Why the Pope is wrong about climate

A close look at Francis's major encyclical finds some awfully strange views, even for people who care about the environment

By Michael Grunwald of Politico. Excerpts:

"There are asides about “the feeling of asphyxiation brought on by densely populated residential areas” and the inability of the individual to “prescind from humanity”"

"Conservatives who are already annoyed by the pope’s climate advocacy might not be too happy to hear him link laissez-faire economics to slavery, pedophilia, organized crime and the abandonment of the elderly in paragraph 123. Liberals who are fawning over the pope might not want to read paragraph 117, where he compares neglect of the environment to support for abortion."

"Pope Francis makes an excellent case in paragraphs 23 through 25 that climate change is the eco-challenge of our time—and it’s great that he’s making that case to the world—but he fails to recognize that it’s a different kind of eco-challenge than the others he mentions in his encyclical, like toxic dumping and endangered species. The pope understandably puts great faith in the healing power of more moral and less selfish individual behavior, but that won’t save the climate. And while the pope doesn’t think much of capitalism or technology, those things are already helping to save the climate."

"The main theme of Laudato Si, repeated constantly, is that everything is connected, that “we cannot presume to heal our relationship with the environment without healing all fundamental human relationships.”"

"Thanks to our love of money, our obsession with technology, and our insatiable demand for stuff, “the earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.” We mistreat nature as we mistreat the poor, the sick and yes, the unborn. With our excessive consumption and “throwaway culture,” promoted by venal profiteers through soulless advertising, we abuse the resources God gave us."

"The pope’s primary example of our insensitive efforts to take dominion over nature with out-of-control consumption is, incredibly, “the increasing use and power of air conditioning.”"

""The markets, which immediately benefit from sales, stimulate ever greater demand,” the pope writes about the relentless worldwide expansion of A/C. “An outsider looking at our world would be amazed by such behavior, which at times appears self-destructive.”"

" And while the pope is certainly right to push for more Third World debt relief and less inequality, that could actually make emissions even worse; promoting long-overdue economic growth in the developing world would help it afford to burn more coal, gas and oil."

"The U.S. is already moving toward cleaner energy, thanks to supportive public policy as well as the entrepreneurial and technological innovation the pope finds so suspicious. President Obama’s clean-air regulations have made coal plants more expensive to operate, while strict fuel-efficiency standards have made our cars and trucks guzzle less gasoline. Meanwhile, a combination of government policies (for clean energy research and deployment) and technical advances (more efficient solar panels and wind turbines, better batteries for electric vehicles and renewable energy storage) are making green energy cheaper. The cost of solar power has dropped 80 percent since 2009, the cost of wind power 60 percent, the cost of advanced batteries 50 percent. In California, a market-based cap-and-trade system is also helping to ratchet down emissions, even though the pope, in his otherwise sensible overview of the climate issue, offers the leftist conspiracy theory that carbon trading schemes “may simply be a ploy which permits maintaining the excessive consumption of some countries and sectors.”

The pope isn’t a big fan of the profit motive, but it’s the best hope for bringing clean-tech products to the masses. It’s what inspired firms like Solar City and SunRun to offer no-money-down leases for rooftop solar panels. It’s what’s inspiring Wall Street to securitize those leases for investors, which will pour more money into the solar industry and further drive down costs. Elon Musk hopes to change the world, but Tesla wouldn’t have a prayer of reinventing transportation (and now grid storage as well) without investors who hope to make a buck."