I once had a nightmare that someone stuck a sword through the sphere of the earth and blood was seeping out. Hours of waking anguish have convinced me this is no dream, but precisely what we are doing to our planet.
No conference may ever be as important as Copenhagen. It goes to the heart of emunah — faith. Are we being faithful to the trust placed in us as custodians of God’s earth? Are we being faithful to our children, to whom we owe the opportunity for a safe and full life? Or are we burning their future to fuel our present? Crimes against the environment are sins, against God, life, the future and ourselves.
Jews, said the Jewish climate-change campaigner Nigel Savage at the recent conference on faiths and the environment at Windsor, “have been thinking about sustainable energy ever since God spoke to Moses out of a bush that burned but was never consumed”.
More seriously, Jews have proved throughout history their capacity to set out great visions and implement them in small, determined steps. That is what the world needs now. So what must we do?
Governments must hasten the urgent change to renewable fuels in all developed countries; the developing world must be aided in the creation of low-carbon economies. Pollution and waste must be punished, air travel and all but the most efficient cars heavily taxed, clean energy and transport promoted. Carbon rationing, argues the film, The Age of Stupid, is both inevitable and just.
Will all this make life more expensive? It depends how we count: what’s cheap for us is paid for dearly by the earth and may cost our children’s children their lives. We must therefore advocate urgent international action.
But what about us in our own daily lives? Just after Yom Kippur, my house had its hour of reckoning. Green Homes Concierge conducted an environmental audit, showing we were wasting 46 per cent of all energy used. They advised us on commonsense, inexpensive measures: insulate cavity walls, put individual thermostatic controls on radiators, line the loft and under the floors. They recommended suppliers and we’ve made a start.
I have gone public about the process because every home should be audited. Ed Miliband wants “green makeovers” in seven million dwellings by 2020. Let Jewish homes be among the first.
Homes represent 40 per cent of our energy consumption; the rest is travel and what we buy. Flying does the worst damage. It is wrong to fly where we can take the train, rationalise several trips into one, or holiday without flying.
Every synagogue needs a green team, says Nigel Savage, whose Jewish Climate Change Campaign, with its excellent website, describes how to alter our ways before 2015, the next shemittah year. Meanwhile, the British movement 10:10 sets every individual and organisation a 10 per cent carbon reduction target by December 2010. They work with churches and mosques; why shouldn’t shuls do the same? Mine is preparing a guide to simchas, stressing — alongside kashrut — carbon-neutrality, avoiding waste and ethical fair-trade purchasing.
We cannot continue to treat God’s world as our rubbish heap. We know what we have to do; the issue is to motivate ourselves to do it. There will be gains, as well as struggles, along the way — a deeper understanding of the privilege of sharing life with all creation.
Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg is the minister of the new North London Synagogue