Extra, Extra! Read all about it! CIPL has made the news.
Read below for some of our most recent blog and news stories:
**12.01.09 – a YES! Magazine article featuring climate hero CIPL President Rev. Sally Bingham
**A media compilation of our 2009 Energy Oscars
**An overview of the national Interfaith Power and Light movement, written for the Arizona State University paper by a student, a future leader!
**Triple Pundit:
http://www.triplepundit.com/2009/11/interfaith-power-light/
Climate Wire
RELIGIONS: Faith-based group plugs pulpit power into climate activism (Monday, November 16, 2009)
Debra Kahn, E&E reporter
SAN FRANCISCO — Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and Jews may have their religious differences, but climate change is a cause they can all get behind.
Members of a dozen California religious groups congregated at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral last week for a friendly competition. Held to highlight congregations’ efforts in green building, education, energy efficiency and advocacy, it also served to showcase several leaders who are making inroads in the political arena.
Advocating for climate action is a natural arena for the religious movement, said the Rev. Canon Sally Bingham, environmental minister at Grace Cathedral and founder of Interfaith Power and Light, an environmental movement that has drawn 10,000 congregations in 28 states since it began in 1998.
“Every major faith tradition calls on its followers to be faithful stewards of creation, the web of life that surrounds us and binds us to each other and to our planet,” she said. “It’s amazing how it brings together religious beliefs that are sometimes at odds.”
Now in its third year, the contest — known as the “Energy Oscars” — drew almost 200 applicants, up from about 60 last year. The finalists this year represented several major faiths, including Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Unitarian Universalism.
Camp Stevens, an Episcopal camp and retreat center north of San Diego, won in the education category for its sustainable farming and gardening classes, while Congregation Emanu-el in San Francisco won an energy efficiency award for retrofitting its synagogue lighting to save up to 10 tons of emissions and $4,000 per year.
‘Interfaith Power and Light’ connects with 30 states
IPL has chapters in 30 states, but only one — Georgia — has an energy competition similar to California’s.
Sponsors include Pacific Gas & Electric, New Resource Bank, SunPower, and SolarCity, which has installed solar panels on at least two churches in San Francisco.
Bingham said she had just returned from a climate meeting at England’s Windsor Castle, hosted by Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Alongside U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and other world leaders from nine major religions, she pledged to spread the message that climate change is a moral issue.
“You can establish green religious buildings, invest ethically in sustainable products, purchase only environmentally friendly goods. You can set an example for the lifestyles of billions of people,” Ban told religious leaders, stressing the need to protect poorer and more vulnerable countries. “Your actions can encourage political leaders to act more boldly in protecting our planet Earth.”
Bingham is a member of a task force that is advising the Obama administration on faith- and neighborhood-based partnerships that can promote awareness of energy and climate change. The group’s recommendations, due to the administration by February, include creating a Web site to show people how to go about retrofitting their buildings, as well as a program to connect low-income people to churches looking to retrofit their facilities.
She also published a book earlier this year, “Love God, Heal Earth,” that is a collection of essays by Muslim, Christian, Buddhist and Jewish leaders on protecting the Earth by acknowledging the interconnectedness of all life.
Another spiritual leader at last week’s awards made the case that to get a viable solution to climate change, one must first change one’s own morals — and then change the political system.
Promoting an ‘ethos of love and generosity’
“The ethos of materialism and selfishness is a spiritual problem, and until we can succeed in fostering a different ethos of love and generosity, there will be no way to stop the marketplace from playing on people’s fears and neediness to generate endless production of goods that are not needed and that despoil our atmosphere,” said Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of the progressive Tikkun magazine and co-founder of the Network of Spiritual Progressives, alongside Princeton University professor Cornel West.
Lerner criticized the House cap-and-trade bill from Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) as an end product of a materialistic society. Obeying pressure to consume gives corporations money to support politicians who will write legislation to give energy companies incentives instead of restrictions, he said.
“These politicians make sure that the legislation that gets passed supposedly to help the environment … is arranged to actually provide incentives for the polluters like the coal companies to get special benefits so that they won’t oppose the legislation, which in turn becomes so whittled down that some environmental groups now hope that it will not be passed at all,” he said.
