The General Synod of the Anglican Church in Australia recently passed a number of resolutions relating to climate change. One of them ‘requests all organisational units within the Anglican Church of Australia to reduce their environmental footprint through best practice energy use, water use, and waste disposal.’ But what is the value of such resolutions? In this briefing, we will argue that they are realistic and helpful. We will also consider what makes people sometimes respond cynically or negatively to resolutions such as these.

Assume we have passed the point where half the planetary oil has been used. With billions of people now using oil, the remaining half will last nowhere near as long as the 150 years it took to use the first half.

This briefing on climate change will be the last in our series for the time being. It will outline the directions that some future community discussions will take. It will also suggest a discussion that we may need to have with the most voiceless members of our community—our children.

The amount written on climate-change presents us with a difficult knowledge-problem. Some knowledge-problems are to do with too little information: some datum is missing that will unlock the puzzle. This knowledge-problem is the opposite: there is too much information, and the mystery resides in how to meaningfully stitch it together.

‘You can’t change the weather,’ we all used to say with a shrug, to make the point that some actions are well beyond the powers of puny humans. But a disagreement has opened up among U.S. evangelicals about the extent to which we can, or cannot, change the weather.

Few of us have much grasp of the scientific details of the case for climate change; we cannot easily follow the spin-off arguments about emissions trading schemes, alternative energy sources, and the economic consequences of making changes; and we have little power over the solutions. We can easily feel helpless and a little depressed over the whole of the subject of climate change. Therefore we aim to produce several briefings on it throughout the year.