Pope Francis is about to release his encyclical about global warming and is expected to advocate for cutting the fossil fuel use that he and others blame for temperature rises.
A Vatican declaration authored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (PAS) and others who attended a meeting Tuesday on global warming. The document from participants of the meeting pushes for ditching market economies to fight global warming and environmental degradation.
“Fossil fuel exploitation has also taken a huge toll on human well being,” the PAS document reads.
“Market forces alone, bereft of ethical values, cannot solve the intertwined crises of poverty, exclusion, and the environment,” the document adds. “The move to a sustainable world will not be cost-free for all: the options we face are not ‘win-win.’”
“Present economic systems have been accompanied by the development of unacceptable gaps between the rich and the poor,” the PAS writes, “the latter still lacking access to most of the scientific and technical benefits that we have developed in the industrial world.”
“We should be prepared to accept a reallocation of the benefits and burdens that accompany humanity’s activities both within nations and between nations,” according to the PAS document.
Pope Francis made headlines this week by promising to weigh in on the global warming debate, meeting with United Nations officials and scientists to discuss the issue and possible solutions to stemming global temperature rises and predicted ecological catastrophe.
Like former Pope Benedict, Francis is expected to condemn fossil fuels and push for more “just” economic reforms.
Judging by what participants of the Vatican’s climate meeting wrote, the Papacy could come out hard against market economies that utilize fossil fuels for development. But given the authors of the document, it shouldn’t be surprising.
One of the authors is economist Jeffrey Sachs who now heads up Columbia University’s Earth Institute. Sachs has been heavily backed by liberal philanthropist George Soros. Years ago, Soros donated $50 million to a project co-run by Sach’s nonprofit the Millennium Promise.
“To save as much of the sustainable fabric of the world as possible, we need to take many steps, among them reaching a level and sustainable population; just consumption rates throughout the world; the empowerment of women and children everywhere and their incorporation into the management of our one planet; and the development of many new and more sustainable technologies that must be made widely available,” reads the PAS document, co-authored by Sachs.
“With such achievements, hunger could be conquered, with one proviso concerning the distribution of food resources,” the PAS ads. “Without taking these steps, there is little hope for societal advance in the future.”
But not all Catholics are happy with the Vatican’s stance on global warming. Conservative catholics are having trouble supporting Francis’s outspokenness on global warming and have been critical of weighing in on the issue.
Global warming skeptics are also making an effort to deter Francis from coming out against fossil fuels and making climate a key plank of the Catholic Church’s political agenda. Currently, skeptics of man-made global warming are in Rome trying to meet the pope on the issue, but have so far been shut out.
“The Pope has picked a contentious scientific issue in which — now going on almost two decades of no global warming, sea ice recovering, sea level rise rates stable to even decelerating, on almost every metric from polar bears on down – the global warming narrative has weakened,” Marc Morano, publisher of the skeptic news site Climate Depot, stated on his website.
Morano was joined by other skeptics who say it’s an error for Pope Francis to side with the United Nations’ global warming alarmism.
“We’re here to prevent the pope from making the mistake of having the UN as an advisor, because he won’t be getting the whole picture,” Jim Lakely, a Heartland Institute spokesman, told Crux.
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