It’s Kairos Time for Climate Change: Time To Act
July 22, 2008
The Rev. Jim Ball, Ph.D., is an ordained Baptist minister, the President and CEO of the Evangelical Environmental Network, and the national spokeperson for the Evangelical Climate Initiative.
As I sit down to write this column, one thing keeps coming to me over and over: “Now is the time; now is the time.”
In the New Testament the word used for this type of time is “kairos.” It means “right or opportune moment” and can be of indefinite duration. It is contrasted with “chronos,” or chronological time as measured in seconds, days, months, or years. In the New Testament kairos is usually associated with decisive action that brings about deliverance or salvation.
The reason the phrase “Now is the time” kept coming to me over and over is that I was thinking of how to describe our current climate change moment. The world has been plodding along in chronological time on the problem of climate change since around 1988. No more.
Simply put: the problem of climate change has entered kairos time; its kairos moment has arrived. How long will it endure? Until the time of decisive action to bring about deliverance comes—or, more ominously, until the time when the opportunity for decisive action has passed us by. Which will we choose? Because we do have a choice.
We have entered this moment for two reasons. First, if we don’t begin to address climate change in a substantive way soon, we will reach a point of no return. Tipping points and natural feedback loops will create a situation where we cannot stop dramatic and devastating climate change impacts. We don’t want to go there.
Second, the political world here in the U.S. is finally beginning to catch up to the natural world. We must have comprehensive national legislation for our country to contribute to the world’s efforts to solve climate change. Only then will we have the moral authority to help lead the world in overcoming the problem. And lead we must.
As I mentioned in my previous column, the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act was an example of just such comprehensive national legislation. The Senate considered the Climate Security Act in the first week of June, but proponents didn’t have enough votes to overcome a Republican filibuster.
This bill wouldn’t have become law this year because the House is not ready to pass it and because the Administration wouldn’t sign it even if it did pass through Congress. But thankfully, the Senate did show serious political progress in keeping up the momentum for passage in 2009. We needed 50 or more Senators to vote Yes, which is in effect what happened. A cloture vote (to end the filibuster) got 48 Yes votes and six absent Senators wrote in to say they would have voted Yes had they been present, meaning 54 Senators would have been ready to move forward. That’s good news.
We need Senators to support provisions in the eventual legislation for protecting the poor in this country and abroad. In the U.S. we want to ensure that low-income and working family households are economically unharmed by any rising energy prices that may result from the bill. We also want to help them have more energy efficient homes that will become a part of the solution. We helped to ensure that such provisions existed in the Climate Security Act, but, as usual, more funding is needed, and the targeting of such funds needs to be more focused on the poor.
As for protecting the poor in other countries, again we have helped to ensure that there were provisions in the bill to address this, specifically the “International Climate Change Adaptation and National Security Program.” This program would help the most vulnerable developing countries adapt to the consequences of climate change via climatesensitive development (e.g. drought resistant crops).
In the future, we need Senators to both protect this program from efforts to eliminate it and to advocate for a doubling of its funding. Given that our country has been the largest contributor to the problem to date, and that the poor in developing countries have done essentially nothing to create the problem, basic fairness compels our country to assist them. It is also in our national security interest to do so. As the Climate Security Act states, “global climate change represents a potentially significant threat multiplier for instability around the world.” This is especially the case in sub- Saharan Africa, from which we currently import more oil than anywhere else in the world. Christian justice and our national security interest demand that we help the poor around the world to adapt to the impacts of climate change.
Overcoming climate change has entered kairos time. The time to act is now.
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