Some have dismissed the Argentine pope as pushing what they call Latin American-style socialism. “Nobody is suggesting a return to the Stone Age, but we do need to slow down and look at reality in a different way, to appropriate the positive and sustainable progress which has been made, but also to recover the values and the great goals swept away by our unrestrained delusions of grandeur,” Francis writes. He calls for courageous, radical and farsighted policies to transition the world’s energy supply from fossil fuels to renewable sources, saying mitigation schemes like the buying and selling of carbon credits won’t solve the problem and are just a “ploy which permits maintaining the excessive consumption of some countries and sectors.” Filippo Monteforte/AFP/Getty Images He praises a “less is more” lifestyle that he is known for, one that shuns air conditioners and gated communities in favour of car pool s, recycling and being in close touch with the poor and marginalized. Article content (Carbon credits are a) ploy which permits maintaining the excessive consumption of some countries and sectors This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. “The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth,” he writes.Ĭiting the deforestation of the Amazon, the melting of Arctic glaciers and the death of coral reefs, he rebukes “obstructionist” climate doubters who “seem mostly to be concerned with masking the problems or concealing their symptoms.” And he blames politicians for listening more to oil industry interests than Scripture or common sense. The chemist-turned-pope takes as fact that the world is getting warmer and that human activity is mostly to blame. “Everything is related, and we human beings are united as brothers and sisters on a wonderful pilgrimage, woven together by the love God has for each of his creatures and which also unites us in fond affection with brother sun, sister moon, brother river and mother earth,” he writes. Yet one of Francis’ core points is that there really is no distinction between human beings, their faith and the environment. Article content The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth “Completely at odds with this model are the ideals of harmony, justice, fraternity and peace as proposed by Jesus.” “This vision of ‘might is right’ has engendered immense inequality, injustice and acts of violence against the majority of humanity, since resources end up in the hands of the first comer or the most powerful: the winner takes all,” he writes.
climate meetings later this year to a wholesale change of mind and heart, saying “both the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor” must now be heard. “The application of affordable energy makes everything we do _ food production, manufacturing, health care, transportation, heating and air conditioning _ better.”įrancis said he hoped his effort would lead ordinary people in their daily lives and decision-makers at critical U.N. “The simple reality is that energy is the essential building block of the modern world,” said Thomas Pyle of the Institute of Energy Research, a conservative free-market group. Humanity is called to recognize the need for changes of lifestyle, production and consumption, in order to combat this warming or at least the human causes which produce or aggravate it.” In recent decades this warming has been accompanied by a constant rise in the sea level and, it would appear, by an increase of extreme weather events, even if a scientifically determinable cause cannot be assigned to each particular phenomenon. “A very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system. Never have we so hurt and mistreated our common home as we have in the last 200 years.” “These situations have caused sister earth, along with all the abandoned of our world, to cry out, pleading that we take another course. “The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.” On the scope of environmental destruction
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