The Pope is the head of the Catholic Church, which encompasses over 1.2 billion people around the world. So when he publishes a lenghty call to action on climate change, this matters a lot.
Ahead of the Paris Climate Conference that will take place in December this is a major message that will hopefully spur more direct, concrete and rapid action against global warming temperatures.
Even if only a tenth of Catholics around the World act seriously on climate after this much anticipated encyclical – #LaudatoSi – it will be a major win for the future of our civilizations.
As you can easily imagine, some US Conservatives have called the Pope – a man who was trained as a scientist – to stop calling for action on climate change.
I find this particularly ironic as these guys – Jeb Bush, Rick Santorum et al – have been denying evidence for the sake of their money and get rebuffed by someone who is their exact polar opposite :
- a man who cares deeply about the poor and Nature,
- a man who has studied Science – Chemistry, up to the Bachelor’s in Science level,
- and with high moral standards…
The Pope has been likened as the Winston Churchill of the Climate movement by Climate Progress. I have to say there are some resemblance in their speeches. Here is an extract of their article :
Pope Francis has just elevated the climate change issue to its rightful place as the transcendent moral issue of our time. And that matters because winning social movements are inevitably won on moral grounds.
Using Churchillian language, the Pope just called B.S. on the do-nothing and do-little crowds. There are many game-changing lines in the Pope’s near-final draft Encyclical statement on climate change that was leaked this week, but I think these are among the most striking:
“The catastrophic predictions now can no longer be looked on with contempt and irony. We can leave to future generations too many ruins, deserts and filth.”
For more details on the encyclical, please turn to the Washington Post, The Independant or RTCC. All three articles explain well what the Pope stated and why this matters a lot.