Catégorie : Vie de l’église

Overall, the U.S. is still among the countries with the highest per capita emissions, so there’s room for improvement, and its emissions haven’t fallen enough to put the country on track to meet its pledges under the 10-year-old Paris climate agreement. But U.S. emissions are down about 15% over the past 10 years.

Here’s how that happened:

US electricity emissions have fallen

U.S. electricity use has been rising lately with the shift toward more electrification of cars and heating and cooling and expansion of data centers, yet greenhouse gas emissions from electricity are down by almost 30% since 1995.

One of the main reasons for this big drop is that Americans are using less coal and more natural gas to make electricity.

Both coal and natural gas are fossil fuels. Both release carbon dioxide to the atmosphere when they are burned to make electricity, and that carbon dioxide traps heat, raising global temperatures. But power plants can make electricity more efficiently using natural gas compared with coal, so it produces less emissions per unit of power.

Why did the U.S. start using more natural gas?

Research and technological innovation in fracking and horizontal drilling have allowed companies to extract more oil and gas at lower cost, making it cheaper to produce electricity from natural gas rather than coal.

As a result, utilities have built more natural gas power plants — especially super-efficient combined cycle gas power plants, which produce power from gas turbines and also capture waste heat from those turbines to generate more power. More coal plants have been shutting down or running less.

Because natural gas is a more efficient fuel than coal, it has been a win for climate in comparison, even though it’s a fossil fuel. The U.S. has reduced emissions from electricity as a result.

Significant improvements in energy efficiency, from appliances to lighting, have also played a role. Even though tech gadgets seem to be recharging everywhere all the time today, household electricity use, per person, plateaued over the first two decades of the 2000s after rising continuously since the 1940s.

Costs for renewable electricity, batteries fall

U.S. renewable electricity generation, including wind, solar and hydro power, has nearly tripled since 1995, helping to further reduce emissions from electricity generation.

Costs for solar and wind power have fallen so much that they are now cheaper than coal and competitive with natural gas. Fourteen states, including most of the Great Plains, now get at least 30% of their power from solar, wind and battery storage.

While wind power has been cost competitive with fossil fuels for at least 20 years, solar photovoltaic power has only been competitive with fossil fuels for about 10 years. So expect deployment of solar PV to continue to increase, both in the U.S. and internationally, even as U.S. federal subsidies disappear. 

Both wind and solar provide intermittent power: The sun does not always shine, and the wind does not always blow. There are a number of ways utilities are dealing with this. One way is to use demand management, offering lower prices for power during off-peak periods or discounts for companies that can cut their power use during high demand. Virtual power plants aggregate several kinds of distributed energy resources – solar panels on homes, batteries and even smart thermostats – to manage power supply and demand. The U.S. had an estimated 37.5 gigawatts of virtual power plants in 2024, equivalent to about 37.5 nuclear power reactors.

Another energy management method is battery storage, which is just now beginning to take off. Battery costs have come down enough in the past few years to make utility-scale battery storage cost-effective.

What about driving?

In the U.S., gasoline consumption has remained roughly constant but fuel efficiency has generally improved over the decades.

Sales of electric vehicles, which could cut emissions more, have been slow, however. Some of this could be due to the success of fracking: U.S. petroleum production has increased, and gasoline and diesel prices have remained relatively low.

People in other countries are switching to electric vehicles more rapidly than in the U.S. as the cost of EVs has fallen. Chinese consumers can buy an entry-level EV for under US$10,000 in China with the help of government subsidies, and the country leads the world in EV sales.

In 2024, people in the U.S. bought 1.6 million EVs, and global sales reached 17 million, up 25% from the year before.

The unknowns ahead: What about data centers?

The construction of new data centers, in part to serve the explosive growth of artificial intelligence, is drawing a lot of attention to future energy demand and to the uncertainty ahead.

Data centers are increasing electricity demand in some locations, such as northern Virginia, Dallas, Phoenix, Chicago and Atlanta. The future electricity demand growth from data centers is still unclear, though, meaning the effects of data centers on electric rates and power system emissions are also uncertain.

However, AI is not the only reason to watch for increased electricity demand: The U.S. can expect growing electricity demand for industrial processes and electric vehicles, as well as the overall transition from using oil and gas for heating and appliances to using electricity that continues across the country.

Most details are lost to history, but records in the National Archives and documents assembled by a team at Dickinson College offer glimpses into experiences at Carlisle, where 7,800 students from more than 100 tribes were sent as the U.S. government systematically and violently evicted Native Americans from their lands to seize them for white settlers.

Among the 17 were children who tended fires, raised pigs and learned how to make clothes. Some were baptized as Christians. One earned 66 cents over four days at the school shoe shop. Another was praised for finishing three pairs of pants in one week — when he wasn’t making bricks.

Who were the children?

Their causes of death, if mentioned in school records, include tuberculosis, spinal meningitis and typhoid fever. Perryman died after abdominal surgery. The records are often contradictory, obviously wrong about names and ages or lacking basic information about their families.

« Sometimes the only evidence of a child’s existence is a scrap of paper with a hastily scribbled note, » said Preston McBride, a Pomona College historian who has examined boarding school death records.

Upon arrival in Carlisle, their long hair was cut. They were issued military-style uniforms and often housed apart from any relatives, forced to speak English.

In addition to lessons in reading, writing, math, science and other subjects, they were sent to work in « outings » at farms and homes.

Several of the 17 were closely related to tribal leaders, reflecting how the U.S. government used the boarding system to control Native people. Each one was somewhere between a hostage, prisoner of war and student being forced to assimilate, Harvard University historian Philip Deloria said.

« It’s undoubtedly true if you have someone’s kids you have a certain amount of leverage against them, » Deloria said.

The Cheyenne and Arapaho had been debilitated by decades of battles for their very existence by the time classes began at Carlisle. Some of their children had lost relatives in the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado and the 1868 attack on Black Kettle’s camp along the Washita River in present-day Oklahoma.

« Every tribe has slightly different sorts of experiences, but in the aggregate, especially in the western parts in the 1860s on, it’s just violence all the time, » Deloria said.

A promising artist

Matavito and Leah’s journey was recounted by federal Indian Agent Charles Campbell, who wrote that care had been « taken to accept the most promising. » He also noted that Matavito’s father, a brother of famed Cheyenne leader Black Kettle, « forced me to accept his boy. »

Matavito became the first typhoid fever victim at Carlisle. Why Leah died is unclear.

Also repatriated was Elsie Davis, whose father, Cheyenne Chief Bull Bear, was a leader of the Dog Men Society of warriors and a signatory to the 1867 Medicine Lodge Treaty.

Called Vah-stah by her family, she was about 13 when enrolled, according to her great grand-niece, Cheyenne citizen and Native American rights advocate Suzan Shown Harjo.

Vah-stah’s family remembers her as kind and a promising artist. She died at the school at 16 of tuberculosis in July 1893, while her etching was exhibited at the Chicago World’s Fair. Her headstone, like many others, contained an error — in her case, the year of death.

« It’s not even clear if they had a service to bury her or if they just buried her without much of a funeral or ceremony, » Harjo said. « It must have been just quite awful. »

A published eulogy attributed to the brother of one of the 17 students, William Sammers, said his death of meningitis in May 1888 at age 19 « happened in these glorious and grandest days of our school lives. » But records also show Sammers had at one point escaped and traveled 70 miles (113 kilometers) away before he was arrested and returned.

Shattering experiences

Many reports of sexual, physical and emotional abuse of children at boarding and residential schools across the U.S. and Canada have come to light, with much more undoubtedly having been unreported, ignored or covered up. In 1913, 276 Carlisle students petitioned the U.S. Department of the Interior to investigate its conditions, including harsh punishments for minor infractions.

A 2024 Interior Department review found at least 973 Native American children died at 400 federally funded schools. McBride said the true number is likely in the thousands. The shattering experiences factored into President Joe Biden’s apology last year.

The Pennsylvania school’s legacy remains complex, said Amanda Cheromiah of Laguna Pueblo, who directs the Center for the Futures of Native Peoples at Dickinson College in Carlisle. « There were such diverse experiences, some were good and some were bad — and everywhere in between, » Cheromiah said. Six of her relatives attended Carlisle.

Cheromiah said several hundred people attended services in early October for the 16 Cheyenne and Arapaho children. She called it « one of the most memorable moments that I’ve ever heard other people share. »

Some tribes are not interested in opening their children’s graves. Because of poor documentation, others may never be returned. A grave thought to contain a 15-year-old Wichita boy was found to hold someone else’s remains last year. Expecting a 13- or 14-year-old boy from the Catawba Indian Nation of South Carolina in 2022, the team instead found a female teenager. Their remains were reburied, the graves marked unknown.

Norene Starr, a Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes projects coordinator who led their repatriation, called it a « federal atrocity » that the exhumed remains of two more students didn’t match their gravestones and had to be reburied. She’s working with forensic experts to identify them.

« That’s gonna be a long, long journey, » Starr said.

Since repatriations began at Carlisle in 2017, the bodies of 58 students have been returned, leaving 118 graves with Native American or Alaska Native names. About 20 more contain unidentified Native children.

Costly undertakings

Exhumations are complicated and costly. The federal government and the Christian churches involved have a moral imperative to fund the work at many more boarding school graveyards, said Samuel Torres with the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.

« For those tribes that are interested in identifying where their children are and to bring them home, there’s an opportunity for complicit entities to step up and fund these initiatives, » said Torres, who is Mexica/Nahua.

To approve repatriation, the U.S. Army requires a notarized affidavit from the closest living relative, but defers to families and tribes to determine who that might be.

Starr said in cases where the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes weren’t able to locate lineal descendants, the tribal governor’s office adopted the children to effectuate their return.

Tribes seeking their ancestors’ return under the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act have run into a U.S. Army policy that it is not required to turn over bodies in cemeteries to tribal nations. A court ruling against The Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, which seeks the return of two of its former Carlisle students, is under appeal.

At oral argument, held during the exhumation process in September, federal appellate judges pressed the U.S. Army to justify its position.

« These were burials without consent. There was no Native American burial. These kids are kidnapped, dumped in a grave after they die at the government’s hands, and then moved so that they can pave over the graves, » said 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Pamela Harris. « Do you think Congress’ point was like, we really need to preserve that setup? »

Fifty-three years have passed, and Sammon, 78, has spent most of her life within a two-block radius, living and working at St. Joseph’s House and Maryhouse. The Catholic Worker movement is a community founded by Day in New York through the first houses of hospitality, rooted in voluntary poverty and dedicated to living among and serving the poor in faith and solidarity.

« She’s been a very constant presence in that house, » Martha Hennessy, the granddaughter of Day, said. « She’s been very dedicated to Maryhouse, to the movement and to Dorothy. » 

Today (Nov. 8) is Dorothy Day’s birthday. Day, with the title « Servant of God, » is in the first formal stage in the canonization process. The diocese’s collection of evidence and testimonies about her life has been sent to the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Causes of the Saints for review and approval, at which point Pope Leo would declare her « Venerable, » recognizing she lived a life of heroic virtue. After that, the beatification and canonization process generally requires two miracles attributed to her intercession.

A Mass at Maryhouse Nov. 8 was dedicated to Day.  

Even after all these years, Sammon’s first encounter with Dorothy stays in her mind. « Her voice … it was very disarming to me, » Sammon said. With a mop in hand, she recalls that in her mid-20s, she expected the then-75-year-old Day to sound old or possibly crotchety, but she didn’t.

The two shared a brief conversation about who Sammon was and where she was from. Sammon would be bringing Day medicine on her deathbed eight years later, in a room four floors above where Sammon lives now. Day died in 1980, just 21 days after her 83rd birthday.

« The last thing she said to me was, ‘and I really want to thank you,’  » Sammon said. « And I said, ‘OK, Dorothy.’  » At the time, Sammon and Day had lived on the same floor of Maryhouse for several years. « She said it to be comforting, in a way, » Sammon said.

Today, Maryhouse and St. Joseph House still feed hundreds of New Yorkers every week and together house about 50 people. From Tuesday to Friday, Catholic Workers at Maryhouse, some volunteers, others residents, prepare lunch for dozens of vulnerable women.

On Friday nights, the auditorium at Maryhouse fills for what Peter Maurin, the French Catholic visionary and co-founder of the movement, called a « Clarification of Thought, » a gathering where activists, filmmakers, musicians, theologians and other thinkers share their ideas and projects.

« Jane is all of our mentor and a pillar in the community, » said Joanne Kennedy, 56, who first came to the New York Catholic Worker in 1995 and later lived at both St. Joseph’s House and Maryhouse. « It’s her home with a lot of other people, but she’s been one long, continuous strand, and that deserves a proper kind of reverence. »

Sammon has written a column for The Catholic Worker newspaper, still printed monthly, since Day’s death in 1980. The column, « The Book of Notes, » chronicles everyday life at the Worker and is published under the pen name Ric Rhetor, a play on the word « rhetoric. »

« It is the most popular thing, hands down, the most-read column in the paper on the regular, » Kennedy said. « It’s one of the only things that’s always in it. »

Fellow Catholic Worker Bernie Connaughton, 70, describes an evening in 2000 when he and Sammon were serving sandwiches in a subway station. Connaughton said police began harassing a homeless man on the stairs. « Jane went right over to the cop and said, ‘Don’t you talk to him that way, officer,’  » Connaughton recalls.  » ‘He deserves respect.’  » 

« She can’t help herself, » Connaughton said. « She can’t stay quiet when she sees something wrong. That can work for good or bad, but it’s who she is. »

Sammon grew up in a devout Catholic family in Cleveland, where her father, Leo, worked as a steamfitter and was involved in the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists. Her mother, Cecilia, who died when Jane was just 11, « had a heart for poor people, » Sammon said. When she was 10 years old, Sammon said, her father first told her about Dorothy Day.

Years later, inspired by reading The Catholic Worker newspaper and its call to the works of mercy and its radical stance on peace, Sammon moved to New York with piqued interest. She describes « a trifecta » that drew her to the movement: the Catholic Workers’ genuine love for the Catholic Church, their willingness to live in voluntary poverty and their readiness to risk jail opposing the Vietnam War.

« This idea that your beliefs might have engendered an idea that would cause you to get arrested — and they were willing to do that, » Sammon said. « That was it. And then when I got here, they also had some good fun. »

Sammon’s health now makes it difficult for her to walk. She said she does « considerably » less at the Catholic Worker than in years past. She still writes her column and helps organize some Friday night events. She continues to run Maryhouse on Sundays, a tradition she began more than a decade ago to give other residents a day of rest.

Today, new faces come through the Catholic Worker often. Maryhouse hosts an Integral Ecology Circle of approximately 50 members, mostly under age 40, who recently added a rooftop garden to provide fresh food. 

« I think I feel like I’m married to this place in a way, » said Sammon, who never married or had children and plans to continue her vow of poverty through the end of her life. « A lot of people find it very hard to understand choosing this lack of material success — to say you don’t want to have it — when there are others who never even had the chance to know whether they could choose that or not. »

« What does it mean to be poor? I think at the Catholic Worker it’s a religious understanding, » she added.

In the archives at Maryhouse, there’s a short recording of a conversation between Sammon and Day, from when Sammon was in her 20s. Day was speaking with a priest about nonviolence and Catholicism in the office at St. Joseph’s House when Sammon walked in looking for a pair of shoes.

« Dorothy said, ‘Come in, come in, what do you want? You can have anything!’  » Sammon said. « I laughed, I said, ‘anything?’  » 

Though Day has been gone for many years, Sammon said there’s no need to dwell on that.

« You’re able to learn from so many people at the Catholic Worker, not only the Dorothy Day person, » Sammon said. « But some woman who walks in, who’s lived out on the street, who just tells you about life in a way that you didn’t know before. And that’s the idea. » 

It comes a decade after the Paris Agreement, a historic deal where for the first time nearly 200 countries committed to reducing heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions — primarily released from burning fossil fuels — that are altering the climate and leading to more extreme heatwaves, stronger storms, devastating wildfires and rising seas.

Since then, countries have made limited progress in meeting the Paris accord’s main goal of limiting average temperature rise to « well below » 2 degrees Celsius, and ideally to 1.5 C.

Seventy-eight countries, representing two-thirds of global emissions, have submitted new climate plans (known as « nationally determined contributions ») as required under the Paris Agreement every five years. Among them was the Holy See, which pledged to slash emissions in the world’s smallest country by 28% by 2035.

A U.N. report issued ahead of COP30 showed that if fully implemented, those plans would yield temperature rise between 2.3 C and 2.8 C — a decline from prior trajectories but still well off pace from 1.5 C. Global emissions continue to rise, the report found, and temperatures will likely surpass 1.5 C, at least temporarily, within the next 10 years. 

Eclipsing the 1.5 C target represents a « moral failure and deadly negligence, » U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Gueterres said Nov. 6 at the leaders summit. 

« Every fraction of a degree means more hunger, displacement and loss — especially for those least responsible, » he said, adding the 1.5 C target must be kept within reach through deep emissions cuts this decade and massive expansion of renewable energy.

The stalled action on climate led Pope Francis in 2023 to issue Laudate Deum, a follow-up to his 2015 encyclical « Laudato Si’, on Care for Our Common Home, » in which he warned the world « may be nearing the breaking point. » Francis timed the release of Laudato Si’ just months ahead of the December 2015 Paris meeting in December to spur nations to reach a deal after years of falling short.

Likewise, Leo in his message acknowledged limited progress countries have made in achieving the Paris Agreement’s goals, saying the path « remains long and complex. » He lamented a disregard for the common good in current politics that has been defined by « collective selfishness, disregard for others and short-sightedness. »

« Against this backdrop, State Parties are urged to courageously accelerate the implementation of the Paris Agreement and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, » the pope said.

During the first six months of his papacy, Leo has repeatedly raised environmental concerns and the need for action in the face of intensifying climate change. In October, he urged Catholics to find new ways to awaken people’s hearts on climate and other environmental crises during a conference marking the 10-year anniversary of Laudato Si’. 

Reflecting the long history of church teaching on creation, Leo in his message to COP30 quoted each of the past three popes, as well as the homily he delivered in July in celebrating the first Mass under a new formulary for care of creation.

He repeated Francis’ call for an ecological conversion to awaken and animate all people to self-reflection and action to limit grave threats to life that climate impacts pose. And he opened his address by lifting up Pope Benedict XVI’s linkage of peacebuilding and stewardship of creation, most notably in Benedict’s 2010 World Day of Peace message.

With the international community mostly focused on conflicts raging among nations, Leo said,  « there is also an ever growing awareness that peace is also threatened by a lack of due respect for creation, by the plundering of natural resources and by a progressive decline in the quality of life because of climate change. »

Leo also cited Pope John Paul II’s framing of the ecological crisis as a moral crisis and echoed the Polish pope’s call for solidarity, especially between industrialized nations and developing countries, emphasizing that people who are economically poor face climate impacts first and worst, despite contributing little to global emissions.

« Tragically, those in the most vulnerable situations are the first to suffer the devastating effects of climate change, deforestation and pollution. Caring for creation, therefore, becomes an expression of humanity and solidarity, » Leo said. 

Such solidarity, the pope added, must extend through financing for climate mitigation and adaptation solutions. He endorsed linking foreign debts held by developing countries to « ecological debt » compiled by many wealthy countries that built economies through extracting natural resources from the Global South.

Resolving such debts was a priority from the bishops of the Global South in an unprecedented joint appeal earlier this year, which also demanded the end of the use of fossil fuels. The heads of each of the continental episcopal conferences of Latin America, Africa and Asia will be in Belem during COP30. 

The pope himself received numerous invitations to attend as well — including from Brazilian politicians leading the proceedings — but declined, instead sending Parolin, the Holy See secretary of state, who will again lead the Vatican delegation.

In concluding his message, Leo wrote, « May all the participants in this COP30 commit themselves to protecting and caring for the creation entrusted to us by God in order to build a peaceful world. »