What’s Wrong with the Pope’s Green Theology
The flawed encyclical
In June, Pope Francis published a 40,000-word encyclical, Laudato Si, which broadly addressed the human relationship to the natural environment and notably targeted the challenge of global warming. Unfortunately, despite deeply detailed arguments and undoubtedly good intentions, the pope’s missive was flawed in several ways likely to make it not only ineffective but possibly counterproductive:
- The essay’s collectivist ethos is illogical and unrealistic.
- By preaching to the converted the pope is unlikely to resolve political conflicts but may aggravate them.
- Despite continually invoking concern for the poor, Francis’ pervasive disdain for both technology and capitalism rejects the engines most likely to alleviate the scourge of poverty, improve human health, and nurture the environment.
The ‘we’ fallacy
A central flaw in Francis’ essay is its continual expression of sweeping generalizations such as paragraph 109, including this:
“We fail to see the deepest roots of our present failures, which have to do with the direction, goals, meaning and social implications of technological and economic growth.”
Such collectivist memes are erroneous and counterproductive. Human society is plural, not monolithic — there is no “we.” There are billions of individual people, clumped in hundreds of diverse countries, cultures, political factions, religious sects, businesses, associations, communities, and so on. Even the billion or so Catholics are hardly uniform in their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors — so “we” can’t even apply to them.
There is no “we.”
Certainly there are some people to whom the pope’s critique applies. But there also are many who are acutely aware of social implications of innovations and economic development. Many also realize that there are diverse perceptions and evaluations of what those implications are. Differing, often conflicting visions of extremely complex problems do not constitute blindness.
Francis says “we” pursue a path of wasteful materialism. But he famously and perhaps admirably lives a very frugal, even ascetic life. And I doubt he would deny that many others do as well, whether by choice or, in the case of the poor, by sheer necessity. So whatever his “we” means, it doesn’t really mean “we.” It’s more like “you”…as in “you sinners.”
There are valid uses of the collective “we,” but they are limited. We humans share common genes that define our species. (Yet the genome of each person is as unique as a snowflake.) We as a population occupy what Buckminster Fuller dubbed “Spaceship Earth” — while it was understood for centuries that the earth was but one solitary planet floating in an immense cosmic ocean, the photo of the small blue earth taken from the moon in 1969 understandably helped goad the nascent environmental movement.
But in politics, “we” is largely a vacuous and often deceptive term. The invocation of “we” is a rhetorical ploy commonly used to negate dissent, often with an accusatory connotation.
Yet conflict is in the DNA of politics. If there were no conflict in diverse human interests, politics would not exist. As Madison noted, “If all men were angels, government would not be necessary.” Neither would the Church for that matter.
Political realities
In any case, it is unlikely the encyclical and the sermonizing about it will have much impact, if any.
There are over 7 billion people in the world. A little over 2 billion are Christians, and most of those are neither Catholic nor particularly sympathetic to the Vatican’s views. So it is quite possible that millions of people will take Francis’ eloquent argument “to heart.” That leaves billions more who only may care to the extent it might serve their mundane interests.
Overall, of the panoply of doctrines espoused by the Catholic Church, many are ignored or spurned, even by its own parishioners. The pope’s church also officially opposes gay marriage. Yet the people of Ireland, among the world’s most devout Catholics, voted by a wide margin (68 percent) to legalize same-sex marriage. The pope has called for peace in the Middle East, and has instructed Vladimir Putin to bring peace to Ukraine — with no evident effect. And self-styled “progressives” who are cheering Francis’s attention to climate protection also commonly disdain his church’s policies regarding birth control, abortion, and the status of women.
Appeals to scientific and moral reasoning may only serve to increase political polarization and to inflame political conflicts, rather than help resolve them.
Political scientist Roger Pielke Jr.’s “Iron Law” of climate policy may be less spiritual than the pope’s treatise, but it is empirically more realistic:
The difference in public response to these government actions illustrates the immutability of what I call the iron law of climate policy: When policies on emissions reductions collide with policies focused on economic growth, economic growth will win out every time. Climate policies should flow with the current of public opinion rather than against it, and efforts to sell the public on policies that will create short-term economic discomfort cannot succeed if that discomfort is perceived to be too great. Calls for asceticism and sacrifice are a nonstarter.
Moreover, a broad body of research cited by Pielke in his book The Climate Fix and elsewhere — including the cultural cognition research by Daniel Kahan at Yale — shows that appeals to scientific and moral reasoning may only serve to increase political polarization and to inflame political conflicts, rather than help resolve them. As Kahan puts it:
What you “believe” about climate change doesn’t reflect what you know; it expresses *who you are*
The implication: The pope’s homily is “preaching to the choir,” or if you will, to the converted. It may energize those who already agree, but it just as likely will aggravate those who disagree.
The New York Times reported evidence that the encyclical does stir believers:
David T. Buckley, a professor of political science at the University of Louisville, used data collected by YouGov to examine the effects of the pope’s statements on Catholics. He found that for Catholics who attend church weekly, the pope’s encyclical on the environment was significantly more influential than an article citing climate-change experts. Fifty-four percent of such Catholics assigned to read the pope’s comments agreed humans were responsible for climate change, compared to 41 percent of those who read the experts’ take.
Nevertheless, a Bloomberg News poll found that only 33 percent of Catholics thought that “chastising those who deny a human connection to climate change” was a good direction for the Church; 56 percent felt it was bad. (And fewer than half thought it was good to denounce economic inequality.)
Meanwhile columnist George Will was one of many critics who expressed a distinctly hostile reaction to the pope’s environmental thesis:
In his June encyclical and elsewhere, Francis lectures about our responsibilities, but neglects the duty to be as intelligent as one can be. This man who says “the Church does not presume to settle scientific questions” proceeds as though everything about which he declaims is settled, from imperiled plankton to air conditioning being among humanity’s “harmful habits.” The church that thought it was settled science that Galileo was heretical should be attentive to all evidence.
Thus the net effect of Francis’ preaching, as is so commonly the case, is more likely to intensify conflict than to resolve it.
Poverty
As Bjorn Lomborg’s pertinent response to the encyclical points out, the policies that would be most beneficial to the poor are generally not climate policies, while many proposed climate policies are harmful to the poor.
Accelerating technological innovations that can make clean energy also cheap would simultaneously alleviate poverty, improve health, and protect the environment.
As Lomborg also points out, the pope’s expressed concern for the poor is largely disconnected from poor people’s own priorities:
Since March 2013, the United Nations has sought citizens’ ranking of 16 policy priorities. More than 8 million people have participated, with nearly 3 million living in the least developed nations.
In fact, an education is the top priority for the world’s most disadvantaged, followed by better health care, better job opportunities, an honest and responsive government and affordable, nutritious food.
Both for the entire world and amongst the worst-off, climate comes 16th out of 16, after 15 other priorities. It’s not even a close race.
And economist Ricardo Hausmann marshals empirical evidence from developing countries to contradict Francis’ claim that capitalism causes poverty:
The developing world’s fundamental problem is that capitalism has not reorganized production and employment in the poorest countries and regions, leaving the bulk of the labor force outside its scope of operation…
Francis is right to focus attention on the plight of the world’s poorest. Their misery, however, is not the consequence of unbridled capitalism, but of a capitalism that has been bridled in just the wrong way.
In the quest for more effective solutions for climate problems, less moralizing and more innovation, and more prosperity, would be most helpful. In particular, accelerating technological innovations that can make clean energy also cheap would simultaneously alleviate poverty, improve health, and protect the environment.
Along that line, Breakthrough Institute cofounder Michael Shellenberger’s tweet in response to Francis’ publication is pertinent:
The Ecomodernist Manifesto that Shellenberger and other colleagues composed has some limitations, but it is more humane, realistic, and practical than the pope’s treatise.
In the end, engineers are likely to be more effective than clerics in transcending conflicts and solving energy and climate problems.
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Copyright 2015, Lewis J. Perelman
Pictures: Wikimedia Commons, NASA
