By Brian Roewe for Earthbeat.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration.

The San Diego Diocese has divested its financial holdings from the fossil fuel industry, the first Catholic diocese in the United States to make public such an economic move in response to Pope Francis' repeated calls for an end to the era of fossil fuels in the face of climate change.

While more than 350 Catholic institutions worldwide have announced divestment commitments, the omission of any U.S. diocese has been notable, given the nation's status as the global leader in fossil fuel production and largest historical source of planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions.

The Southern California diocese, led by Cardinal Robert McElroy, in 2021 began to explore the process of removing direct and indirect investments in companies involved in the extraction and production of coal, oil and gas from its portfolio of trust funds, retirement funds and health funds.

By the end of 2022, it had eliminated all direct investments in fossil fuels and reduced its indirect holdings, through mutual funds, to 3%, surpassing its goal of less than 5%. The diocese does not disclose the size of its investment portfolio. Throughout the past year, diocesan officials and its investment advisors continued to monitor the funds to ensure they were clean of direct fossil fuel stocks and meeting the mutual funds targets.

That monitoring alongside a desire not to prematurely declare mission accomplished led the diocese to refrain discussing its divestment until recently, Kevin Eckery, diocesan communications director, told EarthBeat.

The pivot in investment policy away from fossil fuels was done, Eckery said, "in keeping with the Holy Father's ideas about stewardship of the environment and not wasting resources," along with addressing human-driven climate change.

"This wasn't what we wanted to be invested in and we had other things that we wanted to do," he said.

Along with divesting, the diocese is looking to create a long-term program to promote investing in environmentally responsible companies.

"Pope Benedict XVI says that all purchasing is a moral act. And so we have to think about also the way that our financial behavior has an impact around the world," Christina Bagaglio Slentz, the diocese's associate director for creation care, told EarthBeat.

As part of their discernment, officials with the San Diego Diocese examined the socially responsible investment guidelines of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that were updated in 2021. Those guidelines advise Catholic institutions to "consider divestment from those companies that consistently fail to initiate policies intended to achieve the Paris Agreement goals," referring to the 2015 global pact where all nations agreed to reduce their emissions to limit global warming to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) and ideally 1.5 C (2.7 F).

Fossil fuel production is on pace to double the level allowed under the 1.5 C warming limit.

José Aguto, executive director of Catholic Climate Covenant, said the San Diego Diocese's divestment was "significant and an important marker."

"Pope Francis signals quite clearly, saying so starting in [his encyclical] Laudato Si', that we need to move away from fossil fuel production," Aguto said, adding, "Our Catholic institutions have a moral obligation to heed that call, to do what we need to do to divest, to move away from fossil fuels and into a renewable energy future."

Slentz called divestment "part of a broader effort to care for creation" within the San Diego Diocese.

To date, roughly 70% of its 97 parishes have installed solar panels, and the pastoral center gets nearly 90% of its electricity from renewable sources. It has also encouraged parishes to start creation care teams and is working to reduce single-use plastics throughout the diocese.

San Diego is one of at least 20 U.S. dioceses to enroll in the Vatican's Laudato Si' Action Platform, a multiyear project, endorsed by Francis, for Catholic institutions and individuals to live out the messages in the pope's 2015 encyclical, "Laudato Si', on Care for Our Common Home."

In Laudate Deum, his recent apostolic exhortation "on the climate crisis," Francis stated, "The necessary transition towards clean energy sources such as wind and solar energy, and the abandonment of fossil fuels, is not progressing at the necessary speed."

The pope called on nations at the COP28 United Nations climate summit in December to eliminate the use of fossil fuels, with the Vatican delegation in Dubai supporting the first-ever agreement by countries to work to transition away from fossil fuels.

Burning fossil fuels is the primary driver of climate change, as the greenhouse gas emissions that are released trap heat in the atmosphere. Since the late 1800s, average global temperature has risen between 1.1 and 1.2 degrees Celsius and by the early 2030s is on track to surpass 1.5 C - a point where scientists say millions more people will be put at risk from far more destructive, and possibly irreversible, climate-related impacts, like stronger storms, rising sea levels and more intense heat waves and droughts.

The U.S. is the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gas emissions, responsible for roughly a quarter of overall global emissions. It ranks second in present-day emissions, behind China, and is the largest producer and consumer of oil and gas in the world.

Nearly 360 Catholic institutions globally have announced fossil fuel divestment commitments, including 66 dioceses and eight national and regional bishops' conferences. So have 36 Catholic organizations in the U.S., among them nine universities (University of San Diego in 2021) and a dozen religious congregations and provinces.

In August, EarthBeat reported the San Diego Diocese was in the process of divesting, a development revealed as it was honored for its actions in response to Laudato Si'.

But the diocese waited to make the move public until it was certain it had achieved its divestment goals. News was featured in a late-December article in the Times of San Diego, and a Jan. 1 column in The Southern Cross, the diocesan newspaper.

Eckery said the returns in the newly divested portfolio have been "acceptable to us, so we don't feel we've made any sacrifice by doing it."

But beyond finances, he said McElroy and the diocese determined "it was the right thing to do."

Anna Johnson, North American senior programs manager for the Laudato Si' Movement, which keeps a database of Catholic divesting institutions, said, "We are very excited that San Diego has pursued and completed divestment, particularly in following our Catholic teachings responding to the ecological crisis that we are facing."

Aguto with Catholic Climate Covenant said that while divestment is an important step, it cannot be the only one. He argued its impact is somewhat limited due to the majority of fossil fuel reserves under control of nationally owned oil and gas companies that do not have stockholders.

"We're not getting to that, so we need to continue to find other ways beyond divestment if we're really going to get to the heart of the problem," he said.

Dan DiLeo, a theologian at Creighton University (which divested in 2020) who has advocated for Catholic institutions to divest from fossil fuels, said he applauded the "prophetic witness" and expressed hope it could inspire other U.S. dioceses and Catholic institutions to live out church teaching by cutting fossil fuels out of investment portfolios.

He added that U.S. institutions have a differentiated responsibility - a term Francis has used frequently - to lead in acting on climate change due to the nation's disproportionate consumption of fossil fuels.

Announcing the diocese's divestment wasn't about accolades or attention, the diocese stressed, but in an effort to share that it can be done and provide another resource to other organizations that may be exploring the possibility.

"We don't always need to reinvent the wheel," Slentz said.


Brian Roewe wrote this article for Earthbeat.


get more stories like this via email

Business leaders, clean transportation advocates and other experts say new technologies are helping to accelerate the transition to clean trucks and sustainable freight across Pennsylvania. Members of the Clean Trucks Pennsylvania Coalition are calling on federal and state leaders to back programs that support the deployment of clean-power trucks across the Commonwealth.

Jordan Stutt, senior director, northeast region with CALSTART, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing clean transportation solutions, said the goal is to get gas and diesel-powered trucks off the road.

"We are going to take one of the busiest freight corridors in the country, I-95, and turn it into one of the first zero-emission freight corridors in the U.S. That investment and the jobs that it will bring underscore that this transition to clean trucks is all about opportunity," he said.

The coalition is urging Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and state and local leaders to adopt the Advanced Clean Trucks Act. Advocates say the act would reduce emissions by 50% by 2030 and achieve net zero by 2050.

Brooke Petry, field organizer with Moms Clean Air Force of Pennsylvania, said zero-emission trucks are the key to cleaning up the air Pennsylvania families breathe. When residents of South Philadelphia step outside in the morning, the air often has a distinct toxic smell, and she added that toxic air pollution doesn't harm everyone equally.

"Here in Philadelphia, children of color are hospitalized for asthma complications at five times the rate of their white peers. Reducing harmful diesel pollution from trucks is a key component to address climate justice in our city and beyond," she explained.

Erin Johnson, Registered Nurse with the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments, said diesel exhaust is responsible for multiple types of respiratory illnesses and cancers in the region.

"The trucks, buses, trains and port operations that keep goods and services moving through our region also contribute to deadly air pollution. Diesel exhaust contains more than 40 known cancer-causing organic substances. The good news is that we have solutions to this diesel pollution problem," she said.


get more stories like this via email

Members of the environmental nonprofit GreenLatinos are involved in a push to get more Latinos across Texas involved in the fight against methane gas. Texas is one of the largest producers of the hazardous chemical.

Rogelio Meixueiro, Texas community advocate with GreenLatinos, said a large part of the campaign is educating the community.

"They tell me all the problems that they're experiencing, and the moment I connect with them the fact that there's a fracking site less than a mile away, they start seeing how, 'yeah ever since we moved to this area, we started having breathing problems.' The one that hurts me the most is really the birth defects. Learning that Latino women are some of the most impacted with birth defects is heartening," he explained.

He added that meetings will be held across the state over the next six months, culminating with a final day of action in Austin before the state Legislature.

The organization is forming what they call the Latino Methane Table, to make sure everyone has a seat at the table. Meixueiro said elected officials are passing laws that directly impact the immigrant population, and they hope to give them a voice before the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

"We're seeing how Latinos are constantly affected the most in the agriculture fields, construction. It's so hot, often we don't associate 'oh, methane' - the thing that we are getting out of the Permian - is actually the one that is creating some of the conditions," he explained.

He added the state has a history of being unfair to minorities.

"For Dallas and Fort Worth, what we're noticing is that there's a long history that is tied with redlining. And we notice how often the communities with the most amount of permits approved for fracking - fracking near day-care centers, fracking near homes - it's usually areas where particularly Latino and Black communities live," he continued.

By Julia Tilton for The Daily Yonder.
Broadcast version by Mark Richardson for Oregon News Service for the Public News Service/Daily Yonder Collaboration

When Oregon’s 2024 fire season ended in late October, over 1.9 million acres had burned across the state – an area larger than Delaware. For Tyler McCarty, district manager at the Coos Forest Protective Association (CFPA), in the coastal southwest part of the state, fires today are a “night and day difference” from what they were twenty years ago. 

McCarty spent more than two decades with the Oregon Department of Forestry before starting his current position in rural Coos County, where he also commands one of the state’s incident management teams that responds to large fires and other natural disasters. He started his career right out of high school as an entry level firefighter, and has been fighting fires since 2000.

“When I first started, a two or three thousand acre fire was a big fire,” McCarty told the Daily Yonder. “One of the fires that my incident management team was on this year was 180,000 acres.”

As the Oregon fire season trends longer and fires burn larger, McCarty and others who work with Oregon’s remaining few forest protective associations are grappling with questions about how they will retain personnel and secure enough funding to fight the fires of the future.

“You need more people to manage a 180,000 acre fire versus a 6,000 acre fire, which our system is kind of built on,” McCarty said. “Right now we’re operating in a system with a funding model that doesn’t support the fires that we’re seeing today.”

A Century of Community-Based Forest Protection

The first iteration of the forest protective association in Coos County was organized in 1910. Two years later, in 1912, the Douglas Forest Protective Association (DFPA) formed in the next county over. In those days, the goal was fewer fires and a sense of shared responsibility among those who owned and logged land in Oregon’s forests. 

Nowadays, the state of Oregon mandates that private forest landowners – many of whom are in the timber industry – have fire protection. Membership in a forest protective association like the one McCarty leads is one way to meet that requirement. 

The state of Oregon provides about 50% of the funding for these associations, according to Patrick Skrip, the district manager at DFPA. The other 50% comes from private and public landowners, such as the Bureau of Land Management and Bureau of Indian Affairs. Currently, Oregon has three forest protective associations that operate with this or a similar funding model. 

To the east, Idaho has its own version of community-based forest protection. Called timber protective associations, the state’s two organizations have operated in some form since the early 1900s. At the edge of the Payette National Forest in McCall, Idaho, the Southern Idaho Timber Protective Association protects over half a million acres including private land, state-owned land, and portions of federally-owned land and national forests. In northern Idaho, the Clearwater-Potlatch Timber Protective Association protects nearly one million acres owned by private landowners and state and federal agencies. 

As in Idaho, Oregon’s forest protective associations provide fire suppression and prevention services rooted in community partnership. There are no similar protective associations anywhere else in the country. 

“It’s a system that’s been in place for over a hundred years, and we believe that the best answers come locally,” Skrip told the Daily Yonder.

This local approach is exemplified by the resources shared between private landowners and their forest protective associations. Ken Canon, the president of the board of DFPA, said it is common practice for landowners to lend firefighting teams their timber equipment like excavators and dozers during a fire.

“The nature of DFPA and the way it’s set up is that they not only value the resource that the landowners own, but they also value the very, very close relationships they have with the landowners,” Canon said.

Canon is a retired attorney who has lived in rural Oregon for most of his life, and in Douglas County for over two decades. The 282 acre parcel of land he owns is part of the 1.6 million acres DFPA manages. Mostly forested, the area makes up some of the most productive timberlands in the lower forty-eight, Skrip told the Daily Yonder. It is also a vital part of the local economy. 

In the summer, this same land can pose a significant fire risk. But shutting down timber production, even temporarily, also means shutting down an income stream for local landowners. As a district fire warden, Skrip is one of the people with authority to close the woods for logging activity. It is not a responsibility he takes lightly.

“Those are tough decisions, and I’m very mindful,” Skrip said. “They impact our operator community and our mills, and those are mortgages that people have to pay.”

When Skrip has had to make those tough calls, the larger private landowners have generally supported the decision, Canon said. Many landowners – Canon included – take their own measures when it comes to fire prevention. In Coos County, McCarty said private landowners do the same, from making evacuation plans to ensuring their homes are as defensible for firefighters as possible. 

Even with the close cooperation between landowners and their forest protective associations, the increase in bigger fires burning at the same time means resources are stretched thin.

Firefighting Challenges

Ken Canon has a 120º vista from his property, which sits atop a small mountain surrounded on two sides by forest owned by the federal Bureau of Land Management. That land has not been managed in any way for years, Canon said, partly because of efforts to protect the spotted owl that date back to the 1990s. Today, the land is heavily forested as a result.

“It’s pretty dense, and the denser the fire, the more intense they are,” Canon said.

To mitigate against a future fire on the federal lands jumping to his property, Canon has taken to creating a boundary between his property and the federally-owned neighboring land. He said he has taken out the undergrowth on his side of the property line and left the old-growth trees with space between them.

Forest management is just one part of the story when it comes to the kinds of fire blazing in Oregon today. Dense forests like the one bordering Canon’s property are filled with fuels that sustain fires. On the landscape’s other extreme, burn scars from previous fires that have experienced some regrowth also provide what Skrip calls “light and flashy fuel” for fires to consume quickly as they advance. 

Climate change is also upsetting conventional methods for fire management. Warmer-than-average temperatures and heat waves during the summer season dry out fuels. Combine this with the state’s current megadrought conditions, which are drier than any other period in the past thousand years, and there is a new host of challenges for fire prevention and suppression efforts. 

“In this era of fire, we’ve seen more acres burned in our district in the last 10 years than in the last hundred years combined,” Skrip said. The fire regime is also marching to new lengths, Skrip said, with burning happening more frequently north of Roseburg and in the foothills of the Cascades. 

Adam Sinkey, the North Unit Forester for DFPA, started firefighting at seventeen, and has worked his way up the ranks since the early 2000s. During the first half of his career at DFPA, Sinkey said there was one big fire beyond what the district could handle. That was in 2004, and Sinkey said the district’s next big fire after that was in 2013. Now, Sinkey said, those big fires have become commonplace.

“We’ve had one in the district or multiple in the district it seems like every year, or every other year, ever since 2013,” Sinkey said. 

Larger and more severe fires strain a system where there are only so many resources to go around. Fires also carry a significant financial burden and put a heavy physical and mental demand on firefighters. McCarty said his team spent 50 days out in the field this past summer. Other teams were out for as long as 60 days.

“That’s a lot of days sleeping in a tent during the summertime, sleeping in the dirt,” McCarty said. Asking firefighters to be away from their families for months on end while working some of the toughest seasons the state has seen risks high rates of burnout. And while both CFPA and DFPA offer wintertime work in the form of co-ops to retain summer employees, the associations still face year-over-year retention challenges.

Sinkey is one firefighter who built his career in part thanks to DFPA’s winter co-op programs. When, after college, he realized he wanted to make firefighting his full-time job, he stayed on throughout the year. Sinkey’s co-op work ranged from supporting fuel reduction in Douglas County – much like what Canon does each year on his own property – to short stints with the Oregon Department of Transportation operating snowplows on state highway mountain passes. Today, Sinkey said around 40 of DFPA’s 100 summertime employees stick around for the winter co-op program. 

“Not only are we reducing heavy fuel loads around people’s homes, but it also allows us to retain good folks and good firefighters throughout the years,” Sinkey said. 

Still, Skrip and McCarty agreed they could do with even more full-time employees as today’s fires demand additional resources. Year-round employees allow forest protective associations to retain their leadership on the ground. Ultimately, Sinkey said, it’s “boots on the ground” that put out fires. 

But shifting the hiring model to have the majority of employees be permanent would require increased funding at the state level. 

Finding a New Funding Model

After the catastrophic 2020 Labor Day Fires destroyed more than 1 million acres over the course of a few days in Southern Oregon, 2021 ushered in a series of conversations among the public and the state government about how to better fund firefighting efforts across the state. 

In 2024, a large portion of the 1.9 million acres burned were in Eastern Oregon, a predominantly rural region. Canon said he expects there will be talk about the cost of those fires – a staggering $317.5 million across the state – in the 2025 legislative session.

For private landowners and the forest protective associations that provide for them, the price tag is a reminder of the burden that falls on rural communities.

Private landowners who are members of their local forest protective associations pay for their coverage by the acre. Prices have gone up across the board, McCarty said, to the point where fire protection is no longer affordable, particularly for ranchers and grazers whose land generates less profit than timber.

A more holistic approach to funding would include more investment from urban folks, Canon and McCarty said. Already, every Oregonian pays into a general fund that accounts for 50% of the funding that is dispersed to forest protective associations like in Coos and Douglas counties. But a new era of fire demands more financial resources. Canon and McCarty said those cannot come from rural landowners alone, especially when the fires affect everyone.

One idea is to impose a tax on camping equipment or cars, since both are connected to fires and their common causes: fires set from recreation and malfunctions with catalytic converters. Another idea is to raise the state’s income tax to cover the growing costs of fire protection in the state. A task force was organized by Oregon’s governor earlier this year to look at future possibilities for fire funding. Their findings are due before the legislative session begins in February 2025. 

Canon said he wants to see more participation from urban areas, where he said the effects of fire are only growing more apparent.

“What we’ve seen in the last 10 years is it’s not fun going to the Shakespearean Festival in Ashland in choking smoke,” he said. “It’s not just a discomfort, but it’s a health risk.”


Julia Tilton wrote this article for The Daily Yonder.


get more stories like this via email