Will Pope Francis's encyclical become his 'miracle' that saved the planet?

Will Pope Francis's encyclical become his 'miracle' that saved the planet?

The clearest and loudest moral case yet for action now, firmly rooted in justice for the world’s poor, could galvanise the world to act on climate change

Damian Carrington / Thursday 18 June 2015 15.26 BST / http://www.theguardian.com/environment/damian-carrington-blog/2015/jun/18/will-pope-franciss-encyclical-become-his-miracle-that-saved-the-planet

Pope Francis’s encyclical, subtitled Care for our Common Home, has created a global news event. The question now is whether it will become a historic news event, by galvanising real action to avert catastrophic climate change.

There’s a chance it will, for two reasons. First, the moral force the pope brings to bear may kindle that most fragile necessity: political will. Second, his declaration of the atmosphere as a common good, owned by all for all, may help settle the enduring argument about which nations have the responsibility to act. The rich owe the poor, he says.

Climate change, the mass extinction of species and the poisoning of the oceans have been unfolding like slow-motion disasters for decades and universally damage the lives of the poor for the benefit of the rich. The science is now beyond any reasonable dispute and the economic benefit of acting is clear.

Yet for many people these planetary crises have not felt, deep down, like moral issues. They are too distant in time and space, affecting people we don’t know and creatures we have never heard of. As coal, oil and gas continue to be burned, and emissions rise, the risk of floods, famines, heatwaves and refugees that will affect us all rises. And yet so little has been achieved to curb the use of fossil fuels.

The pope provides the clearest and loudest moral case yet for action now, firmly rooted in justice for the world’s poor.

“We have to realise that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor,” he writes. “Leaving an inhabitable planet to future generations is, first and foremost, up to us. The issue is one which dramatically affects us, for it has to do with the ultimate meaning of our earthly sojourn.”

This moral leadership is important, says climate economist Lord Nick Stern, because of “the failure of many heads of state and government around the world to show political leadership”. But it also matters in the very worldly pursuit of getting a strong, workable climate change agreement at a crunch UN summit in Paris in December.

“You should never underestimate the soft power of moral arguments,” says Professor Ottmar Edenhofer, chief economist of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, a Catholic and who met Pope Francis in July 2014 to brief him on climate change. “It does not provide you with an immediate bargaining chip in the negotiations, but in the end when global agreements are not perceived as fair and just, they are very hard to implement.”

Edenhofer points to a single, short sentence in the encyclical as profound: “The climate is a common good, belonging to all and meant for all.”

From this simple statement follows radical consequences, Edenhoder says. It means that the last carbon emissions we can afford to leak into the atmosphere before disaster strikes must be distributed equitably among all the people of the world - and the rich nations have already had their fair share. As the pope puts it, “a true ecological debt exists, particularly between the global north and south”.

The woman charged with delivering the global climate deal, the UN’s Christiana Figueres is in no doubt of the encyclical’s importance: “It will have a major impact. It will speak to the moral imperative of addressing climate change in a timely fashion in order to protect the most vulnerable.”

That is the positive case. There are numerous argument as to why the pope’s carefully timed intervention may in the end prove to be little more than a passing distraction. Of the biggest polluters – China, US, India, Russia, Japan – only the US has significant Catholic population and that is riven by partisan division. On the other hand, some south American nations have been obstructive in the global climate negotiations and may be swayed by the pope.

Some may think the pope’s moral authority is overstated, given the Catholic church’s differences with much of the modern world on contraception and homosexuality and the corrosive child abuse cover-ups. Yet Pope Francis is more often seen in a positive light than a negative one.

Only time will reveal the true impact of the encyclical on the greatest long-term challenge facing civilisation. But if the moral argument it presents moves the problem from one that “should” be tackled sometime to one that “must” be tackled now, it will have performed a remarkable act.

Perhaps one might even call it a miracle.