But such a clear moral position is rarely heard today from climate leaders and champions — many of whom praised Francis this week as a patron saint of their cause.
The pope’s words arrived at a high point for climate morality. The Paris Agreement, which came six months after the encyclical, emerged from countries partially setting aside national interests in deference to a common good. Several years later, Greta Thunberg’s outrage that future generations would pay for the costs of fossil fuels cut through — for a while.
Now, Donald Trump’s administration is waging an all-out assault on climate work and a more Hobbesian, everyone-for-themselves mentality is taking hold worldwide. Those still waving the climate flag have largely restricted themselves to a rational, self-interested argument: Fighting climate change means economic growth.
Francis, who took his pope name from the nature-loving Saint Francis of Assisi, could barely contain his scorn for what he saw as the smallness of this approach.
He said that a narrow cult of technocracy and progress had come to dominate the landscape of human thought. The negative side effects — including the breakdown of the natural systems that sustain human society — were ignored because people had become blind to their links to the planet and its other lifeforms.
Climate change is an “ethical and spiritual” crisis, he said, requiring all people to “look for solutions not only in technology but in a change of humanity; otherwise we would be dealing merely with symptoms.”