Pontiff meets with oil execs on climate

ROME — Three years ago, Pope Francis issued a sweeping letter that highlighted the global crisis posed by climate change and called for swift action to save the environment and the planet.

On Saturday, the pope gathered money managers and titans of the world’s biggest oil companies during a closed-door conference at the Vatican and asked them if they had gotten the message. Pressure has been building on oil and gas companies to transition to less polluting forms of energy, with the threat of fossil-fuel divestment sometimes used as a stick.

“There is no time to lose,” Francis told them Saturday.

Though oil and gas companies had made “commendable” progress and were “developing more careful approaches to the assessment of climate risk and adjusting their business practices accordingly,” he said, those actions were not enough.

“Will we turn the corner in time? No one can answer that with certainty,” the pope said. “But with each month that passes, the challenge of energy transition becomes more pressing.”

He called on the participants “to be the core of a group of leaders who envision the global energy transition in a way that will take into account all the peoples of the Earth, as well as future generations and all species and ecosystems.”

In an era when the White House is viewed by many scientists as hostile to the very idea of climate change, with President Donald Trump announcing the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, Francis is seen as an influential voice to nudge oil executives to take action on the issue.

Among those summoned to a 16thcentury villa in the Vatican gardens were the chairman of Exxon Mobil, the chief executive of Italian energy giant Eni and the chief executive of BP.

Japanese, American, British, French and Norwegian money managers were also on the list, according to news accounts, as well as the chief executive of the investment firm BlackRock and a former energy secretary under President Barack Obama.

The two-day conference was sponsored by the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame. Paul J. Browne, a Notre Dame spokesman, said the university’s president, the Rev. John I. Jenkins, had been inspired by the pope’s 2015 encyclical, instructing “all schools and departments of the university to respond to Francis’ evocative appeal on behalf of ‘our sister,’ the Earth.”

Many had complied, he said, including by expediting plans to stop coal burning at the university power plant. Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business also began planning the conference “to discuss ways to transition from fossil fuel consumption,” Browne said.

On Saturday, the pope reiterated his call for a transition from fossil fuels “to a greater use of energy sources that are highly efficient while producing low levels of pollution.” It was a challenge, he acknowledged, “of epochal proportions,” but also one that presented an “immense opportunity” to “promote the sustainable development of renewable forms of energy.”

He said that though the world is affected by climate change, it was the poor who would “suffer most from the ravages of global warming.”