Catholic outcry as US withdraws further from global climate action
EarthBeat Weekly
Your weekly newsletter about faith and climate change January 16, 2026  The signing ceremony for the Paris Agreement on climate change is seen at U.N. headquarters in New York City April 22, 2016. (CNS photo/Mike Segar, Reuters)The opening of 2026 has been a turbulent time for U.S. environmental policy. The Trump administration attacked Venezuela, with controlling the South American country's vast oil reserves a driving factor. Meanwhile, the president has renewed his long focus on acquiring, and perhaps by force, Greenland, a place where climate change is vividly on display while home to a wealth of critical minerals. [This New York Times report from way back in 2015 offers a stunning look at the magnitude of melting in Greenland.] At the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, administrator Lee Zeldin has directed the federal government's top environmental health office to no longer consider the potential lives saved from proposed regulations and rules and instead only the economic impact on businesses. Meanwhile, a final rule aimed at revoking the "endangerment finding" — the EPA decision underlying all federal climate regulations — is expected any day. And on Jan. 7, two weeks before its exit from the Paris Agreement becomes official, the Trump administration announced it would also move to withdraw from the bedrock treaty for the 2015 climate accord, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. "These decisions will have painful and direct repercussions on the lives of vulnerable populations and God's creation already suffering from a changing climate," Bishop A. Elias Zaidan, chairman of the Committee on International Justice and Peace for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said in a statement about the planned withdrawals from more than 60 U.N. bodies and related organizations, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world's leading climate science group. GSR international correspondent Chris Herlinger and I reported this week how several Catholic groups joined the U.S. bishops in quickly assailing the Trump administration's move to exit the central U.N. climate treaty, a process which takes a year to complete. Once it does, the U.S. — the largest source of historical emissions and top present-day user and producer of oil and gas — will stand as the only country in the world not part of the UNFCCC. The Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns, whose missionaries see firsthand in their work across 25 countries the life-threatening impacts of intensifying droughts, storms and rising sea levels worsened by climate change, called the planned exit "an isolationist move" whereby the U.S. "is abandoning its moral responsibility as a leading global power and as the world's largest historical contributor to greenhouse gas emissions." "Withdrawing from this framework is not just a policy shift; it is a rejection of our duty to protect our common home and the future of all humanity," Lisa Sullivan, the Maryknoll NGO's senior policy officer for integral ecology, told me. Read more: US 'abandoning its moral responsibility' with exit from bedrock climate treaty, Catholic groups say
What else is new on EarthBeat:by Junno Arocho Esteves, OSV News According to the decree, Leo has established that from Jan. 10, following the closing of the church's Jubilee Year, until Jan. 10, 2027, a special Year of St. Francis may be proclaimed, in which every Christian, "following the example of the Saint of Assisi, may himself become a model of holiness of life and a constant witness of peace." Read more here » by Ersun Augustinus Kayra If ecological sin is real, then ecological repentance must be real, too: pipes that work, standards that bite, and the stubborn, persistent work of repair. Read more here » by Ryan Byrnes The Kisiyas come from a minority of Christians who have lived in the Al-Makhrour valley for thousands of years and make up about 1% of the West Bank's population. Read more here » by Gina Christian, OSV News The Trump administration's plans to acquire Greenland for the U.S. are being met with concern, sometimes fear and "a quiet strength" by residents, said the Arctic island's only Catholic parish priest. Read more here » | 
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