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Faiths See Climate Change as a Moral and Practical Threat May 4th, 2015
Faith groups are mobilizing on climate change, seeing it as an existential threat to creation. Pope Francis will issue a papal encyclical on the environment this summer, which is expected to highlight both the need to reduce man-made carbon emissions, and for wealthy countries to help poorer nations deal with it, as they have done little to create the problem.
Meanwhile, the Church of England is putting its pounds and pence where its mouth is: The body that administers the worldwide Anglican Communion last week announced it is divesting from thermal coal and tar sands.
Islamic finance has played a major role in clean energy investment so far this decade.
Divestment from these most carbon intensive forms of energy is also good financial management. With pressure growing both from businesses concerned about how to operate in a world disrupted by climate change, and increasingly vocal popular movements, a price on carbon to discourage its use, is becoming more likely. Alongside this is the fact that renewable forms of energy – wind, solar, geothermal, and the like, are increasingly cost competitive. If the damages to health and the climate were factored into the price of carbon fuels, renewables would already be a clear winner.
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Religious Leaders Support Normalization with Cuba May 4th, 2015
Photo credit (see below)
Thirty U.S. religious organizations signed onto a letter to Congress urging an end to the decades-long embargo with Cuba. The Rev. William Antone, U.S. Provincial, signed on for the Missionary Oblates USP. The letter refers to the long-standing ties of many of the faith organizations to religious bodies in Cuba, and cite their call for normalization of relations and an end to the embargo.
Photo credit: Krasivaja at the English language Wikipedia [GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons
Two Years After Rana Plaza… May 1st, 2015
Two years after the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh, concerns linger. These include the timeliness of major remediation efforts, the establishment of factory health and safety committees, and corporate commitments to a victims’ fund. A coalition of global investors representing $2.5 trillion in assets – including the Missionary Oblates – have sent letters to corporate members of the Bangladesh Accord for Fire and Building Safety (Accord) and the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety (Alliance). The letters request that companies disclose their efforts to safeguard the lives of workers in Bangladesh garment factories.
Read the investor letter here…
Faith-based Investors Help VOICE to Secure Needed Funding from GE April 28th, 2015
Faith-based and socially responsible investors enabled leaders from VOICE (Virginians Organized for Interfaith Community Engagement) to use their proxies to attend the GE AGM in Oklahoma City on April 22. VOICE was interested to attend the AGM to press GE to commit to $1 million in funding for the Metro IAF/VOICE Equity Restoration Fund. The faith-based activists had already secured $1 million from J.P. Morgan and $1.5 million from Bank of America.
Their effort was successful, which the faith leaders learned in an email from the company just as they were boarding their flight to Oklahoma. The grant will serve to leverage $10 million+ from religious and other social investors to help finance the rehabilitation of blighted and abandoned properties, construction of new homes, the development of affordable rental housing, and other community restoration activities in Prince William County, VA.
The Oblates, through Fr Seamus Finn, OMI have been working with VOICE for several years on this initiative designed to help those crushed by the mortgage crisis in 2007-08.
Read the letter from GE committing to this grant funding.
The Vatican Announces Summit on Climate Change April 22nd, 2015
Thanks to Catholic Rural Life for the information in this post.
The Vatican announced this week that it will host a one-day conference on climate change on April 28, featuring some of the world’s leading climate scientists. The conference is titled Protect the Earth, Dignify Humanity and is subtitled “The Moral Dimensions of Climate Change and Sustainable Development.”
The conference will highlight “the intrinsic connection between respect for the environment and respect for people—especially the poor, the excluded, victims of human trafficking and modern slavery, children and future generations,” states a Vatican announcement.
The purpose of the conference, according to the Vatican announcement, is to help build a global movement across all religions for sustainable development and climate change throughout 2015 and beyond.
Besides climate scientists, the one-day summit will include participants from major world religions. The aim here, says the Vatican, is to “elevate the debate on the moral dimensions of protecting the environment in advance of the papal encyclical.”
The Pope’s much-anticipated encyclical on the environment is expected in late June.
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