FossilFreeUMC

Commentary – Reprinted from One World House.

After an amazing first week of progress at the United Methodist General Conference in Charlotte, NC in the United States, it has become clear that it is the will of the General Conference to move away from language and practices that have caused so many persons harm, especially our LGBTQ2S+ siblings. It is also clear that the General Conference wishes to move away from colonialist expressions of our faith and to be antiracist in belief and practice. It is also clear that the General Conference wants to continue moving a away from being a U.S. centric church to become even more worldwide, inclusive, diverse, and accessible and to be in solidarity with the oppressed and most vulnerable in our world. This is truly Good News!

What is not yet clear is whether this General Conference will move away from The United Methodist Church’s continued investments in fossil fuel companies, the sector of our economy most responsible for the destruction of a livable climate for all life. It is very clear, however, that the agency responsible for managing United Methodist investments, Wespath, wants to continue its current approach of investing and engaging with the companies contributing the most to the climate crisis that is already upon us here and now and that poses a threat to human civilization to all life and disproportionately affects the most vulnerable among us.

By continuing an approach of investment and engagement with fossil fuel companies, The United Methodist Church is giving these companies a stamp of approval they do not deserve by continuing to invest $1 billion in them, all the while profiting from actions that are destroying a livable climate. Fossil fuel companies see our investment and engagement strategy as a game that gives them the appearance of being open to doing something about the climate crisis while simultaneously pursuing more and more extraction of fossil fuels and promoting more and more fossil fuel infrastructure, perpetuating a vicious cycle of fossil fuel dependence. Fossil fuel companies are very good at this game, and it is not a game in which persons and organizations who are serious about addressing the urgency of the climate crisis ought to be playing.

So many of us have been raised to believe that the free market and socially and ecological responsible corporations will lead us to human and ecological flourishing, but where has the free market actually led us? It has led us to a climate crisis, the dawn of the sixth great extinction, ocean acidification and the collapse of fisheries and the death of coral reefs, sea level rise, more extreme weather events including more extreme droughts and floods, and a nearly 70% reduction in the number of wildlife in the last 50 years. Far from solving these challenges, an under regulated free market has exacerbated all of these fiercely urgent problems. Investing in and engaging as stockholders with the companies most responsible for this ecological crisis is the not way to the systemic change necessary to avoid the ecological and economic chaos we are bringing upon ourselves.

If fossil fuel companies had any interest in preserving a livable climate, they would have done the following at the very least:

1. Told the world in the 1970s that their own scientists predicted the climate crisis rather than hiding the information from the public
2. Not spent billions of dollars on misinformation and disinformation over many decades to sow seeds of doubt about the reality of the climate crisis
3. Not lobbied and continue to lobby at every turn for expansion of fossil fuel extraction and fossil fuel infrastructure
4. Not paid merchants of doubt to attack and encourage others to attack and lie about the work of climate scientists
5. Not spent billions of dollars to elect politicians who promised to do nothing about the climate crisis, removed us from global climate agreements, and who attempted to dismantle the EPA.

Fossil fuel companies have had decades to prove that they care about the climate crisis. They don’t, and the faster that persons and organizations working for climate justice face this reality, the better it will be for the preservation of a livable climate for all life on Earth.

Here in the United States, when corporations in the 1970s were polluting our air and water, we did not invest and engage our way to clean air and clean water; we created the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Environmental Protection Agency. Now that fossil fuel companies are ruining a livable climate, we cannot invest and engage our way to preserve a livable climate. We need a Climate Act with similar enforceable laws. This is what The United Methodist Church should be advocating, not a continued seat at the stockholder tables of the companies doing all in their power to do as little about the climate crisis as they possibly can. This is not the Wesleyan way of doing no harm.

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The Rev. Dr. Mark Y. A. Davies is the Wimberly Professor of Social and Ecological Ethics and Director of the World House Institute for Social and Ecological Responsibility at United Methodist-related Oklahoma City University. He is Executive Director of the Leadership, Education, and Development (LEaD) Hub North America of the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry of the United Methodist Church. This post is adapted with permission from Dr. Davies’ blog, One World House. To reproduce this content elsewhere, please contact the author via his blog or Facebook.

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