Energy, emissions, and the choice of Boaz

Energy, and how we produce it, is the key to a stable climate. Three quarters of emissions come from energy production. Get energy right, and we’ve broken the back of it. So, the latest Global Energy Review report from the highly regarded International Energy Agency is a vital health check. What’s happening to energy demand? How are we producing it? Does the arc of emissions bend toward zero?

According to the report, the answers to those questions are: one, it’s going up; two, increasingly from renewables; and three, either no or only slowly. Now, I know it’s hard to engage with numbers and percentages. So, here are just two headlines. In 2024, global energy demand rose by 2.2%. And carbon emissions rose by 0.8%. Behind those headlines is a mixed story. On the plus side, most of the growth came from wind and solar energy. In fact, 40% of all energy now comes from low carbon renewables and nuclear. But on the minus side, use of gas, oil and coal also rose, and carbon emissions are still going up, when we need them to be going down (fast).

What are we to make of this? And what should we do about it? As to the first, well, while there are some positives, overall the news isn’t good enough, is it? We’re getting energy right, but not quickly enough. Until we get rid of emissions altogether (not just stop them going up), temperatures are going to keep going up. And, with them, the increasingly volatile weather that’s already worrying our farmers, sea-level rise that’s exercising coastal towns and cities, and all the rest.

As to the second, let me commend to you Boaz. Not the Boaz of Christianised Mills and Boon, but Boaz the just landowner. He lived in a time when, notoriously, everyone “did what seemed right in their own eyes”. Yet Boaz chooses to be faithful to God’s law, a law which works for the good of the poor and the health of the land. Though it costs him, Boaz doesn’t go over the field a second time, nor harvest to the very edge.

He didn’t live God’s way because he believed his actions could in themselves avert national disaster, or change the course of world history. (Though unbeknownst to him, his great-grandson would be anointed king, and, unimaginably far in the future, the true king of all the earth would be born – so it was thought! – to his line.) He lived God’s way, rather, because he loved the Lord his God with all his heart, life and strength.

Is it not the same for us too? But all the more so, for we are the people of that true king. We live lives that bring God’s peace to our neighbour and to all creation, not because we will change the course of world history (though who can say how the Spirit might take what we offer?). But because we are faithful to the God who in Christ has redeemed us and is renewing all things. And just as it was for Boaz, loving God with all our heart and life and strength is not expressed primarily in grand gestures, nor theological exactitude, nor even vibrant worship services, but in the seemingly humdrum: how we conduct our business, how we heat our homes, how we get around.

This is not so much a command (though it is that!), but a call to inhabit the true narrative of the world: God – in Christ – is redeeming, renewing and restoring all things. So then let us live life – as Boaz did – as it’s supposed to be under the rule of God. Not because it will be ‘effective’. But because one day this is how it will be. In Christ, the arc of emissions does bend toward zero, history toward justice, and creation toward flourishing.