The most interesting part of Cizik’s statement is that he was “converted in 2002 to the science of climate change.” The main topic of this blog is the modes of change people will undergo in response to global warming. And, to make a truly productive change in one’s life — a change which leads one to act in carbon-neutral ways, and leads one to stop particiating in the most wasteful parts of consumer society — a conversion experience may indeed be what many people need.

Responses to climate change, if they are to do any good, will need to involve “reappraisals of values,” (p. 524) as Jared Diamond puts it in Collapse How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. To pull off a significant reappraisal of values, and to discard the value of spectacular wastefulness in favor of something more fitted to nature and more reasonable in the face of a changing climate, we will need the leadership — and then some — of converted evangelical and other deeply devotional leaders.