April 13, 2025
by Deborah Lycan
When the young Swedish climate activist, Greta Thunberg, was asked to address the World Economic Forum at Davos in 2019, she was 15. She told the attendees:
“Adults keep saying, ‘We owe it to the young people to give them hope.’ But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act…I want you to act as if our house was on fire. Because it is.”
Children can speak with a moral clarity that often eludes adults.
Do you know what year was the Earth’s hottest year on record? 2024. The second hottest year on record was 2023. In fact, all of the 10 hottest years, in 200 years of record keeping, have been in the most recent decade.
Last year we surpassed the 2016 Paris Agreement target of limiting global warming to 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels.
The World Health Organization has calculated that heat kills a minimum of half a million people every year, but warns the real figure could be up to 30 times higher.
The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere recently passed 420 ppm, levels unseen in at least 800,000 years. Homo sapiens, or modern humans, emerged only about 300,000 years ago, so our species has never before experienced an atmosphere so laden with planet-warming greenhouse gases.
The last time Earth’s atmosphere had CO2 concentrations as high as today was roughly 3 million years ago, during the Pliocene epoch, an era without arctic ice and one in which the oceans covered the land on which the cities of Houston, Miami, and New York City now sit.
According to a recent paper published in Science, almost 1/3 of all species around the world will be at risk of extinction by the end of this century if we don’t reduce our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
Surely, surely, we can all agree that our house is on fire.
I recently completed a carbon footprint for the UUFD campus. Here is what I learned.
- The solar panels we installed in 2020 generate as much green electricity as we consume as a campus. In 2024 we were basically net zero for electrical consumption. Bravo.
- The carbon we produce from burning natural gas is 20x our electrical consumption. We just cut that carbon footprint in half by replacing the gas furnaces that heated this Sanctuary with two air source heat pumps. Bravo.
- Out of curiosity, I decided to determine what the carbon footprint is for the 45 gas cars in our parking lot to drive to church every Sunday. I was shocked. That number turned out to be almost as large as our natural gas footprint-before the heat pumps. So, then I figured, if all those gas cars were replaced with EVs, those people wouldn’t just use them to drive to church-they would do all their driving in an EV-say 8,000 miles/yr. How much carbon would we save then, as a community? Oh my, in the graph, you almost can’t see the natural gas footprint anymore, the congregations’ gas car footprint was so big.
Here is what I think I learned from calculating a carbon footprint. If you want to make a real difference in climate change, you have to know the numbers-and what matters for UUFD is natural gas consumption, and what matters for this congregation, is gasoline consumption.
Transportation is THE largest source of Colorado’s greenhouse gas emissions. It is also the largest source of emissions here in Durango. Government policy is very important in dealing with climate change, but ultimately, most of the GHG emissions from transportation are due to the personal decisions of all of us. The State of Colorado has committed to reducing GHG pollution in our state by 26% of our 2005 levels by 2025, a goal that we came very close to hitting despite a significant increase in population. The next stage is to decrease our GHG pollution to50% of 2005 levels by 2030 and by 100% of 2005 levels by 2050. 2030 is only 5 years away. Every new gas car purchased in 2025 will still be emitting CO2 in 2050.
This is a community that cares about pledges. What about this pledge? I am going to mirror Greta Thunberg here and make you uncomfortable. How about this one:
“No more new gasoline cars in the UUFD parking lot”
If you are considering buying a new car, let’s “talk”.
If you think that a hybrid and a plug-in hybrid are the same thing, click here
If you think that the charging station infrastructure in Colorado isn’t there yet, click here
If you think that an EV battery won’t work in the cold, click here
If you think that an EV is too expensive, click here.
We are all interconnected and interdependent. We always were. It’s just that now we can begin to feel how interdependent we are.
In the end, our children’s children will not care why we didn’t act-only that we didn’t.
Surely they will wonder why they were not important enough.