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Mammon goes to the Vatican to discuss climate change

The full might of Mammon will descend on the Vatican next week to discuss the Pope’s displeasure with certain earthly things.

According to a list of attendees seen by the Financial Times, nearly 40 top investors and oil industry executives — including Darren Woods, ExxonMobil boss, and Larry Fink, BlackRock chief — will meet church leaders next week in an unusual gathering that underscores the growing pressure on energy groups to address climate change.

Church officials have been coy about whether Pope Francis, who issued an encyclical in 2015 that identified climate change as “one of the principal challenges facing humanity”, will attend the session.

But the forum, titled “energy transition and care for our common home”, will be hosted by the Catholic US University of Notre Dame and attended by senior Vatican officials.

“We’re hopeful that this kind of dialogue can help develop solutions to the dual challenge of managing the risks of climate change while meeting growing demand for energy,” said ExxonMobil.

Pope Francis has regularly met with prominent business leaders during his papacy — including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook of Apple — though they are usually individual audiences and not in big groups.

Given the criticism the Pope has received for being too sceptical of capitalism, such meetings help deflect suspicion that he is staunchly opposed to the free market, as well as further the pontiff’s causes.

“What you are seeing is the Vatican trying to engage with the world more, engage with business,” says Christopher Lamb, Vatican correspondent for the Tablet magazine. “That’s part of the strategy at the moment which is to reach out to as many people as he can and hear from all sides.”

For business leaders, meetings at the Vatican help to lend moral and ethical validation to their efforts to act more responsibly.

The meeting — first reported by the news website Axios — comes at a time when institutional investors are increasingly calling on the world’s biggest energy companies to address their exposure to climate risk.

Last month asset managers with $10.5tn in assets, including many of the world’s biggest funds, published a letter in the FT calling on the oil and gas industry to be more transparent on climate risks and to take responsibility for all their emissions.

Pope Francis has called on Catholics to protect the Earth, and in recent weeks dozens of Catholic institutions — including three leading Catholic banks and Caritas Internationalis, the Vatican’s humanitarian arm — have announced they are divesting fossil fuel investments.

In addition to Mr Fink and Mr Woods, those scheduled to attend the session include Bob Dudley, chief executive of BP, and John Browne, a former head of the group. Heads of Houston-based Occidental Petroleum, Italy’s Eni and Mexico’s Pemex are also on the list.

A BP spokesperson said Mr Dudley “believes gatherings of this kind help develop a better understanding of the energy transition and the best ways for corporations, countries and wider society to participate in it.”

Money managers include the heads of London’s Hermes Investment Management and Norges Bank Investment Management of Norway, as well as top executives from Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund, Calpers of the US and France’s ERAFP.

Pope Francis has been more vocal about the environment than his predecessors, and has expressed support for the Paris climate agreement, which aims to limit global warming to well below two degrees centigrade.

Earlier this week the Pope published a letter reflecting on the world’s progress since the Paris agreement, calling for an “ecological conversion” that would help people take better care of the planet and each other.

“Ecological conversion requires that the human race, beginning with those who have political and economic responsibility, recognise the necessity of changing the way it organises its life; but even more intimately, that it undergo a change [of] heart,” Pope Francis wrote in his letter.