A climate parable for our time

The current climate crisis is like the parable of a man who used credit to buy all the things he liked: nice cars, good homes, fancy vacations, new clothes, the best steaks in restaurants. The man drew on his credit knowing that he had a good job. He had an inner certainty that everything would somehow turn out all right before any debts came due. His buying went on for twenty years. Friends and family warned about the risk, but it did not seem immediate and he resisted changing how he lived. One day the bank stopped his credit card. That alarmed him but he had others. Before long his favourite new car was repossessed, but he had another car that he could use. Eventually he received a notice that his house would be sold at auction unless he paid his mortgage. He was bankrupt. The comfortable  lifestyle that he had refused to give up was irretrievably gone.

In  the same way our society has slid slowly into the climate crisis by paying with a carbon footprint we could not repay in order to buy a lifestyle we could not afford. Year after year our carbon footprint has grown without anyone stopping it, and it has became clear with every attempt to reduce the carbon footprint that we cannot do so without  lifestyle sacrifices that we were unwilling to make. Unavoidable signs of the crisis have become visible: violent floods in the Rhineland, extreme heat in the US and Canadian Northwest, forest fires, droughts. Our carbon footprint debt may already have reached a point of no return. Planetary bankruptcy will have consequences for generations of our children to come. 

A serious commitment to changing our lifestyles in order to reduce the increases in our carbon footprint is more necessary than ever in order to protect God's creation.