During the first few days of his presidency, President Trump followed through on promises he made throughout the campaign to roll back significant investments in environmental regulation, combatting climate change, and international agreements and processes. Specifically, as he did during his first administration, President Trump announced his plan to withdraw the United States from the United Nations climate change treaty, known as the Paris Agreement.
Originally adopted in 2015, the Paris Agreement and the associated conferences are the best mechanism the international community has for global action to combat climate change. In addition to The Episcopal Church’s support of the UN since before its inception, the Presiding Bishop has sent delegations to participate in the UN Climate Change Conferences since 2015 and supported the goals of the Paris Agreement of net zero carbon emissions by 2050. We encourage our federal government to do the same. We are disappointed in President Trump’s decision as it ignores both climate change as a reality and the international collaboration required to prevent the worse predicted outcomes.
An additional executive order calls for oil and gas lease sales in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and throughout Alaska. As a church, we have supported the permanent protection of the ANWR since 1991. The Episcopal Church stands by the Gwich’in people who have had a sacred connection to this region and the wildlife it supports for thousands of years. We reaffirm our call to protect it from all future fossil fuel extraction and support its permanent protection for the wildlife and people in the region.
Additional executive orders call for wide-ranging and harmful extraction of oil and gas, action that contradicts the stated position of our church in moving forward with clean energy investment. This accompanies rescinding funds for parts of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a monumental bill to help boost clean energy production, improve air standards, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and much more. We reaffirm our call for a complete transition from drilling and use of fossil fuels and continue to ask for the expansion of renewable energy, protection of natural resources, and international collaboration to tackle the climate crisis. We reaffirm our call to care for God’s creation and will continue to advocate to the U.S. federal government for them to do the same.
General Convention and Executive Council Resolutions on the Environment