Pope Francis: Laudato Deum

drought; credit Oxfam

Now that the next global climate conference COP28 has been co-opted by the fossil fuel industry (the conference is being held in the United Arab Emirates, a petrostate, and the conference chairperson is a fossil fuel executive. Pope Francis has issued a follow up statement to his ground-breaking encyclical, Laudato Si in which he expressed the need to care for our common home. That document was aimed at influencing the 21st COP held in Paris in December 2015.  Then came the criminal destroyer, Don 'Legit'. He withdrew the United States from the voluntary goal of holding the Earth's increase in global temperature to 1.5ºC above a 1900 basline. All serious negotiations on climate action stalled for the next four years.

The pontiff is bluntly critical of elites who are failing to secure global action to reduce the threats of climate change in his new statement on climate, Laudato Deum. Instead of embracing alternative energy generation, nations increased the subsidies for fossil fuel by $7 trillion annually. Francis notes that increasingly violent weather patterns and the impact of higher temperatures disproportionately impacts poor people. Africa is home to half the world's population, but contributes minimally to global carbon emissions. Nevertheless, he holds out some hope for COP28, “To say there is nothing to hope for [from COP28] would be suicidal,” the pope writes, “for it would mean exposing all humanity, especially the poorest, to the worst impacts of climate change.”

flood; credit Greenpeace

As head of the world's largest religion--there are 1.3 billion Catholics in the world--he has rarely avoided controversy. Nor is he a science denier, either. In his statement he devotes 25% of it to citing the scientific studies supporting the real phenomenom of climate change to contradict, "dismissive and scarcely reasonable opinions that I encounter, even in the Catholic Church." The pope claims that environmental degradation is tantamount to sin, involkiing his namesake's deep love and connection to nature. He advocates all peoples of faith to recognize our technological progress is "turning against us".