Update 6/23/15 - Pope's key science advisor believes in Gaia not God...
(Original post): Rich Lowry offers appropriate commentary:
A quasi-religious movement now has a genuinely religious leader.
The pope’s encyclical on the environment is being hailed for its embrace of science, although it is about as scientific as the Catholic hymnal.
Pope Francis writes that Sister Earth “now cries out because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her.” Really? Is that what the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says?
That doesn’t mean that climate science, economic policy, cost-benefit analysis are its core competencies. No one has ever said: Yes, but what did Gregory VII do to fight the onset of the Medieval Warm Period?
The pope’s at times lyrical encyclical draws on a beautiful tradition of respect for nature and its creatures represented by the pope’s namesake, St. Francis of Assisi, and is suffused with an intense regard for the poor. But anyone who takes the encyclical as a serious guide to public policy deserves a stern talking to from the nearest tough-minded, ruler-wielding nun.
All that matters to the media, though, is that Pope Francis has taken a simplistic apocalyptic climate alarmism and given it the imprimatur of the Vatican. The same people who are unwilling to give the pope the time of day on more central moral matters, like the dignity of life, are now attributing to him an authority that might have made Pope Innocent III, who challenged kings, blush.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter because only the climate-change passages will get much play, but the document could have benefited from an editor cutting out the bizarre ramblings.
The pope writes of “harmful habits of consumption,” including “the increasing use and power of air conditioning.” This apparently is the result of an insidious capitalistic dynamic: “The markets, which immediately benefit from sales, stimulate ever greater demand. An outsider looking at our world would be amazed at such behavior, which at times appears self-destructive.”
That’s assuming the outsider lives in a very cool climate, or doesn’t mind sweating. Anyone not so lucky probably thinks the inventor of air conditioning should be canonized. In France about 10 years ago, roughly 15,000 mostly elderly people died during a heat wave, in part because they lacked the aforementioned wasteful air conditioning.
The pope is also skeptical of automobiles, which are, after all, a suspiciously recent innovation: “Many cars, used by one or more people, circulate in cities, causing traffic congestion, raising the level of pollution, and consuming enormous quantities of nonrenewable energy. This makes it necessary to build more roads and parking areas which spoil the urban landscape.”
If saving the planet, or our souls, depends on giving up air conditioning or cars, we are all indeed on the road to perdition. The pope at one point favorably cites the example of the desert monks. But while living a life of contemplation in the middle of nowhere suited St. Anthony of Egypt just fine — he is reputed to have lived to 105 — most of us aren’t spiritual superheroes, nor does monasticism as a general matter tell us anything useful about improving the lives of the poor.
While the pope pays lip service to technological advances, he doesn’t truly appreciate their wonders. The Industrial Revolution was one of the greatest boons to humankind. Consider the unrelieved misery — the disease, the poverty, the illiteracy — before around 1800, when if you weren’t an aristocrat, a general, or a bishop, your life was probably nasty, brutish and short. Mass industrialization launched the world on a radically different material trajectory.
“The average person in the world of 1800 was no better off than the average person of 100,000 B.C.,” Gregory Clark writes in his book, “A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World.” “Life expectancy was no higher in 1800 than for hunter-gatherers: 30 to 35 years. Stature, a measure both of the quality of diet and of children’s exposure to disease, was higher in the Stone Age than in 1800.”
But at least when everyone died at a much earlier age, we weren’t engaging in the ravages of the planet that so exercise Francis. This sinful assault on the Earth, by the way, largely consisted in taking otherwise completely useless glop from the ground and using it to power economic and technical advances that enriched average people beyond anyone’s imagining. This is obviously a secular miracle of the highest order, although the religiously inclined might think: Thank God for fossil fuels, and above all, for the human ingenuity that figured out what to do with them.
And the bounty hasn’t ended. Something like a billion people have been lifted out of poverty in places like India and China in recent decades as they have embraced markets and global trade. The pope should be delighted, except he has a blinkered view of capitalism as a zero-sum game benefiting only the privileged.
In this vein, he writes of the “ecological debt” that exists “between the global north and south.” Well, if we are going to speak of debts, the global north gave the global south the modern world. (You’re welcome.) The best thing that can happen to the developing world now is that it can follow our example of growth driven in part by cheap energy. It will enrich them, uplift their poor, give them more wherewithal to adapt to future changes in the climate, and — over time, one hopes — foster forms of government that are accountable to their people and respect their rights.
For all that the pope portrays modern development as a long exercise in environmental devastation, it is the advanced countries that have the cleanest water and air, and are best prepared to adapt their way around any far-off environmental challenges. The pope is right to be skeptical of a blind-faith in technological fixes. Of course they can’t cure what ails the human soul; they can solve seemingly insuperable problems. Perhaps Francis should put a visit to the dikes of Holland on his next itinerary.
His encyclical will be portrayed as the best thing the Church has done since Pope Leo dissuaded Attila from sacking Rome, but on climate change, it merely bends to the fashions of the hour.
Rich Lowry is editor of National Review.
** Me. There will be many response to this encyclical for weeks and months and years to come. The Catholic Herald out of the UK attempts a balanced response in which the following unassailable point is made:
Nowhere is it recognised that the models of development that are criticised have led to rapidly falling rates of poverty, global inequality and deaths from natural disasters whilst access to education and healthcare has improved. Furthermore, nowhere is it acknowledged that the natural resource intensity of production falls dramatically as countries develop.
Further:
Given that poorly defined and enforced property rights lie at the heart of so many environmental problems, especially in poor countries, this whole area is a big omission from this encyclical.
See also previous posts: