The Pope Led Notre Dame Toward Decarbonization. He Hasn’t Influenced the School’s Alabama Coal Investment

TUSCALOOSA COUNTY, Ala.—On issues of climate change, the pope’s influence may stop at the Alabama border. 

Following an unprecedented, forcefully written call to action on climate change from Pope Francis to Catholics and non-Catholics alike in 2015, institutions like the University of Notre Dame, storied in Catholic history, took heed. Almost immediately, the university made pledges to curb its use of fossil fuels and aim toward carbon neutrality—goals the pope had lauded in his environmental appeal. 

“Notre Dame is recommitting to make the world a greener place,” the Rev. John Jenkins, the university’s president, said at the time.

But a decade after officials at the University of Notre Dame made that pledge toward decarbonization, the Indiana-based school has left in place a 2013 lease of mineral rights it owns in rural Alabama to Warrior Met, a coal company with a checkered safety history, as part of the company’s plans for one of the largest build outs of coal mining infrastructure in state history. 

Notre Dame’s lease grants the coal company the legal ability to mine coal at the Alabama site, an arrangement in apparent conflict with the university’s stated goals of sustainability and carbon neutrality. 

In a statement, a university spokesperson acknowledged the institution’s ownership of Alabama coal rights but would not provide any additional details. 

“The University of Notre Dame is aware of the mineral rights we hold in Alabama, which were gifted to the University to enable continued advancements in our academic and research mission,” the e-mail statement provided to Inside Climate News said. 

The spokesperson would not reveal the amount of land at issue, did not say when Notre Dame obtained the mineral rights, and ignored a request for a copy of the university’s lease agreement with Warrior Met.

Emily Grubert, a deputy assistant secretary for carbon management at the U.S. Department of Energy from 2021 to 2022 who now serves as an associate professor of sustainable energy policy in Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs, said receiving the mineral rights from a donor doesn’t absolve the university from considering the environmental implications of the asset. 

There are legitimate questions around what the university should do in a situation like this, Grubert said, but to largely ignore that the investment exists seems unreflective of the moral clarity Notre Dame often tries to convey. 

A university spokesperson acknowledged the institution’s mineral rights in Alabama but would not provide a copy of Notre Dame’s lease, which would show how much the institution stands to gain financially from the arrangement. The spokesperson also did not answer questions about how the investment aligns with the university’s environmental goals.

A Divine Call for Environmental Justice

Mother Earth, the pope has said, is crying out. 

“[She] now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her,” Pope Francis wrote in a 2015 encyclical, a letter to the Catholic world and “every person living on this planet.”

The papal appeal, totalling nearly 75 pages, covered issues ranging from climate denial to consumerism, from biodiversity to “ecological education,” and demanded that all people act to curb environmental harm whenever and wherever possible. 

When Pope Francis spoke on the issue, many Catholic institutions listened, enacting policies that solidified what the church now declared a moral imperative. 

The University of Notre Dame, one of the most prestigious Catholic universities in the U.S., was no exception. Following the release of the pope’s encyclical and in the shadow of the leader’s visit to the United States, the university announced it would stop burning coal within five years and significantly reduce its carbon footprint. 

By 2020, university officials said they were ahead of their goals, having discontinued the use of coal at its power plant and “cut its carbon footprint in half.”

“Guided by the wisdom of Pope Francis in his encyclical ‘Laudato Si’,’ we have used a multifaceted strategy to make our campus more sustainably responsible,” Jenkins said. “I am proud of our progress, while realizing that we have still more work to do.”

In 2021, Jenkins and university leadership committed to an even more ambitious pledge: Carbon neutrality by 2050. 

In the university’s announcement, officials touted their claimed phaseout of coal for energy used on campus. 

“Spurred by Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical, Laudato Sii, Father Jenkins announced that fall that the University would stop using coal by the end of 2020,” the announcement said. “That goal was reached more than a year ahead of time when the last piece of coal was used on Oct. 14, 2019.”

But ending the use of coal for on-campus energy was not far enough, Jenkins said. 

“…I am pleased to announce that Notre Dame is committing to a goal of carbon neutrality by 2050—less than 30 years from now,” Jenkins said in 2021. “The use of more geothermal, large-scale solar arrays, hydroelectricity, recovered energy, conservation and other emerging technologies and fuel sources will hopefully get us to a 65 percent reduction in CO2 by 2030, and to zero net neutral carbon emissions 20 years later.”

Notre Dame in Dixie

More than five years after its commitment to carbon neutrality, the university has acknowledged to Inside Climate News its ownership of mineral rights in Alabama it has leased to Warrior Met. 

The University of Notre Dame owns a majority stake in the mineral rights to land in central Alabama, which it was given by a donor, a university spokesman said. The land would now be part of an historic expansion of the mining operations of Warrior Met, a publicly traded coal company based in the state.

The revelation comes as part of the regulatory process necessary for Warrior Met to permit hundreds of acres of land as part of its Blue Creek expansion. In permitting documents, representatives of Warrior Met identified Notre Dame as the owners of the mineral rights to land critical to its Blue Creek operation near the border of Tuscaloosa, Fayette and Walker Counties. According to the document, the university first leased the rights to mine the Alabama land in September 2013—rights it appears Warrior Met had opted not to exercise until now. 

In addition to Notre Dame’s 73 percent stake, four additional private entities are listed as minority owners in the permit application: WHH Real Estate, Hassinger Group and Lang Group, all of Arlington, Texas; and the George R. Smith Group, based in McCalla, Alabama. 

Warrior Met’s Blue Creek project will increase its production capacity by 54 percent and add half a century to its expected coal production timeline. Public financial support for the facility and its export of coal to overseas markets for use in steel-making may soon top $400 million, according to the company. 

Various additional private and public entities are among the land and mineral rights owners listed in Warrior Met’s permit application, including the Bureau of Land Management, one of the federal agencies that leases federal lands for fossil fuel extraction. Warrior Met has asked BLM to approve its proposal to mine 14,040 acres of federal minerals underlying privately-owned land in Tuscaloosa County. Warrior Met’s applications to lease the coal rights propose to extract approximately 57.5 million tons of recoverable public coal reserves, documents show.

As the company awaits BLM and other regulatory approval to complete its Alabama fossil fuel buildout, Warrior Met has maintained a mixed labor, safety and environmental record. 

“Especially Coal”

The pope’s appeal on environmental issues, subtitled “On Care for Our Common Home,” specifically took aim at coal as what he characterized as the worst of fossil fuels. 

“We know that technology based on the use of highly polluting fossil fuels—especially coal, but also oil and, to a lesser degree, gas—needs to be progressively replaced without delay,” the pope wrote. 

Grubert, the associate professor in Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs, took note of the encyclical’s emphasis on the detriments of extracting and burning coal, as a civil engineer and environmental sociologist,. 

“Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’ document is pretty explicit about needing to move away from fossil and especially coal,” Grubert said.

That entails not just an honest accounting of the university’s own energy usage, but transparency around its investments, she said. 

“It’s not like Notre Dame went out and bought a bunch of land with the intention of mining it, necessarily, but with as many resources as we have, and as explicit a commitment [to environmentalism], it’s disappointing not to see the university take this more seriously,” Grubert said. 

An argument that the university should keep the investment because of any trickle-down financial benefit to students is “weak,” she said. 

“It comes down to: ‘Are you taking a moral stand on some of these things or not?’” Grubert said. 

Often, decisions about gifted investments like the coal rights in this case can be isolated ones, Grubert said, siloed in a development office, devoid of context. 

“These things are sometimes done thoughtlessly with really, really, huge impacts on a lot of people,” Grubert said. 

In Alabama, longwall mining in particular has a long history of impacting citizens on the surface. Since the 1990s, when longwall mining became widespread, Alabamians have complained without success to federal and state regulators about the risks of methane escape and subsidence, or the sinking of land, affecting people living above or adjacent to the mines. In March of 2024, a buildup of methane gas from an underground mine caused an explosion that killed an Alabama grandfather less than 50 miles from the proposed Blue Creek mine site. 

Grubert said that she believes more transparency in the investment portfolios of private institutions would be a step in the right direction. Notre Dame’s lease agreement with the Alabama coal company, for example, should be made public, she said. And universities like Notre Dame, in particular, have a moral obligation to think carefully about investments like the one at issue here. 

“I think being better about noticing when one is wielding power in these situations is sort of a non-negotiable first step,” she said. 

Once the reality of what’s happening is squarely up for discussion, institutions like Notre Dame and their stakeholders can recognize that they have some tangible power in the continued progress of fossil fuel investments, even in the Heart of Dixie, Grubert said. What will they do with it?