Pope Francis takes aim at US and climate sceptics

Pope Francis has taken aim at the US, ‘irresponsible’ Western lifestyles and fossil fuels in a new highly political document on climate change.

Pope Francis at the Vatican in September. Picture: AFP

Pope Francis has taken aim at the US, “irresponsible” Western lifestyles and fossil fuels in a new highly political document on climate change.

Laudato Deum (Praise God), released in Rome on Wednesday, said “emissions per individual in the United States are about two times greater than those of individuals living in China, and about seven times greater than the average of the poorest countries”.

The document also took aim at climate-change sceptics who disagreed with him, inside and outside the church, for their “dismissive and scarcely reasonable opinions’’.

It said a broad change “in the irresponsible lifestyle connected with the Western model would have a significant long-term impact. As a result, along with indispensable political decisions, we would be making progress along the way to genuine care for one another”.

The release of the apostolic exhortation, a high level of papal teaching, just below an encyclical, coincided with the first day of the Synod on Synodality, for which 400 church leaders and staff have converged on Rome.

In one of the most controversial proposals in the document, Francis called for “more effective world organisations, equipped with the power to provide for the global common good, the elimination of hunger and poverty and the sure defence of fundamental human rights”.

Such organisations, he said, “must be endowed with real authority, in such a way as to ‘provide for’ the attainment of certain essential goals. In this way, there could come about a multilateralism that is not dependent on changing political conditions or the interests of a certain few, and possesses a stable efficacy”.

Despite its cost and practical challenges, the Pope championed wind and solar power. “The transition towards clean energy sources such as wind and solar energy, and the abandonment of fossil fuels, is not progressing at the necessary speed,’’ he said.

“Consequently, whatever is being done risks being seen only as a ploy to distract attention.”

The Pope praised the work of “activists from very different countries’’ who help and support one another and who can “end up pressuring the sources of power. It is to be hoped that this will happen with respect to the climate crisis”.

He also rejected the view that efforts to mitigate climate change by reducing the use of fossil fuels will lead to a reduction in the number of jobs.

“Millions of people are losing their jobs due to different effects of climate change: rising sea levels, droughts and other phenomena affecting the planet have left many people adrift,’’ he claimed. The transition to renewable energy was capable of “generating countless jobs in different sectors. This demands that politicians and business leaders should even now be concerning themselves with it”.

Laudato Deum comes eight years after the Pope’s green encyclical, Laudato Si.

“With the passage of time, I have realised that our responses have not been adequate, while the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point,’’ he wrote. “No one can ignore the fact that in recent years we have witnessed extreme weather phenomena, frequent periods of unusual heat, drought and other cries of protest on the part of the earth that are only a few palpable expressions of a silent disease that affects everyone.”

In one paragraph likely to provoke controversy, Francis argued against those “who would place responsibility on the poor, since they have many children, and even attempt to resolve the problem by mutilating women in less developed countries. As usual, it would seem that everything is the fault of the poor. Yet the reality is that a low, richer percentage of the planet contaminates more than the poorest 50 per cent of the total world population, and that per capita emissions of the richer countries are much greater than those of the poorer ones. How can we forget that Africa, home to more than half of the world’s poorest people, is responsible for a minimal portion of historic emissions?”