation, first set by Ronald Reagan, to set cost-minimizing efficiency standards for all major appliances. With the conspicuous exception of Arnold Schwarzenegger's California, the states aren't doing much better. And Congress keeps setting ludicrously tight expiration dates for its energy-efficiency tax credits, frustrating both planning and investment. The new president must take all of this in hand at once.

The benefits to America are beyond measure. We will cut annual trade and budget deficits by hundreds of billions, improve public health and farm production, diminish global warming, and create millions of good jobs.
   
Most important, as Metropolitan Community Church, we can reduce harm, tearing down walls and building up hope for future generations.

Blessings and Peace,

Rev. Dr. Cindi Love
Executive Director

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