A month after the release of his “pessimistic” Environmental
Encyclical, are Pope Francis’ “alarmist” views on environmental finally destruction
trigger a worldwide positive ecological awareness?
By: Ringo Bones
First it was the “radical religious and spiritual leader” of
Al Qaeda voicing his environmental concerns, then the leader of the Roman Catholic
Church, is the global climate change concerns finally triggered somewhat
passive spiritual and religious leaders to voice out their concerns? Well,
according to the “princes of the Vatican”, Pope Francis’ rather pessimistic Environmental
Encyclical that had gone viral around the world back in June 16, 2015 was
allegedly prematurely released without the Vatican princes’ “blessing”. To those closely following how the general
public perceives the science behind climate change / global warming, it seems
that only the American right-wing Evangelicals believe that it is a hoax, while
non-Americans subscribing such climate change skeptical views are more likely
to be billionaires of white-Anglo-Saxon descent.
In a nutshell, Pope Francis’ “Environmental Encyclical”
calls for the world’s richest 1-percent – most of them, unfortunately, are the
richest white-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant-Americans – to initiate lifestyles and
energy consumption changes in order to save the global environment. The pontiff
warned that failure to act would have “grave consequences for all of us” – i.e.
the world’s poorest 99-percent. Given the apparent rich versus poor salient
theme of the pontiff’s Environmental Encyclical, even the conservative Catholic
stalwart of the US Republican Party, Senator Rick Santorum, criticized Pope
Francis’ Encyclical as being too socialist and radical. Unbeknown to Santorum,
Pope Francis reached his decision of concern of the global environment based on
his doctorate on chemistry after scrutinizing every published scientific
reports of the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change. Given the Pope’s
rather doom and doom outlook when it comes to the issue of climate change,
should we all be worried?
Fortunately for the rest of us, there has been hopeful
progress when it comes to curbing the worst effects of climate change the
International Energy Commission’s Special Report that’s recently published
earlier this year cites that in 2014, global carbon dioxide emissions had plateaued
despite the global economy growing by 3-percent. Fred Krupp of the
Environmental Defense Fund also cites that the global carbon dioxide emissions
had plateued in 2014 even with the resulting global economic growth due to emissions
regulations being strictly enforced during the past few years. If enforcement
of emissions are strictly enforced, all of us could mitigate the worst effect
of climate change while maintaining our current lifestyle. Despite
right-leaning US Republican Party alarmists calling the adaptation of low
carbon power generation technologies an “abomination” to their “Republican
Jesus”.
