Happy Blog Action Day!

Change.org, in partnership with groups like 350.org and the National Resources Defense Council, is pushing a climate change focus for today's Blog Action Day, and I am happy to be one of the 10,000 bloggers taking part. There is no issue more urgent than climate change. Issues like health care and poverty are tragic and pressing, but as scholar-activist Bill McKibben says, climate change is the one issue that our descendants will not be trying to fix in 100 years. The science, from the University of Cambridge to the UN's International Panel on Climate Change, is clear: in order to head off massive storms, devastating drought, expensive population shifts, massive species extinction, and other horrific events, we must become more energy efficient in our daily lives and cleaner in our national energy policy, and we must do it now. NASA's James Hansen says we may only have three years left to act.  Very few scientists put the tipping point number at higher than ten.

Yet for all the doom-and-gloom, I am excited. After decades of inaction, momentum is finally building around the movement to protect the environment and fight climate change, and it's really invigorating to see. Everywhere you look, from the faith community to corporate America to even the Senate Republican Caucus, this cause is gaining steam.

My own beat is the intersection of faith and politics. I started a new job this week working with Repower Nebraska as their part-time faith outreach coordinator. (This post is not endorsed by Repower America, but I want to be clear about who I am.) All across America, churches are waking up. I had a phone call today with an Episcopal clergywoman who said there are three areas of concern for churches on climate change: spirituality (experiencing God in nature, recognizing the environmental language of Scripture, etc.), environmental stewardship or creation care (heeding the call of Scripture to take care of what we have been given), and eco-justice (climate change will disproportionately affect the poor). Churches are getting that message. I wrote here last week about Day Six, a new effort from the progressive group Faithful America to make sure climate change legislation helps the poor. The Episcopal Ecological Network is a great resource to learn what Episcopal churches around the country are doing to green their communities.

You may be saying yeah yeah sure sure, of course the liberal mainline Protestants are getting involved - but the good news is the movement is broader than that. Thanks to the language of "creation care," many Evangelicals are getting in on the act, too. Rich Cizik, former Vice President for Governmental Affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals, resigned his job after announcing his support for civil unions, but not until he had spent quite some time building support within the Evangelical community for action on climate change. Joel Hunter, a conservative megachurch pastor in Florida, was hired to be the new president of Ralph Reed's Christian Coalition in 2006. The board asked him to resign over his positions on climate change, but the fact that his selection even got that far is indicative of a huge shift within the community.

Even more important are the most recent corporate and political developments. I'll go into detail about poll numbers, bipartisan support, and more below the jump.