Many people were excited by
Pope Francis’s Encyclical on Global Warming, for Francis acknowledged that global warming is largely caused by humans, and also has a disproportionate effect on the poor. Although I’m not sure how much a Pope’s words on such issues can affect public policy, especially given the inertia of nations and the influence of companies that pollute, that’s all well and good, though I still think that the Pope’s stands on important issues don’t presage a serious revision of Catholic doctrine.
Indeed, that was the opinion of Nick Cohen, Steve Pinker, and Lawrence Krauss (earlier posts
here,
here, and
here), who pointed out that one of the main causes of global warming is
overpopulation, and that the Pope not only refused to implicate this issue, but in fact rules it out as anything that needs to be addressed. That is clear in this quote from Chapter 5 of Francis’s encyclical:
50. Instead of resolving the problems of the poor and thinking of how the world can be different, some can only propose a reduction in the birth rate. At times, developing countries face forms of international pressure which make economic assistance contingent on certain policies of “reproductive health”. Yet “while it is true that an unequal distribution of the population and of available resources creates obstacles to development and a sustainable use of the environment, it must nonetheless be recognized that demographic growth is fully compatible with an integral and shared development”. To blame population growth instead of extreme and selective consumerism on the part of some, is one way of refusing to face the issues.
No, demographic growth is not fully compatible with an “integral and shared development.” And to claim that population growth has no effect on global warming is insupportable.
But of course the Pope can’t really go after population growth for two reasons: the Church needs more Catholics to stem the nearly worldwide exodus from the faith, and because the Church’s official stance is that any form of birth control other than the ineffective “rhythm method” is immoral. And the rhythm method is the worst possible method of birth control,
with a failure rate of 18% or more per year.What the Pope is doing, then, is simply ignoring one of the major root causes of global warming so to save Catholic doctrine. And refusal to sanction
effective birth control simply maintains poor women as chattel: breeder stock that can never rise above their stations as baby machines. Nick Cohen excoriated the Pope for this
in the Guardian:
The pope does not say that the poor must stay poor to show their gratitude to the almighty or for the sake of the environment. Rather, he ducks the question of what will happen as the ever-expanding populations of poor countries grow richer. Demand the promotion of birth control – not abortion or eugenics, just contraception – and you are “refusing to face” the world’s unequal distribution of wealth, he writes. End “the extreme and selective consumerism” of the rich world and – eureka! –“demographic growth is fully compatible with an integral and shared development”.
Everything about his argument is slippery. Even if rich countries are prepared to redistribute wealth to poor countries, I have never met a secular campaigner against poverty who does not believe that educating women and giving them control of their fertility is the best way to reduce poverty.
And as Pinker wrote in an email (quoted with permission):
But the solution to climate change is not to moralize from on high and implore people—particularly the poor people who he claims to sympathize with—to learn to be abstemious for the common good and do without central heating, electric lights, and efficient transport. Billions of people aren’t going to do that. Not even the Pope—especially not the Pope—is going to do that. The solution is economic and technological: a global carbon tax, and investment in the development of new energy technologies. The Pope shows no signs of acknowledging this, because it leaves him and his church no special role.
The issue of population growth, carbon taxes, and the like are totally ignored in a new opinion piece in the prestigious science journal
Nature, “
Faith and science can find common ground” by David Lodge, identified as “director of the University of Notre Dame Environmental Change Initiative, Indiana, and editor (with historian Christopher Hamlin) of
Religion and the New Ecology (2006).” Notre Dame, of course, is a Catholic institution. Lodge is breathless with admiration of the Pope, admiring this so-called rapprochement between science and faith, and lauding Frances for saying that Catholics shouldn’t breed like rabbits:
In recent weeks, we have learned that Pope Francis enticed Cuban President Raúl Castro to consider a return to Catholicism, and has ended a dispute involving US nuns that will allow them to return to serving the poor free from the suspicion of heresy.
Perhaps most surprisingly, at least to this Protestant ecologist embedded for 30 years in a Roman Catholic university, the Pope has suggested that humans should not breed “like rabbits”, despite his church’s continued prohibition of birth control.
Pope Francis, after a visit to the largest Catholic nation in Asia, says Catholics may have a moral responsibility to limit the number of their children and need not reproduce “like rabbits.”
But the pope also reaffirmed the church’s ban on artificial means of birth control and said Catholics should practice “responsible parenting.”
That’s all Lodge has to say about population control, and he makes no attempt to relate it to global warming, the main topic of his piece. Instead, he repeatedly praises Frances for trying to bring together science and faith:
Pope Francis is clearly a man on a mission to shake things up. Could the world’s leading Catholic help to bridge the divide between science and the Protestant views that dominate the religious ‘anti-science’ movement? I think that he could.
. . . By framing protection of the environment as protecting human welfare, the Pope has linked the interests of groups that are often at odds. He offers some middle ground on which both sides of this polarized debate can meet and work towards a mutually desirable future.
Except, of course, for the pesky issues of overpopulation, carbon taxes, and alternative technologies.
Well, so be it. I suppose the Pope’s acknowledgment of anthropogenic global warming is a good thing, but of course the vast majority of climate scientists recognized that long ago. The Pope is simply admitting what we all know, and so any praise for him should be directed not at his prescience, but at the dubious assumption that people will actually pay attention to him because he’s the Pope.
In the end, though, Lodge’s article falls down for two reasons. First, he equates religiously based denial of global warming with “extreme environmentalism”, whatever that is. My emphasis in Lodge’s words below:
Such a compromise between the extremes of the religious and environmentalist positions could also help to defuse other sources of tension between faith and science. To many people, the two cannot be reconciled — so much so that when I tell people I am a biologist, believe in evolution and work on environmental issues, I am often told that I cannot be a Christian.
What, exactly, is the “environmentalist position” that should be compromised? That global warming is caused by humans and needs to be curbed? Is that “extreme”? Lodge doesn’t explain. This ridiculous equation is reflected in the article’s subtitle, “Pope Francis has found a meeting place for those with extreme religious and environmentalist stances, says David M. Lodge.”
And Lodge also—completely gratuitously—blames this polarization on the New Atheists, of course dragging the much-maligned Dawkins into the fray:
The same polarization [between faith and science] is urged by many prominent popularizers of science and the ‘New Atheists’ — with Richard Dawkins as their figurehead. Is it so surprising, then, that in the United States especially, atheism is over-represented among scientists, and that science–faith polarization is increasingly reflected in political and cultural discourse?
Further, what New Atheists usually write about is the lack of evidence for the tenets of religious belief, something that happens to be true, and something that a scientific journal should agree with—if it must discuss the issue at all. The polarization between faith and science is not a dubious claim of New Atheists: it happens to be a truth that reflects scientific versus religious “ways of knowing.” Scientists know—in the same provisonal way that scientists “know” anything—that climate change is due to human activity. Religious global-warming denialists claim (based on their unsupported ways of knowing) that climate change either doesn’t exist or reflects the End Times or God’s will. The Pope sides with science, but his compromise—the one approved by Lodge as uniting “extreme” religionists and environmentalists—is simply an ill-advised sop to faith.
