The Church of England has joined with a coalition of co-operatives, charities and community groups – providing a collective membership of 17 million – to welcome the UK’s first ever Community Energy Strategy, published this week, providing the opportunity for a scaling up of community energy.

The Community Energy Coalition (CEC) includes the Church of England, Co-operative Group, National Trust, Campaign to Protect Rural England, Energy Saving Trust, NUS, Co-operatives UK and more than 20 other civil society and sustainable energy organisations.

David Shreeve, Environmental Adviser for the Church of England said: “As a member of the Community Energy Coalition, the Church of England through its individual churches can play a pivotal role in helping develop community interest and action Its many buildings can provide excellent sites for renewable facilities. In addition, it supports the opportunity that community schemes could provide by enabling tariffs to be adjusted to benefit the fuel poor.”

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The Church of England pushed back on Friday from calls to get rid of its investments in companies extracting or selling fossil fuels, saying it would mean a financial hit and it was better to use shareholder influence to pressure change.

The church’s Ethical Investment Advisory Group is reviewing its policy on ethical investment related to climate change, with some church officials calling for disinvestment from such companies to highlight the need to move to a low-carbon economy.

The Church of England, mother church of the world’s 80 million Anglicans, holds total investments worth about 8 billion pounds ($US13 billion) that are used to pay clergy pensions and fund the church’s work.

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Beijing’s skyscrapers receded into a dense gray smog Thursday as the capital saw the season’s first wave of extremely dangerous pollution, with the concentration of toxic small particles registering more than two dozen times the level considered safe.

The air took on an acrid odor, and many of the city’s commuters wore industrial strength face masks as they hurried to work.

“I couldn’t see the tall buildings across the street this morning,” said a traffic coordinator at a busy Beijing intersection who gave only his surname, Zhang. “The smog has gotten worse in the last two to three years. I often cough, and my nose is always irritated. But what can you do? I drink more water to help my body discharge the toxins.”

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Cannonball jellyfish are bland at best. In China, where slivered, dry jellyfish are commonly served before banquets and strewn across salads, cooks don’t use the cellophane-like strips without first dousing them in soy sauce or sesame oil.

Tabasco works too, said University of Georgia food safety professor Yao-Wen Huang, who in the 1980s earned the nickname “Cannonball King” for his work developing a jellyfish processing system.

According to Huang, the allure of jellyfish is its distinctive texture, suggestive of a cross between a potato chip and a stretched-out rubber band. “We call it crunchy-crispy,” said Huang. “It’s like when you eat chitterlings, you’re not really hungry that you want food. You want that mouthfeel.”

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“He envisages a shore-based team of qualified captains working in a replica 3D bridge, similar to the simulators used for training today, that could operate a fleet of a dozen ships at the same time.”

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The flood of North American crude oil is set to become a deluge as Mexico dismantles a 75-year-old barrier to foreign investment in its oil fields.

Plagued by almost a decade of slumping output that has degraded Mexico’s take from a $100-a-barrel oil market, President Enrique Pena Nieto is seeking an end to the state monopoly over one of the biggest crude resources in the Western Hemisphere. The doubling in Mexican oil output that Citigroup Inc. said may result from inviting international explorers to drill would be equivalent to adding another Nigeria to world supply, or about 2.5 million barrels a day.

That boom would augment a supply surge from U.S. and Canadian wells that Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM) predicts will vault North American production ahead of every OPEC member except Saudi Arabia within two years.

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Executives from energy companies met the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth Palace on Wednesday, two months after he called on such firms to be “conscious of their social obligations”, given the “severe” impact of energy price rises.

A statement from Lambeth Palace said that the senior representatives met to talk about “their perspectives on social responsibility around the energy-supply sector”. This was “one of a number of private meetings hosted by Archbishop Justin in order to draw on the experience of people from different areas of national life”.

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The Archbishop of Canterbury has summoned the bosses of the ”˜Big Six’ energy companies to a private meeting on Wednesday to discuss fuel poverty and rising energy prices.

The meeting comes after the Most Rev Justin Welby said he understood why people felt above-inflation price rises were “inexplicable” and called on the companies to act with “generosity”.

Four of the Big Six supliers are believed to be sending their most senior UK executives, in contrast to a recent Commons select committee hearing where just one, E.On chief executive Tony Cocker, attended to face MPs.

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Grocery aisles in Washington state could look a little different in 2015 if voters approve a ballot measure on Tuesday (Nov. 5) to require product labels to disclose when genetically modified crops are included.

Most of the processed foods and beverages that dominate the shelves are made with some sort of genetically modified crop, like soy or corn.

Campbell Soup Co., PepsiCo Inc. and Kellogg Co. are among the companies pumping money into the fight against the referendum, known as Initiative 522, claiming the measure is misleading, would hurt farmers and raise grocery costs.

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So what can we do about this? One idea would be to look for ”“ and then exploit ”“ shale gas in Europe. We may have quite a lot of it ”“ for instance in France, Germany and the UK. But to produce it we need a public consensus ”“ and there is still a lot of opposition in western Europe. Of course, the opposition is understandable ”“ fracking is loud and invasive, and the continent is densely populated. But if Europe is serious about creating wealth and jobs, it is an option worth exploring.

The country that is furthest along the road to consensus-building is the UK, which can count on political will, tax incentives and even a blessing from the Archbishop of Canterbury. If it does manage to create a healthy shale gas industry, it could pave the way for continental Europe to follow.

Other potential components of the solution for Europe are nuclear power, energy efficiency, better use of conventional hydrocarbons ”“ in short, anything that can make energy cheaper and more readily available.

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The Anglican Church in Southern Africa has called on all Churches on the continent to get involved in the care for creation through worship, local church action and advocacy.

The Environmental Co-ordinator for the Anglican Church of Southern Africa (ACSA), the Revd Dr Rachel Mash made the call in a statement to ACNS yesterday.

“This can start with a simple energy and water audit to establish the extent of a parish environmental foot-print,” she said. “A congregation can also commit to celebrating Season of Creation, or World Environment Day among many other environmental events.”

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The Anglican Church in Zimbabwe has introduced a new course on “greenhouse theology” to empower priests with knowledge about creation, the environment and its preservation.

Harare Bishop Chad Gandiya announced this yesterday at a press conference held at St Mary and All Saints Cathedral in Harare which was attended by many high-level government officials including the Minister of Environment, Water and Climate, Saviour Kasukuwere.

“The course on greenhouse theology is taught to all those training for the ordained ministry in the Anglican Church and it is our hope that the priests will take this to the parishes they will be assigned to in their dioceses,” said Bp Gandiya.

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The Archbishop of Canterbury has criticised energy companies for imposing huge price rises that will hammer struggling families.

Justin Welby said power giants had a ”˜massive’ moral duty beyond squeezing customers for maximum profit, and challenged the firms to justify their huge increases in bills.

The Archbishop, himself a former oil executive, said he understood the anger over apparently ”˜inexplicable’ rises and called on the companies ”˜to behave with generosity and not merely to maximise opportunity’.

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Retired Episcopal Bishop Bud Cederholm ”” affectionately known as the “Green Bishop” ”” sprinkled holy water on the new solar panels installed at Grace Episcopal Church on High Street. Cederholm, who earned his nickname for his environmental advocacy, got a lift in a city truck to sprinkle water on the 25-kilowatt solar installation. Grace Episcopal is part of The Genesis Covenant, a worldwide coalition of Christian churches that aim to save the environment. Each member commits to reducing its own carbon footprint by 50 percent. Along with solar panels, Grace Episcopal has installed compact fluorescent lights, energy-efficient appliances, and a high-efficiency gas heating system.

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In “Our Father’s World,” Northland pastor Joel Hunter makes the argument to conservative Christians that saving energy, recycling waste and reducing your carbon footprint are all based on Scripture.

“The Bible provides a direct mandate to be caretakers of the garden,” Hunter says in the documentary. “While creation still belongs to God, he has graciously entrusted it to our care and stewardship.”

But the film also points out that evangelical Christians have abdicated the care of God’s creation to the New Age and secular environmentalists.

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At an interfaith summer camp in northern New Jersey, two dozen children explored a swamp to learn how creatures depend on safe water.

In Southern California, a Unitarian Universalist congregation installed a dry well so water from its church rooftops drains into underground pipes to replenish the water table.

In Vermont, members of a Lutheran church removed cars and appliances that had been dumped in a nearby stream and restored its banks with local willows and oaks.

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Leading climate scientists said today they were more certain than ever before that mankind was the main culprit for global warming and warned the impact of greenhouse gas emissions would linger for centuries.

A report, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), played down the fact temperatures have risen more slowly in the past 15 years, saying there were substantial natural variations that masked a long-term warming trend.

It said the Earth was set for further warming and more heatwaves, floods, droughts and rising sea levels as greenhouse gases built up in the atmosphere. The oceans would become more acidic in a threat to some marine life.

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The Anglican Diocese of Wellington has voted to remove all of its investments in companies which extract or produce fossil fuels.

The decision came at a meeting of delegates in Palmerston North this weekend and follows a similar decision by the Anglican synod in Auckland.

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Fred Bahnson’s first bit of advice when he started planning a church garden eight years ago came from an elderly tobacco farmer who grabbed a handful of soil, rolled it around in his fingers and shook his head:

“You don wohn fahm heah,” he said in his deep North Carolina drawl.

Those were not the only discouraging words he received as he planted and cultivated one of the earliest and most successful church gardens, 20 miles north of Chapel Hill….

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Church of England representative David Shreeve joined others today from the Community Energy Coalition to hand in a nearly 60,000 signature petition to the Department of Energy and Climate Change. It calls on the Government to provide greater support for co-operative and community-owned energy projects.

Ed Davey MP, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change received the petition which is one of the highlights of Community Energy Fortnight. The campaign aims to engage and inspire people about the wide-ranging benefits of community energy.

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In retirement, …[Juanita O’Neal] bought some acreage in the flatlands 60 miles south of Chicago and plunged her hands back into the soil. On a recent Saturday morning, like all the Saturday mornings of the summer, she had driven with a contingent of black farmers to sell their bounty at a market sponsored by one of Chicago’s most formidable black churches, Trinity United Church of Christ.

“I can’t correct the past,” said Ms. O’Neal, 68. “I can’t blame anyone for the past. I have to take the accountability. But if my grandparents are looking down on me, they’re saying, ”˜Good job.’ ”

The collaboration with Ms. O’Neal and a half-dozen other black farmers from an area known as Pembroke Township fulfills two missions for Trinity’s leaders.

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The Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, who has died aged 74, was described by Robert Lowell as “the most important Irish poet since Yeats”. Widely acclaimed for his many notable achievements, he was undoubtedly the most popular poet writing in English, and the only one assured of a place in the bestseller lists. His books sold, and continue to sell, in the tens of thousands, while hordes of “Heaneyboppers” flocked to his readings. His earliest influences, Robert Frost and Ted Hughes, are reflected throughout his work, but most especially in his first two collections, where he recollected images of his childhood on the family farm in Co Derry. Other poets, especially Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Wordsworth and Thomas Hardy, as well as Dante, also influenced his work….

[About him] the critic Helen Vendler wrote: “Seamus broadened my view of Ireland, north and south ”“ its geography, its history, its labour, its sounds, its euphemisms, its crises of conscience, its bog bodies, its bombs, its weather, its sectarian stand-offs, its twilights.” Poet and critic Robert Pinsky praised Heaney’s “gift for laughter and for friendship, a generosity entirely congruent with the qualities of his great gift and accomplishment in art”.

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Fracking may not yet have tested the thickness of his rectory walls, as suggested by the “light-hearted” Energy Minister Michael Fallon, but it has already caused emotional tremors in the parish of the Priest-in-Charge of Balcombe, the Revd Desmond Burton.

On Monday, he described how the drilling of an oil exploration well in the West Sussex village had divided parishioners. Protesters, who have arrived in their hundreds, fear that the drilling by Cuadrilla, an oil and gas company, is the precursor to hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”), whereby water mixed with sand and chemicals is injected at high pressure into rock deep beneath the earth’s surface, to release gas.

“People in the village who have been good friends, because of fracking issues have fallen out quite strongly,” Mr Burton said. ”

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First it was payday lending; now fracking.

Last month, the Church of England acknowledged and regretted investing millions of pounds in a company that financially backs England’s leading payday lending company, Wonga. The company charges exorbitantly high percentage rates for loans that usually target the poor.

Now the church is under fire for taking an interest in fracking.

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The Church of England has set itself on a collision course with opponents of hydraulic fracturing ”“ fracking ”“ by signalling support for exploration of Britain’s shale gas reserves.

Philip Fletcher, who chairs the Church’s group on mission and public affairs, compared condemnation of fracking to the mistaken belief that the combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine was not safe.

“The evidence for that was totally unsound, yet the damage caused by denying children the benefits of immunisation was huge,” he told the Financial Times.

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The Chair of the Church of England’s group on Mission and Public Affairs Philip Fletcher has today (16th August 2013) issued the following statement placing recent media reports in context:

“The Church of England has no official policy either for or against hydraulic fracturing (known as ‘fracking’). However there is a danger of viewing fracking through a single issue lens and ignoring the wider considerations.

“There are a number of balancing considerations which need to be taken into account when coming to a view. Fuel poverty is an increasingly urgent issue for many in society – the impact on energy bills is felt most by the least well off. Blanket opposition to further exploration for new sources of fuel fails to take into account those who suffer most when resources are scarce.

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The Anglican Diocese of Blackburn has released a pamphlet warning their Lancaster flock of the potential dangers of hydraulic fracturing, more commonly known as fracking.

“The time we spend thinking, praying and acting now to protect our drinking water and the rest of God’s glorious Creation cannot compare with the time succeeding generations could potentially spend trying to make good what will likely happen if we in the church remain uninformed and silent,” reads the pamphlet.

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…[Fred] Bahnson, a Duke Divinity School graduate and a pioneer in the church gardening movement, had a different view of farming than the older tobacco farmer. He knew that if he gave back to the soil more than he took out ”” in the form of compost, manure and other soil food ”” he could create an abundant garden.

It was a different way of farming, born of a reverence for the Earth and a deep theological commitment to wholeness, community and peacemaking.

Bahnson’s new book, “Soil and Sacrament: A Spiritual Memoir of Food and Faith,” recounts some of the struggles at Anathoth Community Garden, and fleshes out portraits of four other faith communities ”” places where growing food has produced what he calls “a physical manifestation of God’s presence.”

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The survey stopped short of singling out the UK government for giving a lack of clarity, saying that it was a Europewide and worldwide problem. But Ms Pfeifer conceded that “mixed messages are not helpful,” when asked about the current UK government’s record.

Some 69 per cent of fund managers surveyed said they were only appointing executives with a strong focus on climate change, a significant rise on a year ago. Meanwhile, 53 per cent of asset managers said they had either sold, or decided not to invest in, at least one company in the past year because of concerns about climate change, both moral and economic.

The survey included the views of 84 investment firms in 10 countries, including The Church Commissioners for England, BNP Paribas and the California Public Employees’ Retirement System.

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Water Justice is the theme of this year’s Season of Creation, or Creation Time, which many churches around the world have adopted from 1 September to the Feast of St Francis on 4 October. The Season is a time dedicated to prayer for the protection of Creation, and the promotion of sustainable lifestyles that reverse our contribution to climate change.

The Anglican Communion Environmental Network (ACEN) has compiled a collection of liturgical resources from around the globe to help churches prepare and think about the issues involved. These include an order of service for Creation Time prepared by the Student Christian Movement India. It was first published by the Ecumenical Water Network, a group of churches and Christian organizations promoting people’s access to water, initiated by the World Council of Churches.

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