After the Applause
Now the hard work starts
So, Here We Are
Around ten years ago — roughly the period leading up to and following COP21 — there was genuine enthusiasm for climate action across much of society. Governments announced ambitious targets. Corporations published glossy sustainability reports. Churches, too, engaged with energy and conviction. Many congregations established Creation Care committees, hosted climate workshops, and spoke confidently about a future in which emissions would fall, prosperity would continue, and clean energy would scale rapidly.
That moment has passed.
As we approach 2026, the public posture toward climate programs looks very different. In the United States, successive administrations have rolled back or dismantled a range of climate initiatives under the banner of fiscal discipline, energy security, or political realism. Corporate retrenchment has been just as visible. Companies once eager to brand themselves as leaders in the energy transition have scaled back ambitions. Oil companies are refocusing on their core hydrocarbon businesses, and pulling back from ‘green energy’ programs.
This pullback is often framed as ideological or political. But economics plays a decisive role. Analysts such as Art Berman, in his essay Sunset of the Renewable Dream, argue that renewable energy systems have been oversold — dependent on subsidies, fragile supply chains, and assumptions about growth that no longer hold. Similar themes appear in the recent Gathering Gloom essay, which describes a broader reckoning with debt, declining energy returns, slowing global growth, and disillusionment with alternative energy programs. In short, the optimism of the mid-2010s has collided with physical and financial limits.
Churches have not been immune to this shift. Many Creation Care committees have gone quiet. Climate language has softened or disappeared from sermons and mission statements. Where climate engagement once felt hopeful and forward-looking, it now feels fraught: entangled with politics, cost-of-living pressures, and donor fatigue.
No Negotiation
And yet, the laws of physics have not been repealed; the laws of thermodynamics are not interested in our opinions. They are what they are.
Heat records continue to fall. Extreme weather events arrive with uncomfortable regularity. Sea-level rise, ecosystem stress, droughts, floods, wildfires and agricultural disruption increasingly match what climate scientists warned about a decade ago. Predictions made at the time of COP21 are not fading into irrelevance; they are arriving. The aphorism, ‘You cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet’ is turning out to be all too true.
This dilemma creates a profound tension for communities of faith. The earlier climate narrative assumed that moral concern and technological progress would align neatly — that we could care for creation while becoming richer, more efficient, and more comfortable. That assumption is eroding. What lies ahead feels less like optimization and more like constraint.
For the church, this is not a reason to disengage. It is a reason to change tone.
Faith Leadership
Leadership in 2026 will not look like enthusiastic participation in growth-oriented climate programs. It will look more like witness: naming reality honestly, resisting denial, and preparing communities for lives shaped by limits. The language of sacrifice — long avoided in climate discourse — returns. Not sacrifice as punishment or despair, but as a conscious choice about what we value, what we relinquish, and what we preserve.
Faith traditions are not strangers to such moments. They have long addressed questions of loss, restraint, humility, and endurance. In an era when governments retreat and markets recalibrate, the church’s role is not to promise that everything will work out, but to help people live well when it does not.
The ten-year journey ended in Belėm, Brazil at COP30 ― an event that was widely regarded as a major disappointment. There was:
No formal fossil fuel phase-out.
Weak or vague finance commitments.
Too many compromises on mitigation and ambition.
Failure to rise to the scale of the crisis.
The applause has ended. What remains is the harder work of faithfulness in a changing climate.
