| THE CHURCH in the UK causes as much damage to the planet as one of the big supermarket chains, a coalition of business leaders and climate-change campaigners was told at a meeting in Lambeth Palace on Tuesday.
The accusation came from the Bishop of London, the Rt Revd Richard Chartres: “We are part of the problem.” The meeting was held to mark the first anniversary of the climate-change coalition Together.
Places of worship, clergy houses, schools, and halls produced an estimated 1.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, he said. Nor did that figure include travel on church-related work, nor a further three million tonnes of carbon dioxide generated by the homes and activities of regular churchgoers.
There was a moral imperative to act to cut these emissions, Bishop Chartres said. “We must do this for our children.”
The Archbishop of Canterbury, who hosted the meeting, said he was “seeing what the possibilities are” of not flying for a year, following the example of the Bishop of London. He had recently returned from Rome by train after visiting the Pope.
But Jon Snow, the Channel 4 News broadcaster who chaired the meeting, said that the individual actions outlined at the meeting were “small in comparison to the enormity of the challenge”.
On 25 May, Channel 4 would be screening The Eleventh Hour, which followed in the footsteps of Al Gore’s climate-change film, An Inconvenient Truth. John Berger, the UK and Ireland president of Warner Brothers, predicted that the film would have a profound impact on its viewers.
Senior executives from Tesco, Marks & Spencer, B&Q, Sky, Coca Cola, O2, and other well-known companies outlined the carbon-dioxide savings — half a million tonnes — that they had made by providing online carbon-usage calculators, selling low-priced, long-life light bulbs, collecting clothes hangers from customers, and helping with home insulation. But that was not enough, said Gearoid Lane, the managing director of new energy for British Gas.
“We are picking the low-hanging fruit first.” Over the next ten years, consumers would be asked to give up flights to Australia, and their large family cars. Businesses would have to engage with government on regulations that would force people to do things differently.
But the Minister for the Environment, Phil Woods, rejected such restrictions and repeated the Government’s commitment to globalisation. “One person’s food miles is another person’s protectionism,” he said.
Switch off tumble-dryers. David Shreeve, the Church of England’s environmental officer, has pleaded with people to turn off their clothes dryers and hang clothes on the washing line. “Go out and buy clothes pegs,” he says in a podcast series. Drying clothes in the sunshine would save a great deal of energy. |
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