Pope Francis has warned a group of leading oil executives that while civilisation requires energy, “energy use must not destroy civilisation”.
The Pope was addressing a two day conference held at the Vatican last Friday and Saturday. Senior executives of leading oil and gas companies including ExxonMobil, Eni, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Equinor and Pemex among those attending.
In his speech to the conference, organised by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in collaboration with Notre Dame University, the Pope said that the transition to more efficient and low polluting energy sources as a “challenge of epochal proportions”.
“At the same time, it is an immense opportunity to encourage efforts to ensure fuller access to energy by less developed countries, especially in outlying areas, as well as to diversify energy sources and promote the sustainable development of renewable forms of energy.”
He said it was a “real cause for concern” that two-and-a-half years after the Paris Agreement on climate change, “carbon dioxide emissions and atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases remain very high”.
“Yet even more worrying is the continued search for new fossil fuel reserves, whereas the Paris Agreement clearly urged keeping most fossil fuels underground,” he said. “This is why we need to talk together – industry, investors, researchers and consumers – about transition and the search for alternatives. Civilisation requires energy, but energy use must not destroy civilisation!”
The Pope said decisive progress “cannot be made without an increased awareness that all of us are part of one human family, united by bonds of fraternity and solidarity”.
“Only by thinking and acting with constant concern for this underlying unity that overrides all differences, only by cultivating a sense of universal intergenerational solidarity, can we set out really and resolutely on the road ahead…There is no time to lose: We received the earth as a garden-home from the Creator; let us not pass it on to future generations as a wilderness.”
