Going to bed on the last Friday night of a climate summit usually means knowing that the COP has blown past its scheduled time for closing, that negotiators will be working into the wee hours of the morning, and that the COP president –in this year’s case, Brazil’s André Corrêa do Lago--has one obsessive thought: how do I salvage something that I can claim as success?
After two weeks of being the first person awake at the Base Camp of our Christian Climate Observers Program (CCOP) in Belém, Brazil, I slept till 8 AM on that final Saturday at the end of COP30. Some of our participants and leaders were sitting around eating breakfast and one of them greeted me with the question: “Have you heard the news?” Wow. What had happened overnight? Was there a final negotiated text that presented a “roadmap” for transitioning from fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas by name) to renewable energy? Were there additional billions added to climate finance?
“What?” I asked.
“Marjorie Taylor Greene has resigned from Congress.” That was the news.
If you are not familiar, Greene is the brash U.S. Congresswoman, a Republican from Georgia, known for her trolling, catcalling, and conspiracy theories with almost no record of serious policymaking during her three terms in office. “Jewish space lasers,” she had once claimed, and not climate change, was the major factor in the 2018 California wildfires.
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
This year is the 100th Anniversary of the publication of T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men.”
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
“The Hollow Men” is a hard poem to contemplate while in the Amazon rainforest during a climate summit where the star that is fading is not the heat of our sun, but rather our hopes for the Paris Agreement and for multilateralism (i.e. the diplomatic cooperation between three or more countries.) When we come to the end of Eliot’s poem with its attempt by the poet to pray “For thine is the kingdom,” we are devastatingly left with the famous ditty:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but with headlines about Marjorie Taylor Greene. When I got back to North America, I asked some colleagues: how was COP30 covered in the American press? “Not much,” they said. “We heard you had a fire inside the Blue Zone.” Yes, we did, but it was quickly contained, and no one was injured. Other than that, the news in the States was all about the release of the Epstein e-mails, Trump insulting female journalists, and America’s largest aircraft carrier stationed off Venezuela to help sink some more fishing boats whether they were verified as drug runners or not.
I’m back home now where I wake up each morning to new analyses in my newsfeed of the COP30 outcomes. My immediate sense is that the fossil fuel companies won, but in the most boring of ways. They sent the largest number of lobbyists ever to a COP and they prevailed in erasing some of the gains that previous COPs (dating back to Glasgow in 2021) had secured for climate action. Saudi Arabia was a bully, and the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and the E.U. flaccidly let the Brazilian presidency take the fall for a failed COP30. The worst thing about it is the nature of COP30’s failure: COP30 was neither hot nor cold; it was lukewarm. We’ve had lukewarm COPs before, many in fact in the 30 years of the COPs that produced mealy-mouthed texts and bland promises. Nonetheless, such lukewarm outcomes with lukewarm attention to them are becoming more intolerable as each year of the climate crisis unfolds.
Meanwhile, Belém, Brazil was hot. In the first week of COP30, outside temperatures reached 32°C (89.6°F) with humidity at 91 percent. On the same day, my wife reported that temperatures back home in Ontario were the same number, 32, but in Fahrenheit, (i.e. snowing and freezing). We know about hot and cold, and we know that hot or cold responses are the only serious approaches, the only dignified approaches, to something as heartbreaking as the “way the world ends,” by which I mean: the ending of the world(s) that we have known, e.g. the loss of the Tuvaluan homeland to sea-level rise, the migration of peoples out of Northern Africa, the annual razing of Californian forests, etc. Instead, we are getting the same attitude which the Lord Jesus condemns in Revelation 3:
To the angel of the church in Laodicea write:
These are the words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the ruler of God’s creation. I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth. You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see.
Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest and repent. Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me. To the one who is victorious, I will give the right to sit with me on my throne, just as I was victorious and sat down with my Father on his throne.
Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches (Rev 3:14-22).
We often interpret this text to refer to spiritual lukewarmness, but Jesus ties it to our deeds: “I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot.” What does it mean to be “spit out of the mouth” of the Lord of the Universe, the creator of heaven and earth? Are our lukewarm hearts which produce lukewarm deeds so disgusting, so worthy of disdain? Of course, the message to Laodicea is a warning. One can choose to become earnest. One can repent. One can re-attune one’s ear to the knock of Jesus at the door, the sound of his voice calling. COP30 began on Day One with researchers from the University of Exeter presenting their 2025 Tipping Points report. The opening paragraph of its summary reads:
The world has entered a new reality. Global warming will soon exceed 1.5°C. This puts humanity in the danger zone where multiple climate tipping points pose catastrophic risks to billions of people. Already warm-water coral reefs are crossing their thermal tipping point and experiencing unprecedented dieback, threatening the livelihoods of hundreds of millions who depend on them. Polar ice sheets are approaching tipping points, committing the world to several metres of irreversible sea-level rise that will affect hundreds of millions.
All of this makes the way Christ’s attitude toward lukewarmness is worded so ominous: “So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” About to.... This too is tipping point language—and it is refers to something that we have way more control over than we do about the melting of polar ice sheets. We can vow to never lapse ourselves into lukewarmness. We can choose to speak out prophetically whenever we encounter its vile banality.
In 1958, at age 70, T.S. Eliot was asked if he would still conclude “The Hollow Men” in the same way—“this is the way the world ends/not with a bang but a whimper”— as he did when he wrote it in 1925. “No,” the poet responded. The interviewer explains:
One reason is that while the association of the H-bomb is irrelevant to it, it would today come to everyone's mind. Another is that he is not sure the world will end with either. People whose houses were bombed have told him they don't remember hearing anything.
You are very dear to God,
Lowell Bliss
On behalf of the Climate Intercessors Leadership Team
Source: Henry Hewes, “T.S. Eliot at Seventy, and an Interview with Eliot,” Saturday Review: 13 September 1958, vol. xli, 30–2.
