NET ZERO: The Church of England's One Unqualified Success

A Satirical Essay

By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I July 10, 2026

The Church of England announced this week that it will not meet its target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2030, and the faithful across England wept — all eleven of them.

This is, of course, deeply unfair to the church. The Church of England is in fact well ahead of schedule on net zero. It is simply measuring the wrong thing. While the bean counters at Church House fret over boiler emissions and the carbon footprint of votive candles, the church has been quietly achieving net zero where it really counts: in the pews.

Consider the numbers. Sunday attendance has been declining so reliably, so predictably, so sustainably, that actuaries now use it to calibrate their instruments. At current rates of decarbonization — sorry, decongregationalization — the Church of England will achieve Net Zero Worshippers well before 2050, comfortably beating the Paris Agreement, the Lambeth Conference, and the Second Coming, whichever arrives first.

A Carbon-Neutral Kingdom

And here is the genius the progress report missed: an empty church is a carbon-neutral church. No parishioners means no heating, no lighting, no tea urn belching steam after Evensong, no petrol burned driving to the 8 o'clock. Every congregation that quietly expires is a win for the planet. The Church Commissioners should stop apologizing and start applying for carbon credits. Sell them to British Airways. Fund the pension scheme. Everybody wins, except God, who was not consulted.

The new Archbishop of Canterbury, we are told, remains convinced the church will still be around in 2030 and has helpfully clarified that net zero “applies to smoke, not people.” This is reassuring, though one notes that the Church of England abandoned smoke decades ago along with sin, judgment, hell, and most of the Thirty-Nine Articles. The only incense rising from most parish churches these days is the gentle vapor of a heat pump struggling manfully against a fourteenth-century nave.

Ah yes, the heat pumps. General Synod, that great engine of missionary zeal, has spent more hours debating ground-source heating than it has spent debating the Resurrection — though to be fair, Synod regards the latter as the more controversial of the two. Rural churchwardens have been instructed to decarbonize buildings that predate the discovery of carbon. Somewhere in Norfolk, a 79-year-old treasurer is filling out a 40-page Net Zero Action Plan for a church with a congregation of six, four of whom are kneelers.

When the Faith Goes, the Real Estate Follows

Meanwhile, the evangelistic strategy writes itself. Why struggle to fill churches when you can simply close them? A closed church emits nothing. A sold church emits luxury flats.

The Episcopal Church in America — always a decade ahead of Canterbury in the race to the bottom — has already put its New York headquarters on the chopping block, proving that when the faith goes, the real estate follows. The archbishop says she hopes Lambeth Palace will not go the same way, and one sympathizes. “Two-bedroom apartment, river views, original Cranmer features, chapel converted to wellness studio” is a listing no one wants to read. Though the developers, unlike the diocese, would at least fill the place.

Here is the part the report will never say aloud: the Church of England's emissions problem was never carbon. It was hot air. Decades of it, rising from synods and study documents and Living in Love and Faith consultations, warming nothing but the self-regard of those producing it. If the church could capture and sequester the verbiage generated by its own commissions since 1990, it could heat every cathedral in England through the next ice age.

And while the bishops audit the candles, the people have voted with their feet — which, being a form of walking, is at least carbon-friendly. They have gone to the Pentecostals, to the Romans, to the garden center, to bed. The mystery is not why they left. The mystery is why the church thinks a photovoltaic panel on the lych-gate will bring them back.

The Gospel of Carbon

Because here is the thing the whole sorry exercise reveals: a church that no longer believes it has a message worth heating a building for will always find something else to be earnest about. The gospel of carbon requires no repentance the bishops find awkward, no doctrine the culture finds offensive, and no God who might interrupt the planning process. It is religion with the religion removed — which, come to think of it, has been the Church of England's flagship product for fifty years.

So let us not mock the missed target. Let us instead congratulate the Church of England on the target it is hitting, dead center, year after year: net-zero conviction, net-zero converts, net-zero confidence that the tomb was actually empty.

The tomb, as it happens, is the one thing in Anglicanism that is supposed to be empty.

The churches were meant to be full.

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