Jul 10, 2022 Hot Take

Hallelujah, Churches Have Seen the Light

By Amy Westervelt

The Presbyterian Church made a huge announcement this week: it will divest $4-$7 million from fossil fuels entirely. That includes removing its money from five oil companies: Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Marathon Petroleum, Phillips 66 and Valero Energy. The announcement came on the heels of another announcement from three dozen other religious groups that have also divested from fossil fuel. It's a big deal, not just as a win for divestment and less money for Big Oil, but also because of the longstanding relationship between western Christianity and oil.

Religion and oil have been deeply intertwined from the very early days of the industry in the U.S. According to Darren Dochuk, author of the book Annointed with Oil, which traces the history of this relationship in great detail, "Oil is first found in western Pennsylvania. This is a land of folk religion, right? Tucked away in Appalachia. Where does oil discovery and exploration go next? It goes to east Texas. It goes to California. It goes to regions where there is already kind of an established kind of folk religiosity, much of it very intensely evangelical. So, you know, where oil arrives, there's already a built-in mechanism that, whether it's Pentecostal or Presbyterian, allows this prosperity gospel to flourish at the ground level."

Early oil men like Lyman Stewart and John D. Rockefeller were deeply religious men who believed that God had chosen them not just to find oil, but to profit from it, and, eventually even to use it as a tool for reaching new converts. "There is evidence of American corporations, those located in the West in particular, in relying on information provided by missionaries for exploration and also lines of potential marketing in places like Peru," Dochuk explains.

Peru was one of the first countries where a U.S. oilman, Presbyterian leader Lyman Stewart, found large oil reserves.

He moved to Southern California in the late 1800s and started Union Oil company. Eager to build his own oil empire in the West to compete with the Rockefellers' stranglehold in the East, he started looking to Latin America to do that. "An executive in the company was a missionary in Peru and was aware both of the oil potential of Peru but also of this kind of fertile, as they saw it, land for witnessing and spreading a gospel of conservative evangelicalism," Dochuk says. "So, these two operations, the search for oil and the quest to save souls for Christ, as Lyman Stewart saw it, went hand in hand very much early on."

Which not only makes the announcement about the Presbyterian Church divesting in fossil fuels that much more important, it also makes divestment that much more complicated and fraught for the church. Leaders in the Presbyterian Church have been talking about divestment since the 1980s, but opted to try to engage with company leadership in an effort to try to pressure them to change. This move to finally embrace divestment marks an evolution there, a realization that those changes aren't coming, that engagement isn't enough, that there really is no compromise between the status quo and winding down fossil fuels. In a lot of ways it's a precursor to the rest of society disentangling itself from the grip of fossil fuels…and it's about damn time.

Upgrade now for full access!

May and June Were a Mixed Bag for Climate Coverage

By Mary Annaïse Heglar

Ever since May, it feels like the news has been dominated by two things: the overturning of Roe vs. Wade and the January 6 hearings. As we’ve written about ad nauseum in this newsletter, neither of those two things are separate from the climate crisis, but that’s usually how the story is told. At the same time, we’re kicking off wildfire and hurricane season with terrifying temperatures across the globe. And, as far as I’ve heard, all the news outlets that made Big Pledges to tackle the climate story haven’t issued statements to the contrary. So… let’s check in on how media coverage on climate change panned out in May and June.

Upgrade to keep reading

Survivors' Guilt

By Amy Westervelt

California is on fire again. This time, an out-of-control wildfire is threatening Yosemite and, in particular, a grove of ancient sequoias that have been rooted in the ground there for more than 500 years. Every year, for the last decade or so, I have braced myself for fire season, starting around April and going until the end of December, tensing up whenever there's lightning or a dry wind. This year's different. I'm worried and watching still, but I'm not there.

Upgrade to keep reading

LOL @ BP

By Mary Annaïse Heglar

Okay, I’ll be the first to admit that I have not been on top of my greentrolling game lately. I’ve kind of just needed a break from social media and technology in general, so I’ve been keeping my distance. Which is how I happened to miss this gem of a tweet from my #ClimateBae BP:

pic.twitter.com/5UI4cx4SgM
— Christian Henderson (@CjvHenderson) June 14, 2022

As a bisexual woman in the Philippines, I’m always having literal nightmares about my safety and my future, which is why this #Pride Month I’m partnering with @Shell and @bp_plc to burn the patriarchy, as well as more coal, gas and human rights in the climate change er— https://t.co/cYCeJVbocy
— Beatrice Tulagan (@beatricetulagan) June 15, 2022

BP…sweetheart…babydoll…sugar pie…GIRL..Verbalizing support for the LGBTQ community is not what gets you nasty comments on the Twitter machine. Never in my entire time of cyberstalking and cyberbullying BP have I seen anything homophobic or hateful in the comments. What I HAVE seen are people pointing out the hypocrisy of “supporting” the queer community while… doing your damndest to end life on earth for everyone–including the queer community!

Upgrade to keep reading