FossilFreeUMC

Tennis ball-sized hail erupted in Charlotte, North Carolina, Saturday, as General Conference gathered. It scattered cars over the freeway, busted out car windows, scattering them over the roadways. The hail was so large and fell so violently that glass splintered and impact-resistant windshields turned to shards with sharp broken glass penetrating skin and clothes and eyes, all while desperate drivers tried to avoid flailing, distressed vehicles while they themselves were under the barrage.

When you take a Lyft, you hear a firsthand account. Not only of the hail Saturday, and its impacts, but of the severe-weather tornado, too. As we drove through the still wet streets, the story was harrowing. I heard of strewn car parts, terrified drivers and passengers, downed trees, and a tornado in the middle of all of it. The driver noted the lighter traffic Sunday, the day I arrived, saying many chose to stay off the road due to the lingering fears after that storm.

This is climate crisis. Yes, yes. We have had tornados and storms and hail before, yada yada. I hear that a lot. It is easy to minimize when giant balls of ice didn’t pummel your own car, and terrify your own kids, and you aren’t now bandaging your wounds and wrangling with insurance companies to repair your windows and your home where the tree came down—insurers will attest to the reality of climate change as they hike rates across the country.

The truth is that the climate crisis is here. We must not grow numb to this. Oil and gas pollution in our atmosphere is supercharging our storms. It worsens droughts and floods and heat and freeze. It is currently costing homes and lives across the globe. I am heartbroken by headlines like this one from Relief Web this week Deadly heatwave in the Sahel and West Africa would have been impossible without human-caused climate change. And I feel a deep sadness that we ignore the science that tells us that the climate crisis will give us larger hailstones, and that ‘tornado alley’ isn’t an alley anymore as tornadoes strengthen and move east and west and into areas that didn’t used to get them.  

Because right now, with over a billion dollars invested in oil and gas, The United Methodist Church is invested in climate change. It is literally banking on climate change. We have to bank on solutions, instead. Because mega-droughts, mega-hail, mega-storms, those are here.

I was recently in a conversation where someone dropped a truth-bomb, ‘any writer now writing of next year, and the next, and the future in general, who isn’t writing about a climate changed world, is writing straight-up fiction.’ Our stable climate is going, going…gone. Will we who have the power to stop billions in investments to fossil fuel companies—will we who have the power to act in our companies and in our denomination, will we act?

We are a people of the Book. Yet our book is weathering into fiction. Those Bible stories, that Biblical history, all of it happened in a stable climate. When Mary and Joseph traveled to Bethlehem, they weren’t thwarted by flooding or drought. There are noticeable stories of weather catastrophes in the bible, the seven years drought, the great flood. We can count on our fingers how many. In our new climate, with hundred year storms every 5 years, the bible becomes a distant memory—a nostalgic fiction—compared to the earth we now inhabit.

We must vote to divest from fossil fuels. But it is no longer that simple. We must vote to divest while simultaneously reinvesting in solutions—a just transition to a green economy. Our forefathers enjoyed a stable climate with predictable rains and life-giving ecosystems. We squandered it. It is not too late to do something about that. But we don’t have 30 years, we have two. The time to act is now.

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Cover photo by Michael Jin

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Rev. Richenda Fairhurst is an elder in the Greater Northwest Area, living in Southern Oregon. She volunteers with the United Methodist Creation Justice Movement and a number of other organizations at the intersection of faith and climate change. Find her at justcreation.org