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Environmental Advocacy

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For the Love of Creation Faith-in-Action Campaign

For the Love of Creation is a Canada-wide, ecumenical initiative that brings together faith bodies and faith-based organizations  to mobilize education, reflection, action and advocacy for climate justice. Its members include the Anglican Church of Canada and our ecumenical justice partners Citizens for Public Justice, KAIROS, and Faith & the Common Good.

For the Love of Creation’s Faith-in-Action Campaign mobilizes Canadians to reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions and to demand increased federal climate action:

  • increase Canada’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction target and invest in a just transition to a fair, inclusive, green economy;
  • implement the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and
  • commit equal support for climate change adaptation and mitigation measures in the Global South.

To make your personal emissions reduction pledge, to send customizable letters to federal authorities regarding the aims of the campaign, to learn more about and host a Faithful Climate Conversation, or to register as an organization for your parish or local community, visit the For the Love of Creation website.

 

Carbon pricing

Carbon pricing is a key part of addressing climate change, and it’s not anti-conservative. In a 2014 opinion piece, former Reform Party leader Preston Manning proposed that “for any economic activity, especially the production of energy, we should identify its negative environmental impacts, devise measures to avoid, mitigate or adapt to those impacts, and include the costs of those measures in the price of the product. It’s the idea behind using carbon pricing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” Cap-and-trade is exactly such a market-based approach to reducing greenhouse gases, while financing our shift to renewable sources of energy, which has the potential for growing our economy.

The matter is urgent. Recently, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a new report stating that we need “unprecedented political commitment” between now and 2030 to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or our world will not be able to avoid the most drastic impacts of climate change. And these will be economic and humanitarian impacts, as well as biological ones. A 2017 report from the Bank of Canada projected that climate change would cost the Canadian economy more than $20 billion annually by the 2050s unless we reduce our carbon footprints. Already, climate change is costing Canada’s economy billions in terms of response to disasters like wildfires and flooding, insurance payouts, damage to infrastructure, and lost agricultural productivity.

Cancelling one of our best tools to mitigate this foreseeable loss is the very definition of financial and governmental irresponsibility. Ontarians have a right to expect our government to take care of our economy and our resources, not to jeopardize them.

Statements by Anglican and other Church leaders