Deutsche Welle: The southern German city of Constance has become the first in the nation to pass a resolution declaring a climate emergency. The resolution, which was passed unanimously by the city council on Thursday [May 2, 2019], was urged by the local chapter of the environmental group Fridays for Future.
The resolution has several aims, including a goal to provide a climate-neutral supply of energy to buildings and a new mobility management plan.
The plan came about in February when environmentalists approached Mayor Uli Burchardt, who then tasked administrators with developing a provisional plan.
“In order to ensure that the passage of this resolution is more than a symbolic act, we have to analyze who can and must contribute to it,” said city representatives on Thursday.
Members of Fridays for Future said the city had committed to providing annual reports to monitor progress in reducing its carbon emissions. “The Constance city council’s climate emergency declaration is an important signal for the whole of Germany,” they said in a statement.
Although it has been acknowledged that the term emergency was not used in the traditional legal sense, council members found it important to acknowledge the acute threat posed by climate change, “and to make stemming the climate crisis and its grave consequences a top priority.”
A number of cities around the world, including Los Angeles, London, Vancouver, and Basel have recently passed similar resolutions. On Thursday, the British Parliament did so as well.
Prophetic Link:
“While appearing to the children of men as a great physician who can heal all their maladies, [Satan] will bring disease and disaster, until populous cities are reduced to ruin and desolation. Even now he is at work. In accidents and calamities by sea and by land, in great conflagrations, in fierce tornadoes and terrific hailstorms, in tempests, floods, cyclones, tidal waves, and earthquakes, in every place and in a thousand forms, Satan is exercising his power. He sweeps away the ripening harvest, and famine and distress follow. He imparts to the air a deadly taint, and thousands perish by the pestilence. These visitations are to become more and more frequent and disastrous. Destruction will be upon both man and beast. ‘The earth mourneth and fadeth away,’ ‘the haughty people … do languish. The earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof; because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant.’ Isaiah 24:4, 5.
“And then the great deceiver will persuade men that those who serve God are causing these evils. The class that have provoked the displeasure of Heaven will charge all their troubles upon those whose obedience to God’s commandments is a perpetual reproof to transgressors. It will be declared that men are offending God by the violation of the Sunday sabbath; that this sin has brought calamities which will not cease until Sunday observance shall be strictly enforced; and that those who present the claims of the fourth commandment, thus destroying reverence for Sunday, are troublers of the people, preventing their restoration to divine favor and temporal prosperity. Thus the accusation urged of old against the servant of God will be repeated and upon grounds equally well established: ‘And it came to pass, when Ahab saw Elijah, that Ahab said unto him, Art thou he that troubleth Israel? And he answered, I have not troubled Israel; but thou, and thy father’s house, in that ye have forsaken the commandments of the Lord, and thou hast followed Baalim.’ 1 Kings 18:17, 18. As the wrath of the people shall be excited by false charges, they will pursue a course toward God’s ambassadors very similar to that which apostate Israel pursued toward Elijah.” Great Controversy, pages 589-590.
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