FossilFreeUMC

Reprinted from Mark Davies’ Moral Clarity for a Fossil Free UMC – One World House – Mark Davies

Living in Oklahoma most of my life, I have had a front row seat to watch how fossil fuel companies work their influence to protect their interests and expand their profits regardless of the impact on our climate crisis. They capture non-profits by making them dependent on their charitable giving; they capture government officials by making them dependent on their political influence spending; they capture higher education through financial influence that leads to board of trustees representation and academic leadership that favors their interests; and they capture churches by fostering financial dependence of churches on fossil fuel money. 

Many denominations have found the moral and missional fortitude to break free from the control that fossil fuel companies exert over them, but the United Methodist Church is not one of them. The entity that manages United Methodist investments, Wespath, is persistent in its desire to continue to invest vast sums of money in and thereby profit from fossil fuel companies that are destroying a livable climate for life as we currently know it. 

Wespath continues to invest in fossil fuel companies under the guise of engaging these companies to make them more socially and ecologically responsible, but these are the same companies that have known for decades that their products are leading to a catastrophic climate crisis for all life on Earth and have responded with a propaganda campaign of misinformation and disinformation to sow seeds of doubt in the public about climate science so they could continue to profit off our diminishing future. They also profit off plastics that are polluting our waterways and oceans, and now we even have micro-plastics in our brains.

Fossil fuel companies represent a multi-trillion dollar enterprise, and it is beyond naive to think that a small fraction of the United Methodist Church’s $26 billion in holdings being invested in their climate destroying profiteering is going to have any positive influence on these companies whatsoever. If having their own scientists warn them in the 1970s that continued use of fossil fuels would have catastrophic consequences for all of life didn’t change their ways, we can hardly think the United Methodist investments in their companies will somehow lead to their climate repentance.

If United Methodist investments are making no demonstrable difference in the ongoing climate disrupting activities of the fossil fuel industry, then there is no moral justification for continued investment in these companies in order to have a seat at their tables. It is tragically way past time to realize that the United Methodist Church, through Wespath, taking a seat at these tables is far more likely helping fossil fuel companies profit by giving them political and religious cover than it is influencing them towards positive change, and it is doing nothing to protect a livable climate – that work must be done through political action and regulations that these very same fossil fuel companies are doing all in their power to diminish.

Fossil fuel companies are responsible for gutting the Environmental Protection Agency, helping to fund the election of a fascist government in the United States, creating barriers to clean energy, sowing seeds of doubt about climate science, withdrawing the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement, rapidly hurling our planet towards climate chaos and the death of billions of people, and accelerating the sixth great extinction on our planet; but for some pathetic reason beyond my comprehension, the United Methodist Church through Wespath continues to see the fossil fuel industry as a good investment of its money.

Divesting from fossil fuels is not naive as some supporters of continued investment and engagement maintain, rather it is an expression of moral clarity that profiting from the companies that are knowingly destroying a livable climate for life on Earth is evil.