Oil

Pope Francis delivering his blessing during the Angelus noon prayer, from the chapel of the hotel at the Vatican grounds where he lives on Nov. 26, 2023. Photograph by VATICAN MEDIA / Catholic Press Photo via Reuters.

Hundreds of Catholic institutions around the globe have announced plans to divest their finances of oil, gas, and coal to help fight climate change since Pope Francis published his landmark encyclical on environmental stewardship in 2015 urging a break with fossil fuels.

Zachary Lee 11-02-2023

'Killers of the Flower Moon' / Apple Studios

The real mystery of Killers of the Flower Moon is not who murdered so many Osage people, it’s how these murders can go on for so long — how the loss of life can be dismissed with such apathy.

The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby attends the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland Jan. 22, 2016. REUTERS/Ruben Sprich

The Church of England Pensions Board said it had decided to divest its holding in Shell over what it said were insufficient plans to align its strategy to the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Pope Francis arrives to lead the Wednesday general audience in Saint Peter's square at the Vatican, May 23, 2018. Image via REUTERS/Stefano Rellandini. 

He said there was a "very solid scientific consensus" that the planet was warming and that people had to "combat this warming or at least the human causes which produce or aggravate it" because greenhouse gases were "released mainly as a result of human activity."

Image via RNS/Reuters/Romeo Ranoco

Nine Catholic organizations from around the world have announced they are divesting their savings from coal, oil, and gas companies, in a joint bid to fight climate change.

Religious orders and dioceses from the U.S. and Italy made the announcement on May 10, ahead of international negotiations due this month on implementing the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Image via DVIDSHUB/flickr.com

Ahmed Abdelsattar was 14 when Islamic State swept into Mosul and declared a caliphate in 2014. Fearing he would be indoctrinated and sent to fight by the militants, his parents took him out of school.

Three years later, he sells ice cream at a refugee camp for internally displaced Iraqis. His family have lost their home, and his father is too old for the manual labor positions at the camp, which means he is his family's sole breadwinner.

The Editors 8-07-2014

The deep roots of the land need deep roots of stewardship.

BETWEEN 6:30 AND 7 nearly every morning, a dark rumble drifts up through the chilled air from the railroad tracks at the bottom of our hayfield in the Adirondack foothills of New York. A line of more than 100 black tanker cars, mostly full of fracked Bakken oil from North Dakota, rolls southward. They will pass the field where our neighbor’s kids play, then close alongside beautiful Lake Champlain, which defines this region, and on to Albany, where the oil will be put on barges and floated down the Hudson River to New Jersey, to be stored or refined.

Tanker cars like these have been blowing up recently. An accident north of us, over the Canadian border, flattened a downtown and killed 47 people. These cars carry a mix of crude oil and volatile compounds arising from the fracking process, making them dangerously flammable. I worry about my small town’s volunteer fire fighters, all of whom I know personally and admire greatly, who do not have the expertise or the equipment to deal with an accident like that.

Watching the tanker cars, I am also haunted by a scene seared into my memory five months ago. We are driving east along U.S. Route 2 in North Dakota, our small camper in tow, trying to pass through Williston, smack in the middle of the Bakken oil fields.

As the sun sets, we see hundreds of oil and gas rigs flaring excess volatile gases in huge plumes of orange flame. Processing plants spew fumes of God-knows-what. There are row upon row of metal trailers, boxes really, actually used as housing for people. Unrelenting traffic beats a path on the undivided highway under furious construction, with no breakdown lanes or turn-offs for miles. Huge water tankers and oil trucks force us to move onward at 60 mph; there will be no rest for us here, as all campgrounds, gas stations, and parking lots are filled with the rigs of the temporary workers.

Liz Schmitt 6-23-2014

Another Christian school moves to divest – this time, a Catholic university

Just one week after Serene Jones, President of Union Theological Seminary, announced their decision to become the world’s first seminary to divest from fossil fuels, another first announced. The University of Dayton, a Catholic, Marianist university, will divest fossil fuels from its $670 million investment pool. This is the first Catholic university in the world to do so.

Just as divestment makes sense for Union Theological Seminary and its history of engaging social justice, this choice is in line with Catholic social teachings and the Marianist values of leadership and service to humanity. Marianists view Mary, the mother of Jesus, as their model of discipleship, and their mission is to bring Christ into the world and work for the coming of Christ’s kingdom.

Union and the University of Dayton are the newest schools joining the growing list of U.S. colleges and universities divesting from fossil fuels as a way to stop financially supporting the climate pollution and the public health implications of coal, oil, and natural gas as the dominant sources of energy in the country. Their announcements are unique because they speak not only of the moral choice, but of the Christian choice on matters of financial investment.

At the Presbyterian Church (USA) General Assembly this past week, in addition to the denomination’s decision to divest from three companies in relation to conflict in Israel/Palestine, a decision was made to begin the discernment process on fossil fuel divestment. The fossil fuel divestment conversation is happening in many churches and religious institutions across the country, and Union Theological Seminary and the University of Dayton are clear that they see this as an act of Christian witness for protecting God’s creation and people.

Information is from The University of Dayton’s website.

Rebecca Kraybill 5-13-2014

A map of the proposed route for the Keystone XL pipeline

Cal DeWitt 5-09-2014

WONDERFULLY, WE FIND ourselves very much alive in “a large and beautiful house,” as Cicero called it in his day. We know it was built not only for “the sake of mice and weasels,” or “immortal gods,” but for the entire array of life on Earth.

As we behold the remarkably habitable abode we call Earth, we are left to wonder: What is this grand house in which we live, move, and have our being? What makes it such a habitable abode?

The answer is written elegantly before our eyes in creation itself. And when we join this with reading God’s word, we find the foundation of the answer: “The [geophysical] earth (ge) is the Lord’s and its fullness, the [biosphere] (oikoumene) and everything that lives in it,” as it says in the Septuagint translation of Psalm 24:1.

We discover as grateful dwellers in this most habitable abode that we also are its housekeepers. If we mess it up, it will teach us something about proper housekeeping. And from scripture we learn that we are its Earth-keepers, commissioned, as the Anglican Communion puts it, “to strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth.”

In the beautiful architecture of Earth, we find the foundations of life in the geophysical earth as well as keystone species in its biosphere. In the architecture of our houses and churches, we find structures of our own crafting, such as foundations, cornerstones, columns, arches, domes, and keystones.

Significantly, one of these architectural features appears in the name “Keystone XL,” the proposed tar sands oil pipeline. Architecturally, a keystone locks together two legs of an arch. If completed, Keystone XL would do much the same.

Sara Stratton 4-01-2014

We have a responsibility to use the Earth's wealth relationally, not exploitatively.

Bill McKibben 3-05-2014

(Thaiview / Shutterstock)

I'D ALWAYS HOPED that the president’s “all of the above” energy strategy was a mere campaign slogan, a way to avoid riling anyone up as he ran for re-election. But he’s made pretty clear that it’s actually his guiding light.

“The all-of-the-above energy strategy I announced a few years ago is working,” he crowed in his State of the Union address. And indeed it is, if the goal is to drill, baby, drill. In Obama’s time in office, U.S. oil production has increased 50 percent; analysts estimate that by the time he’s gone in 2016, we’ll have literally doubled the amount of oil we produce in this country. The curve for natural gas production has been almost as steep, and though we’re burning less coal in our own power plants the amount we export has hit record highs.

In political terms, Barack Obama holds us environmentalists at bay with pretty words on climate change, but when it comes time to drill he’s the go-to guy. As he told a crowd of cheering oilmen in Oklahoma during the last campaign, “over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We’re opening up more than 75 percent of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth and then some.”

Bill McKibben 1-05-2014

(Rena Schild / Shutterstock)

PHYSICS IS IMPLACABLE—it won’t bend even to politics.

Which is why it comes as bad news to see the charts on U.S. production of fossil fuels. During the Obama years, even as the president has been touting his administration’s success in reducing our domestic carbon emissions, it turns out that we’ve been drilling, mining, and fracking for more oil, coal, and gas than ever before. In fact, we’ve passed Saudi Arabia in oil production and are about to pass Russia in oil and gas output combined; meanwhile our coal exports have reached new highs. We’ve become the world’s biggest fossil fuel producer.

Which means that, precisely in the years when it’s become clear how much damage climate change is doing—the years of Midwest drought, of Hurricane Sandy—the United States has been bucking physics. We’re going in exactly the wrong direction.

The White House might make two arguments in response. One, it’s not their fault: The oil boom in places like North Dakota is all private enterprise. But in fact Obama’s done much to grease the skids for this boom: He’s opened up big offshore tracts for drilling, and even let the oil companies into the Arctic. His Interior Department has held auctions for vast piles of Powder River Basin coal.

Wen Stephenson 10-25-2012
Seth Butler / www.sethbutler.com

Bill McKibben Speaking at Waitsfield, VT Connect The Dots Rally. Seth Butler / www.sethbutler.com

It was game time. The Saturday night crowd on the Vermont campus was festive, boisterous, pumped. People cheered and whooped when told that one of their heroes, climate activist Tim DeChristopher — serving a two-year federal sentence for his civil disobedience opposing new oil and gas drilling in Utah — would soon be back on the field.

When the man on the stage, 350.org’s Bill McKibben, said it was time to march not just on Washington but on the headquarters of fossil fuel companies — “it’s time to march on Dallas” — and asked those to stand who’d be willing to join in the fight, seemingly every person filling the University of Vermont’s cavernous Ira Allen Chapel, some 800 souls, rose to their feet.

McKibben and 350, the folks who brought us the Keystone XL pipeline protests, are now calling for a nationwide divestment campaign aimed at fossil fuel companies’ bottom line. Beginning with student-led campaigns on college campuses, modeled on the anti-apartheid campaigns of the 1980s, they’ll pressure institutions to withdraw all investments from big oil and coal and gas. Their larger goal is to ignite a morally charged movement to strip the industry of its legitimacy.

“The fossil fuel industry has behaved so recklessly that they should lose their social license — their veneer of respectability,” McKibben tells his audience. “You want to take away our planet and our future? We’re going to take away your money and your good name.”

CHOOSING TO PAY more for a gallon of gas than the price at the pump sounds a bit crazy—but that is exactly what a couple of dozen members of the Community of St. Martin, a worshipping group of Lutherans, Catholics, Mennonites, and others in Minneapolis, Minnesota, have covenanted for more than a year. It’s one way they’re seeking to show commitment to environmental stewardship.

After committing to a voluntary “tax” rate (from $1 to $3 per gallon, depending on income), each community member keeps track of gas receipts. The Community of St. Martin (CSM) collectively decides in advance how their taxes will be spent each quarter. Every three months, the group gathers to write checks and conduct a lively discussion about changes in their gasoline usage habits. CSM borrowed the idea from a group in Goshen, Indiana, that started a similar campaign 10 years ago.

Why intentionally pay more for gas than it costs? According to CSM members, this is precisely the point: The price of gas in the U.S. doesn’t reflect the actual costs that U.S. society and the global community incur as a result of the country’s dependence on oil. Those costs include fossil fuel’s contributions to air pollution and global warming. Also hidden at the pump are the costs of U.S. strategies to maintain an inexpensive supply of oil, often through political or military interventions in oil-producing regions—not to mention $4 billion a year in tax credits and subsidies to Big Oil.

Sara Nelson-Pallmeyer, the group’s treasurer, says that “everyone is paying a different amount—from $10 to $385 per month. The fun part is that so far we’ve given more than $5,000 to organizations working on alternative transportation solutions and advocating for political change around climate-change issues.” She added that, ironically, “The real heroes of the group are the ones paying the least.”

Rare red pandas, wrestling in the snow. Image via Wiki Commons http://bit.ly/xcp

Rare red pandas, wrestling in the snow. Image via Wiki Commons http://bit.ly/xcpR67

Having critics isn’t a bad thing. Sometimes they serve as a sort of public accountability. Other times, they express questions that others might be asking but haven’t voiced.

Marvin Olasky, editor in chief of World Magazine, came out with a quick critique of Sojourners’ press release celebrating the Obama Administration’s decision to reject the current plans for building the Keystone XL pipeline. His post offers an excellent opportunity to address a few things that others might have been wondering as well.

His headline? “Sojourners and Keystone: Using the Bible for Political Purposes.”

Elizabeth Palmberg 1-18-2012
Girl Scout cookies. Image via Wylio http://bit.ly/zwXfFU

Girl Scout cookies. Photo by Marit & Toomas Hinnosaar via Wylio http://bit.ly/zwXfFU

We're once again in that sugary time of year, Girl Scout cookie season — but, as two Girl Scouts from Ann Arbor, Mich., want you to know, there's palm oil in those cookies, as there is in many foods we eat. And palm oil has been linked not only with rainforest destruction in Indonesia, but with plantations in league with paramilitary killers in Colombia. (Kind of gives appalling new meaning to the phrase “cookie monster.”)

Last year I also met with Colombian farmers driven off their land by paramilitaries, as I write about in this month's issue of Sojourners, so I was excited to interview Madison and Rhiannon after their recent trip to Colombia.

Read on to find out about how, trying to live by the Girl Scout Law, these two intrepid 11th-graders have been on a five-year mission to stop cookies — and lots of other things you may be planning to eat — from, well, palming off human rights abuses on U.S. snack-seekers.

Jim Wallis 11-07-2011
A demonstrator at Sunday's anti-Keystone XL pipeline rally in Washington, D.C. P

A demonstrator at Sunday's anti-Keystone XL pipeline rally in Washington, D.C. Photo for Sojourners by Joan Bisset.

I always notice something when speaking to a mostly secular audience. Many people have been so hurt or rejected by the bad religion in which they were raised or have encountered elsewhere over the course of their lives, and, quite understandably, they are skeptical and wary of the faith community. But when someone looks like a faith leader (this is where the ecclesial robe helps ) and says things that are different from what they expect or are used to, their response is one of gratitude and the moment becomes an opportunity for healing.

After I spoke Sunday and joined the circle around the White House, person after person came up to me to express their thanks or simply to talk.

My favorite comment of the day came from a woman who quietly whispered in my ear, "You make me almost want to be a Christian."

Lisa Sharon Harper 11-02-2011

american dream poster

Nearly 50 million Americans are currently living below the poverty line (that is $22,000 for a household of four) and half of them are working full time jobs.

In our current economic system, the "happiness" of the super-elite is secured while the lives, liberty, and access to basic needs of the rest suffer. This isn't the American Dream and it isn't God's dream either.