Eight things I discovered about loving your enemies at COP28
by Lowell Bliss
Director of the Eden Vigil Institute for Environmental Leadership
In the Fijian language, the word for enemies is meca, as in “dou lomani ira na kemudou meca,” which is Jesus’s command to “love your enemies” (Matt 5:44). This essay is my deep dive into what this means, what it feels like, and how it is deployed in the climate crisis.
It’s always an exciting moment when one of our participants in the Christian Climate Observers Program (CCOP) gets to meet a US senator at a UN Climate Summit. How often does one have such high-level access to talk about climate change? How often do you meet a politician who cares? The US congressional delegation usually comes in at the start of the second week of the COP. They are greeted by the US Special Envoy on Climate, John Kerry. They come prepared with their talking points, including that one tweetable soundbite. For Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) that statement was: “The number one enemy to solving the climate crisis is the fossil fuel industry but the number two enemy is despondency.” Despite the buzz around Schatz’s quote, I however could only receive it uneasily. This, I felt, was one of the worst things the senator could have said at COP28.
In the week before I departed for Dubai, I charted my course for COP28 by publishing an essay entitled “On (Finally) Having Enemies and (Starting to) Love Them at the COP28 Climate Summit in Dubai.” I was embarking on a course of discovery, as per a quotation I used from Martin Luther King. “We must discover the power of love, the power, the redemptive power of love,” King said. “And when we discover that, we will be able to make of this old world a new world. We will be able to make [people] better. Love is the only way. Jesus discovered that.” Such sentiment is not uncommon in Christian circles, except that in this case, it was embedded in a sermon of King’s about “Loving Your Enemies” (Matt 5, Lk 6). Sermons on having enemies and how to treat them are rare. The COP president, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, gaveled COP28 to a close on December 13 with a negotiated text euphemistically called the UAE Consensus. What did I discover about loving our enemies during those two weeks? What did I discover that maybe the senior senator from Hawaii hasn’t? I have come up with eight discoveries.
Sultan Al Jaber, President of COP28
In my “(Finally) Having Enemies” article, I reported on Al Gore’s concern that the fossil fuel industry has now “brazenly seized control of the COP process, especially this year’s COP in Dubai.” We certainly expected more fossil fuel delegates to show up in Dubai than the 636 who attended COP27 in Egypt, but we weren’t prepared to hear the final number for COP28: 2,456. Our antennae were also on high alert for any possible machinations by Al Jaber, president of a climate summit while still CEO of the UAE’s state oil company, ADNOC. There were rumours that he was using the occasion of COP28 to meet with global oil executives to strike production deals. One week before the COP, in a heated exchange with Mary Robinson, former UN special envoy for climate change, he declared, “There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C.” Our colleague Henrik Grape of the World Council of Churches reported to me that every side event proposal that they submitted to Jaber’s presidency that had the phrase “phase out fossil fuels” in it, came back to them unilaterally revised with the words “phase down” instead.
There was more. The biggest bombshell may have been the leaked letter from the head of OPEC, and then his sudden appearance at the COP a couple days later. I write about this letter in “COP28, OPEC, and a Mind-Blowing ‘Perhaps’”.Secretary General Haitham al Ghais called all OPEC members to rally to Dubai lest language of “phase out,” or of energy production and not just emissions, would make it into the final text of the agreement. Another occurrence which felt like a grenade lobbed by an enemy was when it was announced who would host next year’s COP. In the UNFCCC’s rotation, it is Eastern Europe’s turn, but Vladimir Putin declared his refusal to support any COP hosted by an EU nation. (Bulgaria, who had volunteered, was therefore out.) Azerbaijan offered, but Armenia objected, citing on-going human rights violations. Reportedly Putin had a hand in brokering the deal that eventually landed Azerbaijan as host of COP29 in Baku in 2024. What this means is that for the second consecutive year at a critical juncture in the climate crisis, the COP presidency and the Paris Agreement agenda will be in the hands of a petrostate. Around 60 percent of Azerbaijan’s revenues, and around 90 percent of its exports, are linked to oil and natural gas. In the middle of COP28, was this a strategic move by the fossil fuel powers? If they were being forced to bend this year, would the prospect of a second petrostate-led COP give them the wiggle room to regroup and renege in the following year regardless of what the UAE Consensus says? And speaking of Vladimir Putin, he didn’t come to COP28, which wasn’t a big deal—neither did Joe Biden—but during the days of the COP, Putin did fly unexpectedly into the UAE in order to meet offsite with… Saudi oil officials! That certainly sent a signal.
On one of the mornings of our CCOP program, I wrote out six category headings on separate pages of a sketch pad. If we were going to discover what it meant to (finally) have enemies who were actively antagonistic to the progress of climate action, these seemed to be the six identifiable candidates:
Fossil fuel lobbyists
Fossil fuel companies
Obstructionist governments
·The UAE host, Al Jaber as president
Powerful Deniers (e.g., Mike Johnson, new US Speaker of the House)
“The Money Pipeline” (Civil society’s and 350.org’s name for those like Citibank, largest financier of new fossil fuel projects; Liberty Mutual, largest insurer of new fossil fuel projects; and Black Rock, largest asset manager of new fossil fuel projects.)
Saskatchewan Pavillion in the Green Zone, COP28
A COP is divided into two zones. The Blue Zone, where the negotiations take place, is restricted to those who have a badge, like the red ones worn by governmental (called “party”) delegates or the yellow ones worn by observers like me and other Civil Society persons. The Green Zone is open to the general public and operates like an environmental trade fair. A couple days after writing up my list of six fossil fuel enemies-for-discovery I made my way over to the Green Zone to see an old friend. Scott works for the Province of Saskatchewan and is normally based in an office in the Canadian High Commission in New Delhi, India. Scott was sent by his employer to Dubai to operate a pavilion for Saskatchewan where they could showcase all the “good, sustainable” work being done in the province, and available for export. Scott and I barely had a chance for a hug before he was called to the microphone to introduce the Premier, Scott Moe, who was going to interview a panel of Canadian oil executives. There they were, from Cenovus Energy, Strathcona Resource Limited, and Whitecap Resources. They were three among 35 others from Canada. Around their necks were red badges labeled “Party Overflow,” meaning they were issued by the Canadian government, although the Government of Canada later claimed it was the Province of Alberta which was to blame. These fossil fuel executives didn’t need red badges to be with Premier Moe in the Green Zone, but with them they could accompany the premier straight from their panel and into the Blue Zone where they would have greater access to the Canadian delegation than I, for sure. (Around that same time President Al Jaber had just tasked the Canadian delegation—headed by Minister of Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault—with drafting whatever language about the fate of fossil fuels would be included in the agreement.)
After the panel, I asked Scott to introduce me to Rhona DelFrari, Chief Sustainability Officer and Executive Vice President, Stakeholder Engagement, for Cenovus. I had a question for her which went like this: “I think I understand what ‘achieving Net-Zero’ means when applied to a whole nation under the Paris Agreement, but what does it mean when you claim that your company specifically is going to achieve Net-Zero?” I was able to ride the wave of the words coming at me as successfully as I had during the panel, at least enough to hear her say a couple things. First, that they “of course” don’t count “Scope 3” emissions, which are the emissions that occur from the use of their product, after they ship it and sell it to another. It’s similar to the OPEC argument: don’t blame us if other people choose to burn what we pump out of the ground, at record rates and to record profits eight years after the adoption of the Paris Agreement. Secondly, DelFrari told me about how Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) technology is Cenovus’s key to achieving Net Zero, not this year for sure, but—abracadabra—in the next five years. She didn’t use that magical language; that’s my terminology for the myth that CCS is as effective or as scalable as the fossil fuel industry wants us suckers to believe. Unlike the others on her panel—who were CEOs with engineering backgrounds—DelFrari got her start in journalism. Her first jobs were as Media Relations Advisor for Ottawa Tourism, and then in radio and TV. Her career path at Cenovus began as Director of External Communications/Media Relations. Of her next role at Cenovus, she writes “As lead of the Strategy team, I was responsible for identifying trends that could have an impact on our industry and company and developing recommendations for the Executive Team and Board of Directors about how to address those risks and opportunities.” After six months of evaluating what trends could negatively impact her employer, she was promoted to be Vice-President Sustainability and Engagement. If you are a fossil fuel company who wants to achieve Net-Zero, hire from your PR department, it seems.
Despite all my (cynical?) interpretations, my number-one takeaway from visiting with Ms. DelFrari was: she is an incredibly nice person. So is pretty much everyone I’ve ever known from Saskatchewan. And as for Scott, the emcee and facilitator of all this: I can’t tell you how much I love that man.
I charted out my course of discovery in the article “On (Finally) Having Enemies,” by first confessing, “It’s hard to admit that nice people like us have enemies.” My conservative evangelical Protestant (and privileged class) upbringing taught me nothing about how “loving your enemies,” as per Jesus’s words in the Sermon on the Mount, could be instructive, could be visionary, could show a path forward (as Martin Luther King understood those words). Instead, “loving your enemies” was weaponized against dissent: it was a shameful sin to ever think so poorly of a person that you might label them an enemy. One of the first e-mails I received after I published my essay was from an old friend at our former church in Kansas. She wrote:
It’s interesting to me that your article is about how to respond to “enemies” of the “climate change” movement(?). How about viewing them simply as people with very different views on climate changes and the role of fossil fuels? I am aware of a couple of organizations that will be showing up at COP28 to present different facts. Enemies?? Well, I guess that’s one way to look at the debate.
Years of meeting with a Spiritual Director has revealed to me that older religious ladies are my kryptonite. I so hate to spiritually disappoint them.
Even some of the people in our program were feeling the tension. After listening to my teaching during Week One of COP28, one participant returned to the States and wrote back advising against a quickness to villainize the fossil fuel industry, the temptation to divide out “us” from the “other,” and a risk of precluding potential allies. He certainly had a point, and while I ended up disagreeing with his conclusions, his letter sparked a discovery for me because of the way he introduced it. He began his letter by appreciatively quoting Sen. Brian Schatz: “The number one enemy to solving the climate crisis is the fossil fuel industry but the number two enemy is despondency.” I suddenly knew why this statement left me so uneasy. Schatz quite boldly makes the claim that the fossil fuel industry is indeed an enemy, and that they are, in his opinion, the number one enemy. Nonetheless, the rhetorical weight of his quote is built into the second phrase of that statement, not the first. We listeners—habituated as we are to pour shame on our emotions and our performance—too easily skip over the first phrase and embrace the second. “Hi. It’s me. I’m the problem. It’s me,” Taylor Swift says for us in her latest hit.
I’m still not sure why Sen. Schatz wasn’t included in the exhortation against a “quickness to villainize the fossil fuel industry;” after all, the first fourteen words, two-thirds of Schatz’s entire statement, pointed the finger at the fossil fuel industry. I do know, however, how my mind works. My magnetic pole in most confrontations is skewed. My compass which points to blame or obstacles quickly gets pulled in the direction of whom I secretly believe to be the true enemy in way-too-many-scenarios: “It’s me. I’m the problem.” If I was only smart enough. If I was only strong enough. If I was only emotionally stable enough. It might be argued that Schatz was declaring “despondency” to be the enemy, but if so, he’s naïve about how human psychology—and certainly how my Evangelical-trained psychology—works. It’s healthy, psychologists tell us, to use language like “I am feeling despondent,” rather than identifying our Self with our emotions so thoroughly as when we say, “I am despondent.” But that’s where we go, and it is an easy, albeit subconscious jump to go from “I am a despondent person” to “therefore, I am an enemy to solving the climate crisis.” And who cares if you are only the number two enemy, when it is your Self who is the enemy, you are the only enemy that matters. If you weren’t so despondent, then we could easily overcome the enmity of the fossil fuel companies and solve the climate crisis.
To be fair to Sen. Schatz, he went on to say in his remarks that we need to turn our despondency into anger toward fossil fuel interests and into action. Of course, anger in Christian circles is an even bigger target for shame than is despondency. Pouring shame on ourselves is little different than the gaslighting that the fossil fuel industry does to us. It’s not our production of fossil fuels that is the problem,” they say to us, but YOUR burning of it. We don’t need government regulation, they argue, but only widespread individual behavioral changes. It’s like Putin blaming his invasion on the “Nazification” of Ukraine.
This discovery of how real our inner resistance is to admitting having enemies, leads to the first major revision to my “(Finally) Having Enemies” essay. In it, I said that, during my childhood and young adulthood, Ephesians 6:12—“our struggle is not against flesh and blood”--was quoted so often to me as to signify that only Satan could possibly be an enemy for someone who calls him- or herself a Christian. But while that was what was explicitly taught, what was internalized was the message that in almost any struggle you will have as a Christian: you are the likeliest candidate to be “your own worst enemy,” including against Satan. If only you were a better Christian, even the gates of hell wouldn’t prevail. If only you were a better Christian, you wouldn’t be losing this battle. “Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (I Peter 5:8). If the devil is the one who is labeled the adversary, why do I always feel like I’m to blame for being so unsober, unalert and devourable?
Fa! I refuse to live that way any longer. Shame, like kryptonite, is a comic book fantasy.
The OII Circle, compliments of Kansas Leadership Center
I propose we put a period, a full-stop, after Schatz’s first phrase and see what we can discover by sitting for a while with his declaration: “The number one enemy to solving the climate crisis is the fossil fuel industry.” Let’s be curious about this instead of skipping over it or holding it at arm’s length. I discovered that the principles of Adaptive Leadership can help in overcoming our resistance to identifying and loving our enemies.
The Kansas Leadership Center (KLC) employs the OII circle: Observation, followed by Interpretation, followed by Intervention, and then engaged all over again. The job of any leader, like a climate activist in our case, is to make the next intervention, or a series of interventions, small actions which help make progress on our daunting adaptive challenge. But what action we choose, if it has any hope of making a successful contribution to addressing our problem, must be based on helpful interpretations about what exactly is happening. We leaders have a predisposition to action. We tend to think that leadership is built primarily around our interventions. As a result, the Interpretation phase often gets shortchanged. KLC advises that we do the due diligence to “Test multiple interpretations and points-of-view.” Who else might have a point-of-view on whether the fossil fuel industry is an enemy? (Perhaps someone from the sinking islands of Fiji, from the flood plains of Pakistan, from the glacial-fed fields of Bolivia.) And what are three or more interpretations we can generate about our situation? For instance, before COP28, John Kerry voiced publicly the interpretation that Al Jaber is a good-faith actor. Al Gore offered a second interpretation: that Al Jaber’s conflict-of-interest was insurmountable. In the Climate Intercessors prayer network, we wondered whether having a businessperson as a COP president--compared to the past heads-of-state, diplomats, and bureaucrats who have assumed that role at previous COPs—might open up new possibilities for the practical implementation of the Paris Agreement. The old Desert Fathers call this Interpretation process diakrisis. It is discernment or wisdom. One of KLC’s most helpful mantras is: “One interpretation is [just] an opinion. Two interpretations is a dilemma, [because now you are forced to make a binary choice]. Three interpretations is the path to discovery.” There’s that word discovery again.
In testing multiple interpretations, KLC further advises us to Explore tough interpretations. They call this the Interpretative Mindshift: from technical interpretations to adaptive interpretations; from benign interpretations to conflictual ones; from individual interpretations to systemic ones. Technical interpretations tend to cling to the hope our challenges are quickly “fixable” if we spend enough money and find the right expertise. There’s a reason we like technical interpretations. In 2007, the George W. Bush White House released a statement: “The way to meet this challenge of energy and global climate change is through technology, and the United States is in the lead.” That wasn’t true of the climate crisis then, and it certainly isn’t true now. Adaptive interpretations, by contrast, recognize that there are multiple stakeholders around a challenge, and that much learning must occur, not only about the solutions, but about the nature of the problem itself.
It’s also easy, let’s admit it, to settle on benign interpretations and ignore conflictual ones. If wheat-producing powerhouse Saskatchewan has an American cousin, it is surely my old home state of Kansas, and at KLC I first heard the phrase, “Kansas nice.” Kansans are nice people who think nice thoughts about other people. It makes for nice living but sometimes it doesn’t yield the crucial insights for the type of interventions needed to make progress on adaptive challenges. For example, my old hometown of Junction City thought quite benignly about Timothy McVeigh as he signaled his intentions around town, bought fertilizer, and rented a truck before driving to Oklahoma City, only to discover that, yes, clean-cut white veterans can kill Americans in the name of America. In 1939, Neville Chamberlain had a benign interpretation of “Herr Hitler”; Churchill had a conflictual one. The work of exploring conflictual interpretations is “tough,” according to KLC, because it is uncomfortable work. It cuts against our grain and is vulnerable to shaming. But this isn’t moral work; it’s strategic work. And it is exploration, not judgement. I have written out a verse from Proverbs and posted it on my wall. It speaks to me of the struggle for climate justice, it centers wisdom, and seems to allow for the existence of enemies: “One who is wise can go up against the city of the mighty and pull down the stronghold in which they trust” (Prov. 21:22). The use of conflictual interpretations is given sanction by this type of effective wisdom.
Allen Johnson, Christians for the Mountains
The third interpretative mind shift recommended by Adaptive Leadership is from the individual to the systemic. We tend to like individual interpretations because we like scapegoats to whom we can apply easy fixes. If we can fire the pastor, or wait out the president’s term, and then put the “right” person in the job, all will be well. But what if it is the system and not the incumbent that needs to be changed?
We presume that systems are neutral and objective and that they operate without intent. “Garbage-in-garbage-out” we say about computer systems: trashy human programmers are the enemy. “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people” some advocates say about the system of a safety, a trigger, a hammer, and a firing pin. Systems don’t have intent, but they do seem to be programmed with some self-protective mechanisms, the biggest likely being that, like slot machines in Vegas, they allow for a regular and sufficient number of winners. This allows Capitalism’s mega-winners to preach at us: “See, if I can win, then so can you.” If you fail, it’s your own fault. Systems say that if you are looking for enemies, search exclusively among individuals. Religion is a system, and my systemic upbringing added an addendum: if you are looking for enemies, be a nice Christian and don’t even look for them among any other individuals than yourself.
The shame mechanism kicks in strongest when you dare to “explore tough interpretations” about religion, Christianity, Christendom, Evangelicalism, or any of the other systems that religion has chosen to ally with, co-opt, or be co-opted by. In 2015, Allen Johnson of Christians for the Mountains gave me and a colleague a tour of mountain-top removal coal mining sites in West Virginia. I was overwhelmed by the wanton destruction of some of North America’s most beautiful landscape. I was also overwhelmed by what I later heard a sociologist call acquiescence in Appalachia’s working class. “I am a Friend of Coal” declared the billboards over the boarded-up storefronts. “I am a Friend of Coal” declared the button worn by the miner rendered jobless by the giant machines that can more efficiently—because more ruthlessly—tear away the “over-burden” (soil, trees, wildlife) to get at the seam below. How exactly has coal EVER been a friend to local populations? The sale of mineral rights at a pittance? Black lung? Mine disasters? Slag heaps? Profit-taking from New York firms? Mine closures and lay-offs at a moment’s notice? It’s hard to find a man who mixes the prophetic and pastoral gifts better than Allen Johnson. He’s a Christian for the mountains and the mountain folk, but it is he and his fellow MTR activists who get condemned as enemies!
“In order to love your enemies,” Martin Luther King declares in his famous sermon, “you must begin by analyzing self.” He quotes Matthew 7:3: “How is it that you see the splinter in your brother’s eye and fail to see the plank in your own eye?” This may come as reassurance to those ready to accuse me of a quickness to excuse myself and villainize others. But King says this is only where you begin, not where you confine your explorations. And King argues that this is not only good biblical practice, but it also has strategic value, because the goal is not (as Christian shame throwers may say) to simply identify enemies, but rather to press on to love them. In other words, in testing multiple interpretations and points-of-view, we test conflictual interpretations about ourselves as well, asking why our enemies might hate us. We need to own our share of the mess. Yet we don’t stop there, because we TEST this interpretation for shame that might be illegitimate and we own ONLY our share of the mess, not what others should own.
The second practical step that MLK recommends performs another beautiful move toward the individual, but this time toward the enemy-as-an-individual. “A second thing that an individual must do in seeking to love his enemy is to discover the element of good in his enemy, and every time you begin to hate that person and think of hating that person, realize that there is some good there and look at those good points which will over-balance the bad points.” Here, the religious system that King was raised in may be more helpful than the one I was raised in. I feel that a lot of my teachers thought that human experience began in Genesis 3 with the Fall. King’s religion begins in Genesis 1: we are each of us created in the image of God. “The person who hates you most has some good in him; even the nation that hates you most has some good in it; even the race that hates you most has some good in it. And when you come to the point that you look in the face of every man and see deep down within him what religion calls ‘the image of God,’ you begin to love him in spite of. No matter what he does, you see God’s image there.” Again, it seems perfectly legitimate to identify a person, a nation, a race as hateful, so long as you are doing the hard work of clawing your way to where you love them.
In his third and final way of loving your enemies, King once again features the individual enemy. “Another way that you love your enemy is this: When the opportunity presents itself for you to defeat your enemy, that is the time which you must not do it…. In the final analysis,” King teaches,
love is not this sentimental something that we talk about. It’s not merely an emotional something. Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all men. It is the refusal to defeat any individual. When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system.
Our path forward in (finally) having enemies and (starting to) love them begins in the Interpretation phase of exercising leadership and exploring multiple interpretations, including conflictual ones and systemic ones, and including conflictual interpretations about systems. A particular system might indeed be evil. It may, in fact, be a godly and Christian calling to engage in the struggle to defeat these systems. King advises us, “Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love.” One of our ad hoc assignments in the CCOP program was to try and imagine Al Jaber as a family man and not just as an oil exec. We did some research and found that his first name is Ahmed, he is married to Hessa, and they have four children. I asked our CCOPers to call to mind four children from a climate vulnerable population, like Fiji. Then add to that group four children from their immediate family or community. Finally, even though we didn’t know the ages of Ahmed and Hessa’s four kids, add them to the group as well. Once we had this group of twelve in mind, each of us dedicated our day of climate action to them as we headed into the Blue Zone at COP28 in order to, as King instructs, “seek to defeat the system” that was pressing so evilly on all twelve of them.
“The Conversion of the Proconsul”, by Raphael, c. 1515-6
As I mentioned in my pre-COP28 “(Finally) Having Enemies” essay, I was led to believe that the Bible teaches that the only enemy that a (nice, good, real) Christian can have is Satan. Yet even a good old-fashioned biblical word study reveals a different truth.
The Greek word in the New Testament for enemies is echthros. Yes, the word is used of the devil, as in the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares, which Jesus explains as “The field is the world, and the good seed stands for the people of the kingdom. The weeds are the people of the evil one, and the [echthros] who sows them is the devil” (Matt 13:38-39). In this case, the worst that a fellow human being can be labelled is a “weed,” albeit also a member of “the people of the evil one.” Once echthros is used of Death as the last enemy to be destroyed (I Cor 15:26). But these are only five of the 32 occurrences of the word echthros. The other 27 occurrences refer to human beings who are enemies.
Fourteen occurrences refer to human beings whose enmity is directed towards God. This seems like a safe-enough exegesis: only God is perfect enough to be trusted with having enemies. Some are called enemies “of the cross” (Phil 3:18), or “of all righteousness” (Acts 13:10), or “to the gospel” (Rms 11:28). We might feel most comfortable with those verses that lump us in with the enemies of God. However, these are only two references and both declarations over us are in the past tense: Romans 5:10 (“For if while we were enemies [echthroi] we were reconciled to God. . .”) or Colossians 1:21 (“And you who were at one time who were alienated and [echthrous], doing evil deeds.”).
Of the other occasions where human beings are called enemies of God, a few overlap as enemies of other human beings as well. This is particularly true when a verse quotes the messianic Psalm 110:1 where the enemies that are made a footstool under the Lord’s feet are King David’s enemies as much as they are God’s. Or you have the case of the Apostle Paul in Acts 13 where Paul was providing spiritual counsel to a proconsul in Paphos. A sorcerer named Elymas “opposed them and tried to turn the proconsul from the faith.” Paul “looked straight at Elymas and said, ‘You are a child of the devil and an echthre [vocative single masculine form] of everything that is right! You are full of all kinds of deceit and trickery. Will you never stop perverting the right ways of the Lord? Now the hand of the Lord is against you.” Admittedly, our own timidity is quick to remind us: this was the Apostle Paul, and verse 9 says that Paul was “filled with the Holy Spirit”, and he has the power to strike Elymas blind, which is what happens. Are we so cowed as to exclude the possibility that the fossil fuel industry is a modern sorcerer, full of all kinds of deceit and trickery, perverting the right ways of the Lord, turning the proconsuls of the Paris Agreement away from mercy and justice? Is the filling of the Spirit not also available to us, for power in discernment or action?
When it comes to the niggling acquiescence that whispers to us “only God has the right to have enemies,” I will point out that eighteen of the 32 occurrences of the word echthros in the New Testament are directly or inclusive about we human beings (or we disciples) having enemies. The Bible presumes that we have enemies. It doesn’t shy away from that reality. If anything, the teachers (including Jesus himself) want to move us quickly to the main point, which is not whether we have enemies, but rather how we will treat them. This is a crucial moment in our discipleship. Jesus identified our default mode when he told his listeners, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’” Now, however, in and through Christ, there is a new vision. Jesus says, “But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matt 5:43-45).
There is now a higher order of love unleashed in the world and we get to participate it, but Jesus’s words seem to indicate that we will only discover this new love if we are willing to direct it to those whom we have differentiated from being neighbors, to those whom we understand in realism to be enemies, to those for whom our feelings naturally rise up to return the real hatred directed toward us. “If you love those who love you,” Jesus goes on to say, “what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?” (v. 46-47). Jesus claims that an indirect outcome of loving our enemies is “that you may be children of your Father in heaven,” that we grow in our teleios: “be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (v. 48).
Romans 12:17-21 is an instructive verse where echthros refers to a human enemy directing enmity towards you. It also seems foundational to what Martin Luther King believed.
Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord. On the contrary:
“If your enemy is hungry, feed him;
if he is thirsty, give him something to drink.
In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.”
Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
Sometimes enemies make it impossible to “live at peace” with them, but nonetheless, we are commanded to first try, and then failing that, to not take revenge on them (or “defeat” them, as King says). The phrase “If your enemy is hungry” presumes that human enemies do exist, but it wants us to be mindful of the hungry and thirsty ones. Another important thing about this passage is that it presents loving your enemies not only as morality, but also as strategy. We are engaged in a great struggle to overcome evil in this world. We do so by employing the good. The two verses that Paul quotes are from the Book of Proverbs, and like most of the proverbs that employ the imperative tense, they are not commands or the Law; they are wisdom. And let’s not overlook the brilliant judo move on coal! In the climate crisis, let good deeds be the only coal that gets burned. In the climate crisis, “one who is wise” knows that loving our enemies is one of the most powerful strategies for going “up against the city of the mighty” in order to “pull down the stronghold in which they trust” (Prov 21:22).
Fijian Prime Minister Rabuka at COP28
The word echthros is defined as “hated, under disfavor, inimical, or hostile.” Etymologically, the focus seems to be on the inner condition of the enemy, like only calling someone a racist who has discernible racist intent. However, when Jesus gives the “love your enemies” command in Luke 6:27-31, the parallelism in the text further helps us know how to identify enemies.
But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you.
Enemies are those who hate you, those who curse you, those who mistreat you. They are someone who would slap you on your cheek or take your coat and other things that belong to you. Enemies are those who do unto you contrary to how you want to be done unto. Jesus seems to allow for enemies defined by harmful impact and not just hostile intent. Are you missing a coat, or have a bruise on your check? It may be the work of an enemy.
At the end of the session where I enlisted my Spiritual Director around the topic of loving my enemies, he suggested that I seek out new language for it. It makes sense, especially if my habituated understanding of the English word “enemies” has locked me into the type of rut that precludes discovery. Echthros is new language for me. We sometimes forget that the biblical languages are more than just data for exegesis; they are “foreign languages” in their own right which can open up for us new worldviews. For example, Fijian is a foreign language for many of us, and the word for enemy in the Fijian language is meca. Fijian Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka told his nation in the first Christmas message of his term, “let us acknowledge that we are duty bound to forgive our enemies and those who hurt us.” Every Fijian would have known that the word meca carries some heavy weight. In the history of the islands, enemies who are hostile to your tribe not only want to kill you but consume your flesh afterwards. Enemies engage in exocannibalism (exo- signifying “outside their tribe”) so as to appropriate valued qualities about their victims, and to further humiliate them in one final act of violence. Coupled with Jesus’s list of examples, echthros and meca seem particularly preoccupied with theft: taking away your life, your dignity, your valued qualities, your coat, what belongs to you.
I also found myself coining two new words, though neither of them should survive beyond this essay. The first is impactemies. This clunky word is designed to challenge my habituated notion that only if we can clearly identify “intent to do harm,” do we bother with someone as an enemy. If you watch courtroom dramas on TV, you know that it is a big victory for the defense attorneys if they can get the charges reduced from first or second-degree murder to manslaughter, which is defined as “the crime of killing a human being without malice aforethought, or otherwise in circumstances not amounting to murder” (Oxford Languages). Skillful defense attorneys can do their clients even better with charges reduced to involuntary manslaughter, negligent manslaughter, vehicular or intoxicated manslaughter (the latter two where the machine and addiction apparently share some of the blame.) But manslaughter is still a crime, and in the end, some man (or woman, or child) has been slaughtered. Why does the word “slaughter” sound almost worst than “murder”? It sounds like something we do mindlessly, commercially, like to livestock, or in genocide. “The Slaughter of the Innocents” refers to Herod’s killing of the Israelite babies in the first century. He didn’t hate those babies; he loved his reign.
In my “(Finally) Having Enemies” essay, I quoted Bill McKibben’s famous article “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math” where McKibben says that the intentions of the fossil fuel industry to pump every last drop of oil from their known reserves make “painfully, usefully clear. . . that the planet does indeed have an enemy – one far more committed to action than governments or individuals. Given this hard math, we need to view the fossil-fuel industry in a new light. It has become a rogue industry, reckless like no other force on Earth. It is Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization.” McKibben wrote this a decade before COP28. The fossil fuel industry is replete with intent, and just because it isn’t malicious intent directed toward the islanders of Fiji doesn’t mean that the impacts aren’t experienced malevolently with every centimeter of sea-level rise. In a famous Op-ed published in the New York Times in 1970, influential economist Milton Friedmann addressed the proper intentions of a business and set up the framework by which the fossil fuel industry could say “Screw the Paris Agreement.” Friedmann argued that the only intention that a business can legitimately have, at least by way of “social responsibility”, is to increase its profits. “In a free‐enterprise, private‐property system,” he writes, “a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.” After the Paris Agreement’s adoption in 2015, the body of law regarding carbon emissions is being debated in legislatures around the world. In numerous court cases, existing law is being applied in novel ways against fossil fuel companies, with many of these suits being brought by young plaintiffs. Additionally, the concerted voices of Civil Society means that the body of ethical custom is also shifting, enough apparently to make OPEC take notice and rush to Dubai during COP28. Nonetheless, existing laws and ethics are still such that fossil fuel executives like the three nice people I encountered at the Saskatchewan pavilion feel adequately protected by the Friedmann Doctrine (it’s actually called that!): they are absolved to make as much money as possible for their shareholders. Climate manslaughter (where the vehicle is a coal-fired power plant, or the intoxication is an addiction to oil) is not yet a crime. In the logic of Friedmann’s Op-ed, he even flips the thievery concerns of echthros and meca. He writes, “Insofar as [a business executive's] actions in accord with his ‘social responsibility’ reduce returns to stockholders, he is spending their money. Insofar as his actions raise the price to customers, he is spending the customers' money. Insofar as his actions lower the wages of some employees, he is spending their money.”
The second clunky, but useful, word I coined is empathemies. The first coinage, impactemies, was meant to be objective, to suss out the logic that hostile impacts are their own form of enmity. This second coinage is meant to be subjective and emotional, and meant to tailor-make it for privileged Westerners like us. You see, here in the Niagara peninsula of southern Ontario, I can’t claim that my family has been greatly devastated yet by climate change impacts. My encounters with fossil fuel executives and employees have all been simpatico—they look like me, speak my same language, share my same historical interests, claim to be working for my share of the collective well-being as an immigrant to Canada and a citizen of the US. My guitar strings vibrate sympathetically with the ones they are plucking. To feel exactly how the fossil fuel industry is an enemy, I have to instead, and proactively, employ empathy. The word meca is in a foreign tongue to me, but so is the Fijian experience of climate change. The more we actively listen to the voices of Fijian and other threatened brothers and sisters, and the more we quietly reflect before rushing to activism, the more the condition of empathy will aid us in our project of discovery of what it is to understand the fossil fuel interests as enemies and how to love them.
Before we leave our word study, let me circle back to the English word enemy and to an English word that is often included in its definition, namely the word “inimical.” Other words like hated or hostile that were quoted in the definition of enemy that began this section are most often applied to individuals (not systems) and intent (not impact). But inimical is different. Its definition is: “tending [note: not intending] to obstruct or harm.” Its usage is most often reserved for systems, institutions, or policies, as in the Cambridge Dictionary’s example: “The stifling repressive regime was inimical to innovation and adoption of new technologies.” In the end, whether you do your word studies in English, Fijian, NT Greek, or Jesus’s Aramaic, there are numerous pathways to bringing the fossil fuel enemies to the dock. Now, how do we bring them to the peace conference where they can surrender?
Corrie Ten Boom (standing) and her family before the War.
The definition of love (or more precisely, agape love) that I grew up with was that it is “an act of the will whereby you seek the greatest good of another regardless of the cost to yourself.” Most of the preachers I heard were quick to point out that this type of love is not an emotion, or not merely emotional. Our will could somehow activate it, an act of good decision-making whereby our correct theology overpowers our natural inclinations so that we end up doing the right thing.
If I had a model for this “act of the will”, again picked up in my childhood reading, it was a scene from a story in Corrie ten Boom’s autobiography The Hiding Place. After Corrie was released from Ravensbruck concentration camp and the war had ended, she embarked on a preaching ministry of healing and reconciliation. After one meeting in Munich in 1947, she saw a man come walking down the aisle in order to speak to her. She recognized him as a former guard at Ravensbruck and in a flash relived the moment when she and her sister Betsie were forced to walk naked past this man. Her vision flitted between him in an overcoat and brown hat, as he was in the church, and a blue uniform and visored cap with its skull and crossbones, the leather crop on his belt, as he was in her trauma. Corrie said that it was the first time since her release that she had been face to face with one of her captors. The man came up to her, described his conversion and repentance, and then held out his hand and asked Corrie, “Will you forgive me?.” She froze. She writes, “I stood there—I whose sins had every day to be forgiven—and could not. Betsie had died in that place—could he erase her slow terrible death simply for the asking? I could not have been many seconds that he stood there, hand held out, but to me, it seemed hours as I wrestled with the most difficult thing I had ever had to do.” Her mind raced, no doubt with the theology that only later she was able to transcribe, such as “Still I stood there with the coldness clutching my heart. But forgiveness is not an emotion—I knew that too. Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart.” What was more likely a real thought process is the prayer Corrie silently prayed in the moment: “Jesus, help me! I can lift my hand. I can do that much. You supply the feeling.” She recalls,
And so woodenly, mechanically, I thrust my hand into the one stretched out to me. And as I did, an incredible thing took place. The current started in my shoulder, raced down my arm, sprang into our joined hands. And then this healing warmth seemed to flood my whole being, bringing tears to my eyes.
“I forgive you, brother!” I cried. “With all my heart!”
For a long moment, we grasped each other’s hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. I had never known God’s love so intensely as I did then.
Years later—for me, not Corrie—in reflecting on this incident and exploring further the story of the ten Boom family, I have a more sophisticated understanding of what transpired there. I believe it was much more than a spectacular, but momentary, “act of the will” on Corrie’s part. For one thing, consider the final statement she makes: “I had never known God’s love so intensely as I did then.” It’s the same conceit of discovery that Martin Luther King introduces. Corrie knew all about loving God and loving her neighbors. The fact that she was one of a small minority of “Righteous Gentiles” among Dutch Christians who could conceive of the Jews as her neighbor enough to hide them in her home, already indicates that she knew a level of love beyond most of us. But, by her own admission, her first occasion of loving her enemy seemed to catapult her into a new unmatched intensity of experiencing God’s love.
Corrie also demonstrated the three ways that King described as how to actually go about loving your enemies. First, she analyzed herself. While she didn’t blame herself for the violence of the Nazi occupation of Holland, she recognized, “I whose sins had every day to be forgiven.” Her preaching ministry was also predicated on an observation she was making: “Those who were able to forgive their former enemies were able also to return to the outside world and rebuild their lives, no matter what the physical scars. Those who nursed their bitterness remained invalids. It was as simple and as horrible as that.” This was her moment of horrible simplicity, as much as it was the former guard’s. Secondly, Corrie demonstrated King’s admonition to look for the good, look for the image of God. When Corrie writes about first seeing the former guard in the audience, she describes him as “a balding heavyset man in a gray overcoat, a brown felt hat clutched between his hands.” Later her mind’s eye will see his blue uniform and black Nazi visor, but it will just as quickly flit back to the gray overcoat, and a brown felt hat. She saw his humanity, stripped of abstract symbology. And the man’s hand—and Corrie’s hand—are all over this narrative: his clutching the felt hat, his hovering in Corrie’s memory over his crop, his stretched out to her's, his hovering before her’s for what seemed like hours, her’s becoming a subject of prayer to God, her’s thrust into his, both their joined hands feeling a current of healing warmth. He called her “Fräulein” in asking for forgiveness. She called him “brother” in extending it. Finally, Corrie’s story matches King’s prescription in that, in a real sense, a chance had presented itself to Corrie to defeat this man, to destroy him, and she didn’t take it. “It was 1947,” Corrie writes, “and I had come from Holland to defeated Germany with the message that God forgives.” Often groups of Germans, she remembered, would leave her talks in silence. “The solemn faces stared back at me, not quite daring to believe. There were never questions after a talk in Germany in 1947. People stood up in silence, in silence collected their wraps, in silence left the room.” But in one church in Munich, a man in a gray overcoat, and a brown felt hat clutched in his hands decided to risk it. “’But since that time [at Ravensbruck],’ he went on, ‘I have become a Christian. I know that God has forgiven me for the cruel things I did there, but I would like to hear it from your lips as well, Fraulein’—again the hand came out—'will you forgive me?’” What if Corrie had refused? What if she had never bothered to pray for help? What is she had never lifted her own hand, however woodenly or mechanically? What if she had intimated that while the German people might qualify for the forgiveness she had just preached about, not so a former Nazi prison guard? If offering forgiveness was a path of healing for victims of Nazi atrocities, then seeking forgiveness was equally a path of healing for those sadists. Corrie could have closed that door for this man; she chose not to.
The story of Corrie ten Boom loving her enemy is full of references to whether love—or forgiveness in this case—is an emotion, and how love seems to be an act of the will. In the years since first reading this story, I’ve been greatly instructed by the teaching of Dallas Willard who argues that, of course, love is an emotion, just as it is also an act, and a choice, and a virtue, and an obedience. The fact that we have such a holistic experience of love indicates that it might best be understood as a “condition.” And Corrie ten Boom was conditioned in love. Before the war broke out, long before the ten Boom family invited their first Jew into their hiding place, Corrie and Betsie had started clubs and church services for youth with learning disabilities. Even after their mother died, the remaining ten Booms took in foster children, with as many as seven living in their house at one time. In Ravensbruck, often following Betsie’s lead, Corrie shared her meager rations of bread and medicine with fellow prisoners. Some of these prisoners had been cruel to her, so they too presented an opportunity for Corrie to practice forgiveness. Each of these acts were physical manifestations of love which Corrie had practiced and which served to condition her in love so that when the moment of crisis arrived—as it did when a former Nazi thrust out his hand to her at a church in Munich in 1947—Corrie’s whole being, Dallas Willard would argue, was ready. There was also some immediate conditioning that we should remember. Corrie had already made the “act of the will” not to spend 1947 rebuilding her own life in Holland, but to travel to Germany with the message: “God forgives.” She had conditioned herself to look out lovingly over an audience of Germans, long before she spotted one German she knew from cruel and personal experience to be a Nazi. And even the act of shaking hands with another person is a conditioning practice. It is a mark of welcome and acceptance. Anthropologists theorize that the practice of shaking hands dates back to 5th Century BCE Greece where it was meant to communicate something to enemies—real or potential. A handshake says, “Look, I’m not caring a weapon in my hand. I’m not here to hurt you.” Handshakes build muscle memory, and it’s a memory of love. Dallas Willard wouldn’t say that Corrie’s loving her enemy in that church in Munich in 1947 wasn’t a remarkable moment; he would say: Look at her entire remarkable life and how her practices—her discipleship—conditioned her to make that one moment remarkable.
For those embarking on the path of discovery which is loving our enemies in the climate crisis, the work is that of practice, discipleship, and conditioning. We begin with what we know to do and look to do it as regularly (as daily?) as any spiritual practice. At one of the morning devotionals during COP28, our CCOP participants came up to the third floor lounge of our hotel where we held our Base Camp meetings and discovered six sheets of sketchpad paper on the floor, each containing the names, as I had mentioned earlier in this essay, of our six identified enemies in the climate crisis:
Fossil fuel lobbyists
Fossil fuel companies
Obstructionist governments
The UAE host, Al Jaber as president
Powerful Deniers
“The Money Pipeline”
Taped on the wall were three pages describing HOW to love our enemies:
According to King, as per his sermon:
1. Begin by analyzing yourself.
2. Look for the good (i.e., for the image of God)
3. When given chance, don’t defeat.
According to King and Gandhi, as per their practice:
1. Non-violent resistance
2. Non-cooperation with evil
According to Jesus, as per his words in Matt 5 and Luke 6
1. Bless; don’t curse.
2. Do good to those who hate you.
3. Pray for those who persecute you.
We only had twenty minutes or so before we would all be heading to the Blue Zone for another day of advocacy. I at least wanted them to get a taste of this exercise: choose one of the enemies and one of the practices, and do that practice, or reflect on that practice, as a moment of loving that enemy. I told them that the easiest one to pull off for the first time, and in the twenty minutes allotted, was probably to just pray. The harder practice--akin to the ten Booms harboring Jews and forging ration cards—was the practices of Non-violent Resistance and Non-Cooperation. Like many of my fellow CCOPers, I had participated in climate marches in the past, but these invariably had a festival feel to them, surrounded by thousands of like-minded compatriots, shouting for climate justice, but with no enemy around to shout it at. At the climate march during COP24 in Katowice, Poland, we did walk through a corridor of Polish police in riot gear, but they posed no great threat to us, unless you happened to be a Polish activist, in which case the Polish police were our empathemies. At that march, believe it nor not, I marched leisurely alongside Svante Thunberg, his 16-year-old daughter Greta, and other Swedish Christians. Back in 2018, Greta was not yet famous and only then embarking on the year of growing fame and frustration that, coupled with the clarity of her Asperger’s, would confront her with the planet’s enemies and their enmity. Interestingly, only in the run-up to COP28 in 2023 did Greta ever engage in a protest that got her arrested. Martin Luther King said the best way for individuals who are oppressed to deal with their oppressors—indeed the only alternative to vengeful violence or passive acquiescence— is “to organize mass non-violent resistance based on the principle of love.” Most of us have little to no experience with non-violent resistance or non-cooperation with evil. If we hope ever to learn what it means to love our enemies, I guess we will have to make it an “act of the will” to learn, through actually participating in resistance, how to do this. (Scary!)
In our debriefing after the (Eight) Practices to Love Your (Six) Enemies exercise, I inadvertently added another practice that I’ve subsequently taken up as a discipline. During Week Two, it was our first day to revel in the story of four of our CCOPers encountering the head of OPEC (as told in the article “COP28, OPEC and a Mind-Blowing ‘Perhaps’”). I congratulated them on a job well done. I was so incredibly proud of them. But then I invited all of us to revisit that moment—whether we were the ones physically there or not. How well had we loved Secretary General Al Ghais? How well had we loved his PR guy? There was no shame in those questions, since our CCOPers had acted so respectfully. There was, however, surprise. Despite the fact that we have the name Christian in our program’s title, it is still a surprising moment when the greatest of all Christian virtues, love, gets introduced into a scenario where we never thought to consider it. Then I asked this question: “How might the dynamics have changed if before speaking, you had taken a beat and said in your heart to the gentleman: ‘God loves you as much as he loves me, and God loves us as much as he loves his own son Jesus Christ’”? I can’t imagine that I’ll meet another fossil fuel official until next year at COP29, but I was able to try out this new practice this week when I read an article in The Guardian with the headline, “Azerbaijan appoints no women to 28-member COP29 climate committee.” I looked at the photo of COP29 president Mukhtar Babayev and said out loud in the privacy of my office, “God loves you as much as he loves me, and God loves us as much as he loves his own son Jesus Christ.”
Since returning home, I have also written out the list of six fossil fuel enemies on a card, and placed it on the station where I say my morning prayers. I’ve substituted UAE and Al Jaber for Azerbaijan and Babayev. Sometimes my prayers are just for a general blessing, and not for a curse. Sometimes, depending on a name that pops up in the news, I will pray a prayer of forgiveness. (I suspect I’ll be doing that a lot in 2024 when so many “powerful deniers” are seeking office, and so much of the electorate, including from my own tribe, is seeking to put them there.) “Loving your enemies” now feels like practice, but it hasn’t lost its feel of discovery.
Mukhtar Babayev, President of next year’s COP29 in Baku
Under the Kyoto Protocol, an axis was established with the designation of Annex 1 and non-Annex 1 nations. This was just diplomatic-speak for “Developed Nations” with high historical emissions and high incomes, and “Developing Nations.” This traditional split has characterized much of the animosity that ended up sinking the Kyoto Protocol and that made the negotiation of the Paris Agreement and its rulebook such an agonizing affair. But battle lines have shifted over time. Perhaps it was because of China. After 2006, the year when China—a non-Annex 1 nation—replaced the US as the largest annual emitter of CO2, it became hard to think that developed nations vs. developing nations was the most meaningful way to understand what was happening with climate change. It’s also possible that something shifted in 2022 at COP27 in Egypt with the establishment, finally, of a Loss and Damage Fund and with attention paid to such conciliatory measures as the Bridgetown Initiative which brings debt relief (a traditional tension) into conversation with climate finance (also a traditional tension).
I’m not saying that the climate crisis’s axis of contention between developed and developing nations has been removed, or that it ever will be, but it did seem to shift this year at COP28 so as to include a new axis: fossil fuel interests and all-of-the-rest-of-us. How else can we make sense of nations like the UAE or Azerbaijan (COP hosts) who are both petrostates and non-Annex 1 nations? How can we understand COP presidents like Al Jaber or Babayev with their concurrent oil company backgrounds, credentials, and Friedmann Doctrine obligations? How can two Canadians like Rhona DelFrari and Steven Guilbeault both wear the same color badge into the Blue Zone when the latter is supposed to negotiate a transition away from fossil fuels and the former is sent to exaggerate the promise of CCS?
Make no mistake: the battle against the fossil fuel industry was enjoined at COP28 in Dubai, and there’s no going back. I can’t help but think that Jesus’s command to “love your enemies” is going to loom larger and larger for all of us, not only morally, but also strategically. If you are not yet on the path of discovery, a long line of lovers—Jesus, Martin Luther King, Corrie ten Boom, Fijian Prime Minister Rabuka—invite you to join us, the Resistance.