earth watch
The 7th Carbon Budget: love your neighbour?
Paul Kunert
The Seventh Carbon Budget is out now. It won’t make it to our news feeds, but it’s an important document.
Published by the UK government’s Climate Change Committee (CCC), it’s a well-articulated pathway to (trigger alert) net zero. It’s their best effort at how we in the UK can live more or less as we do now, but without ruining the world around us. For us evangelicals though, there’s something about it that really stands out. Something quite amazing. Though lacking the poetry of Isaiah 65, its themes of prospering humanity, long life, well-being, justice, peace and a flourishing earth could come right out of the prophets.
earth watch
Raw sewage, clear streams – and the gospel of the King
Paul Kunert
This week sees yet another instalment in the UK water company saga. In 2023, untreated sewage was discharged for 3.6 million hours into our lakes, rivers and seas.
Only 15% of English rivers are in good ecological health. Who’s going to pay to have them run clear? To teem again with living creatures? Thames, Anglian, United, etc.? Their customers? Their shareholders? (Spoiler alert: As a veteran of a regulated industry, I’m sorry to say, it’s us, the bill-paying customers. Profiteers took advantage of a cheap sale and hands-off regulation to make super-returns. But they’re long gone, together with the cash. Poor policy and regulation time and again leaves customers to pick up the pieces.) And, moreover, what does the gospel of Jesus Christ have to say?
earth watch
How ‘nigh’ really is the end of the world?
Paul Kunert
Well, there you have it! The numbers are in! The award for the hottest year on record goes to… 2024! Beating previous award-winning 2023, it racked up an impressive 1.6 degrees hotter than the pre-industrial average. In fact, the world’s been on a record-breaking streak for some time now: the top ten hottest years occurred in, well, the last ten years.
But we won’t just look back on 2024 as yet another record-breaking year in a long run of unwelcome records. We’ll look back on it as the first year our world breached 1.5 degrees, the so-called ‘safe limit’ of heating.
