As we mark World Environment Day, we share an extract from the first episode of Common Ground, a new podcast hosted by Bishop Mary Gregory.
In this episode, the Rt Revd Mary Gregory, Bishop of Reading, is joined by Professor Chris Merchant, Professor of Ocean and Earth Observation at the University of Reading and a member of St Paul's Church, Wokingham.
Together they explore climate change, renewable energy, Christian hope, and the role individuals, communities and nations can play in caring for creation. In this extract, Chris explains why climate change is not inevitable, why he believes there is still reason for hope, and how renewable technologies are already transforming lives around the world.
Listen to the full episode: Observing the Earth with Professor Chris Merchant
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Can we still stabilise the climate?
Bishop Mary
Do you think there is still the potential to stabilise climate change?
Prof Chris Merchant
Absolutely, yes. Not quickly or easily. No. But yes, absolutely.
Essentially, the temperature keeps going up so long as we accumulate greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels or by releasing methane, which is often a by-product of generating fossil fuels. And if we manage to switch to a way of powering our societies so that we're not adding those greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, the temperature rise will stop and the temperature will stabilise.
Nature will start to draw down some of the greenhouse gases that are present in the atmosphere at that time and over the course of hundreds or thousands of years probably we would revert to something like the climate of the previous decades, before about 40 years ago probably. So that is... That's what we'd like to see. As climate scientists, that's what we think is necessary. You've got to keep fossil fuels on the ground, ultimately. And then nature will help us by stabilising the temperature of response. It's not inevitable that the temperatures go up. It is driven by us continuing to burn fossil fuels.
Hope and justice
Bishop Mary
So that feels, you know, compelling and hopeful. And yet, you know, I mean, one of the things about fossil fuels that I am interested in is in countries that are in an earlier developmental phase than Britain, for example, would they have the same access to sustainable methods of energy? Because there's issues of justice here, it seems to me.
Chris
Well, interesting thing is that, for example, in recent years in Pakistan, the consumption of diesel has been dropping really rapidly because many agriculturalists are finding that it's cost effective for them to get some solar panels and to power their small holdings. way, solar panels and batteries is doing for them what diesel generators were doing before.
More cheaply, more cleanly, less noisily, all sorts of advantages. And that's having an impact at the country scale. So these things can be affordable and are enthusiastically taken up in many countries. So it's a mixed picture, of course. But you can imagine that someone who's perhaps relying on firewood for cooking could benefit greatly from having cooking facilities that are powered by the sun, and maybe through the batteries so they can cook in the evenings as well.
China has basically made that affordable by deciding that it was going to go strongly in the renewables direction, and doing such a scale that the morals of efficiency and competition have dropped the prices for things like batteries and solar power by huge factors over just 10 years or so. It's extraordinary actually. And they're still continuing to drop, so it will become affordable for more and more people over time.
Yeah, so I think there is hope for not just industrialised societies to benefit from these advanced technologies. It is already happening in all sorts of countries.
Reality, hope and grief
Bishop Mary
That's good to hear because I feel like in the West or in industrial societies, we've caused a lot of this, haven't we? And our actions are impacting other nations disproportionately, you know low-lying island nations for example, the Solomon Islands, where people are having to leave their homes because the waters are rising and so I feel that we bear an additional responsibility in the industrialised nations and yes I'm encouraged to hear that those sorts of technologies are accessible and affordable to to countries who don't have the wealth that we do. Otherwise we'd feel really doubly unfair somehow.
Chris
Absolutely. I think we could be doing more and making them more affordable, because there still tends to be with renewables, you know, it's the same for us in this country if we want to switch our heating system or buy an EV, there tends to be a bit more of an upfront cost. But then over the lifetime, it's cheaper. Okay. Lifetime costs are often because you're ultimately powering it from free sources. Yeah. So sometimes the upfront cost is the barrier and industrial nations could be spending more, doing more to help address those upfront costs to help every nation make this transition.
Bishop Mary
You spoke a few minutes ago about holding onto hope in the face of people who just won't get it, choose not to get it. And I was talking this morning to a group of people about a fantastic book by Walter Brueggemann, who's an Old Testament scholar. And he wrote this brilliant book called Reality, Grief, Hope, where he's talking about from Isaiah when people of Israel are in exile and what does hope look like for them. And then he parallels it with contemporary America. He's an American writer. And he says that you have to start with the reality and grieve what is and only then you can move to hope and I kind of quite like that analysis because it's hope then that's grounded in reality rather than this kind of optimism that has no base bearing on reality and I mean are you able to find hope in the reality that you know and perhaps that you grieve I mean is that still possible for you?
Chris
Well, grieving is certainly part of it because stabilising the climate is not reversing the damage that's been done. There are all sorts of ways. I have worked on ocean temperatures as I mentioned before as part of our research and one of the beautiful ecosystems that's been affected by rising ocean temperatures is the coral reefs around the world. The tropical coral reefs, beautiful, diverse, amazing places. And so many of them have died, essentially, because they're no longer able to tolerate the temperatures of the seas that they live in. And that's an irreplaceable loss. We might be able to transplant corals make something there, but we will never recover the coral reefs that we've lost. And that story could be thought about across many parts of the world, both directly from climate change, but also from the way we've treated the land in various places. And stabilising the climate will also not get us back to the more benign weather that we used to have.
If the planet's still warmer, there'll still be a greater propensity to flooding, for example, because the atmosphere is holding more moisture. Droughts as well also become more intense when the general temperature is warmer. So we won't undo that by stabilising the climate. We'll still have to adapt and cope with that changed climate that we created.
But the alternative is that the temperature keeps changing and that's not a plan. That is basically not a plan. So when people say we shouldn't bother with net zero, it's almost crazy because admittedly it's going to be beyond our lifetimes. But in the long run that is disastrous.
Listen to the full conversation
In the full episode of Common Ground, Bishop Mary Gregory and Professor Chris Merchant explore climate change, courage, hope, faith, and what it means to care for creation in a changing world.
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