Edward Mason is Chair of the Church of England’s Ethical Investment Advisory Group. He recently visited the national offices of the Anglican Church of Canada.

From here:

Whether it is the Rockefeller family joining a campaign to withdraw $50 billion from fossil fuel investments over the next five years or the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement pushing for changes in Israeli policies toward Palestine, many people are thinking and talking about where they don’t want to put their money.

[….]

“We don’t expect perfection,” Mason said, “but we expect a positive direction of travel and a willingness and desire to make that positive journey. So with BP, it was reforming their safety procedures, which they put a huge amount of effort into.”

Henriette Thompson, director of public witness for social and ecological justice for the Anglican Church of Canada, noted that there is a renewed focus on investment issues for the Canadian church because the joint declaration on responsible resource extraction made with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada (ELCIC) at the 2013 Joint Assembly commits the churches to “advocate for responsible and ethical investment and actions by individuals, faith communities, corporations, and governments both in Canada and around the world.”

Mason is working hard to “disincentivise” the use of fossil fuels:

From here:

While engagement with companies is an important component of an ethical investment response to climate change, it is not sufficient. We believe that engagement with policy makers is even more important: only policy makers can put the price on carbon that is needed to disincentivise the use of fossil fuels.

Doubtless he would have visited Canada earlier had it not been for the fact that he paddled himself across the Atlantic in a sustainable canoe constructed from renewable bark harvested from an organically grown Amazonian Hymenaea tree lovingly cultivated from a seed in his own back garden.

One would think that Western Anglicanism, having largely replaced the hope of heaven later with the illusion of utopia now, would be enthusiastically supporting the use of fossil fuel. No other technology has benefited billions of people as fossil fuel has. Even the lenses in Edward Mason’s glasses are probably made of polycarbonate, derived from the demon petroleum; let’s see how well the disincentivising goes without your glasses, Edward.