BUTIANITY
“BUT” – the watchword of popular faith in our day. This is the madness of the third decade…. at the stage when we can see that efforts for transition really do have an effect…. to the extent that the downwardly revised worst case scenario [RCP 8.5/SSP5-8, if you want to look it up ] is gleefully seized upon as a weapon for the still entirely deadly lie that “everything’s going to be all right anyway” and that efforts to live differently are pointless. How close it is to the strange cult of “God’s in charge, so we don’t need to bother with climate change”
The layers of irony pile up. It’s capitalism, eager for profit, that is now driving transition, rather than any morality or concern of governments, and the capitalist incompetence of climate deniers in this respect is a major factor in geopolitical shifts before our eyes. Fossil fuels are already the losing side, but still happy to drag life on Earth down with us. Nature loss, even in a censored UK government document, remains a national security threat to food systems, health and economy. BUT…
As for our own societies, the old “I’m not a racist BUT…” attitudes have a twin in the “I care for the planet BUT…” even a UK government which finally and wisely ( put out the flags and write congratulations) draws a line under new North Sea oil, nonetheless pushes for further capacity for air travel.
And the aggressive men – always men, thus far – who bluster and berate about “China” are like murderers who have been convinced that, because Jack the Ripper and Harold Shipman have a higher body count, it’s OK to murder just a few.
In Mission terms, I can’t see much progress yet beyond John the Baptist’s efforts to persuade those baptised, genuinely to “do less harm”. Few institutions who initially backed some sort of ‘Net-Zero target had any idea how stringent that could be. But the direction of travel remains far more valuable than the discouragement of targets whose missing you can use as an excuse to rein back.
Is that, realistically, the most we can aspire to, for now? So that our small, but valuable efforts and changes are not undermined by not ‘saving the planet’ in snap of fingers? Or is even that a branch of BUTianity?
Yes, we put our trust in BUT…. I wonder what Christ makes of us?
