By Shepherdstown Friends Monthly Meeting
January 2020
We support the Climate Change Statement developed by Quaker Earthcare Witness, Friends Committee for National Legislation and Quaker United Nations Office over five years ago. However, we regret the alarming lack of progress made during those critical years, and we add the following:
We recognize that climate change is now an emergency that poses a severe threat to life, peace and equality on earth, and that the ravages of this crisis fall more severely upon poor people than upon the more affluent.
As people of faith, we are called to act with urgency to avert and mitigate this looming disaster. Actions we can take include strong advocacy at all levels of government; divesting from fossil fuel companies; reforming agriculture to sequester carbon in the soil; lowering our personal fossil fuel use; and, for some, nonviolent civil disobedience.
Locally, the struggle for a livable and just world comes to us as a call to stop the planned burning of fossil fuels delivered via trucks and proposed pipelines to a heavy industry park under construction in Jefferson County. If allowed to operate, Rockwool, the first of several factories planned for the area, will burn an estimated 84 tons of coal and 1.6 million cubic feet of gas every day. It has rejected the option to use an electric furnace instead of a fossil-fuel driven furnace. Rockwool would expose young school children to dangerous levels of toxic air pollution; risk contaminating local water supplies; and jeopardize our agricultural, equine and tourism economies.
We oppose Rockwool and any other planet-heating and polluting industries, not only in our backyard, but in anyone’s backyard. We call for shifting the world’s economies to fossil-fuel free energy sources with utmost urgency and for support to meet basic needs in those communities least able to withstand the market adjustments of the transition process