First of alii want to thank you for holding this public hearing on the proposed C02 pollution standards 

for new power plants. I believe that the standards you have announced are a more than reasonable 

response to the instruction by the United States Supreme Court that you take steps to regulate a 

pollutant which we now know beyond any question to be harmful to people and other living things. I 

know you are hearing testimony from experts in the fields of public health and environmental science 

on how important this is. I am here today as a minister, and as the director of the Illinois Interfaith 

Power & Light Campaign of Faith in Place. 

Faith in Place and our Illinois Interfaith Power & Light Campaign work with over 900 

congregations in this state to help people of all faiths become better stewards of creation, because all 

our faiths teach us that we must take care of this beautiful planet. Each faith teaches this in different 

ways but they all speak to the need for us to be careful stewards of the extraordinary gift of being here 

at all. We are part of the Interfaith Power & Light coalition nationally, which involves 14,000 

congregations in this call for stewardship in 38 states. 

Many of those congregations are taking steps themselves to address climate change by reducing 

their energy consumption. The Mosque Foundation in Bridgeview has installed a solar thermal system to 

heat the water they use to wash for Friday prayer, making them the first solar mosque in the nation. Our 

friends at the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation in Evanston built the first Platinum LEED-rated 

worship space in the country. The Euclid Avenue United Methodist Church in Oak Park retrofitted their 

heating system to geothermal, and while they had the parking lot dug up anyway for the well field, they 

replaced it with a permeable surface. For the climate change we don't manage to prevent, that will help 

them with the heavier rains that are coming. St. Matthew Lutheran Church in Urbana converted a fiveacre field they had planted in corn to a Community Supported Agriculture farm, the Sola Gratia CSA, 

making them the only church I know of anywhere with a farmer on the payroll. These examples are 

inspiring. They inspire us at Faith in Place, without doubt. But all the communities of faith who have 

taken steps like these know that to impact an issue as big as climate change we need more than 

individual action, or even action by hundreds of congregations. We need policies that go across the 

economy as a whole. 

I am also here to speak to you as a human, a mother, and someone who grew up in a part of 

Illinois which has coal beneath it. I recently took part in a tour of the mining areas of Central Illinois with 

a group of clergy. We stood at the base of the slurry impoundments, and we thought about what will 

happen to the rivers of our state, and to our fields, if that impoundment wall breaks and the billions of 

gallons behind it spill out. We also watched the prairie wind blow across piles of coal ash, the final 

remnant of coal burned for electricity, which is being disposed of back at the mine sites by the acre. 

This mining goes on in proximity to our water and our food because of the demand for coal. 

When we burn that coal, which is after all nature's own carbon sink, we are also releasing tons of carbon 

into the atmosphere. We have heard a lot over the last 13 years that I've been in this work about how to 

describe the impacts of carbon pollution from industrial sources on the climate of the Earth. The biggest 

single source of this pollution is our fleet of old coal-fired power plants. As a person of faith I think we 

should just tell the truth about them- that they will disrupt natural systems and may soon push the 

Earth beyond its resilient capacity. 

We are already seeing impacts on agriculture. The harvest two years ago was the latest ever 

recorded. Last year there was hardly any winter, so the pests that should be killed by freezing are 

probably here in greater number this year. The rain patterns have become erratic, with ferocious storms 

followed by weeks of dry weather. This year's fruit crop in southern Michigan and Illinois has been 

devastated by early warmth followed by hard frost. I grew up among farmers so that matters to me. But 

we all know the joy of that first ripe peach in summer, the way it bursts and the juice runs down our 

chins. That won't happen for us in the Midwest this year. Too many of these disruptions have occurred 
year after year in the last decade for us not to be looking to greenhouse gas concentration as a cause. 

This is the beginning of the altered world- a world of less joy and less beauty. 

It will also be a world of more suffering. And not just for our farmers, or for our urban residents 

who will have to deal with increased heat. The floods and famines that climate change will trigger 

among the millions in the world who live in poverty are an injustice that could be prevented. 

The rituals I most often engage in have a rhythm to them, a formality and a pattern. Rituals like 

this one do too, and the essential truth of things can get lost in their form. I wish sometimes that we 

could just come here as whatever kind of citizen we are and say in plain language that our dependence 

on dirty and destructive sources of energy is ruining our planet and we expect you as the agency 

charged with protecting the environment to do something about that. 

Your regulations are a first step, and a hopeful one. People of faith are united with me today to 

thank you for making it. 

Rev. Dr. Clare Butterfield 

Executive Director 

Faith in Place/Illinois Interfaith Power & Light Campaign 

70 E. Lake Street 

Chicago, IL 60601 

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