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:
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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.
-
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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