Ever since the environmental movement began it has had a religious fervor: Like God, Earth is always capitalized, and there is an annual celebration, Earth Day, rather like holidays celebrated by other religions. Of course, the dogmas of green religionists have changed over time: Prophecies of a new Ice Age gave way to forecasts of global warming, and those to a more all-purpose fear of climate change. Fair enough. In order to survive, any religion has to adapt to changing times.
Which brings us to Laudato Si (Praise Be to You), the encyclical recently issued by Pope Francis, who, during a trip to the Philippines, told reporters that “man has slapped nature in the face” and that global warming is “mostly man-made.” He now warns, “If we destroy Creation, Creation will destroy us.” In preparation for the release of the encyclical, Pope Francis received U.N. secretary general Ban Ki-moon, who, according to the New York Times, arrived at the Vatican accompanied by “his own college of cardinals”—U.N. bureaucrats representing all major U.N. agencies. He then issued his encyclical, warning the world’s billion-plus Catholics that global warming, mainly created by man’s use of fossil fuels, is especially threatening to the poor.
The pontiff’s certitude aligns him squarely with President Obama, who proclaims the science of climate change to be settled, much as believers that the sun circled the Earth once claimed their science to be settled. And they knew what to do with that heretic Galileo. Obama doesn’t have such enforcement measures available to him, despite the elasticity with which he views his constitutional powers. But he does have the bully pulpit, congressional allies willing to demand that holders of unorthodox beliefs be excommunicated from universities, and now the support of a papal encyclical, a teaching document that is one of the most authoritative statements made by the Catholic church. Democrats are hoping the encyclical will put pressure on presidential hopefuls Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Rick Santorum, Chris Christie, and Bobby Jindal, all Catholics, to moderate their opposition to regulations on the use of fossil fuels. But Jeb Bush, although expressing an interest in what the pope has to say, told an audience, “I don’t get economic policy from my bishops or my cardinals or my pope.”
This merging of the Catholic and environmental faiths should come as no surprise. Pope and president, the respective leaders of the Catholic and environmental faiths, are as one in holding the “science” of global warming to be settled fact. Obama’s followers also tend to believe he is infallible and cheered in 2008 when he proclaimed his victory in the Democratic primaries as “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Both warn of biblical-scale droughts, floods, storms, and pestilence in our future, owing to the use of fossil fuels. Some might reject Obama as a religious leader—his decades of study at the feet of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright notwithstanding—but none can doubt the stature of Pope Francis.
State-supported religions typically have state-supported schools. We have Common Core educational standards, not quite the same thing, but increasingly the impressionable young are taught that there is one truth, and it is that man’s activities are having a devastating effect on global climate. As the Wall Street Journal has pointed out, the new K-12 science curriculum recommends “that by the end of Grade 5, students should appreciate that rising . . . temperatures” will affect the lives of everyone. By Grade 8, they “should understand that the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels is a major factor in global warming.” And by Grade 12, that “global climate models are very effective in modeling” and managing the impact of climate change. Lest educators lack the ability to transmit this knowledge, the EPA and other agencies have prepared climate-change primers for instructors.
Like all religions, environmentalism has its factions and sects. I am not certain that pantheism is the right label for those environmentalists who believe that salvation is to be found in the sun and the wind, but both forms of energy have caused considerable concern among coreligionists who see abstinence, using less of this or that, as the preferred route to a better, greener world—a sort of “just say no” approach to big cars and fridges, cooling in summer and heating in winter.
Unfortunately for the pantheist wing, the sun god has produced only about 40 percent of the bounty it promised when a vast acreage in the California desert was devoted to its solar-paneled places of worship. And the power of wind loses believers every time flocks of birds, and not all of them virgins, are slaughtered when the wind is high. Besides, those large whirling towers are scars on Earth’s beautiful vistas. Little wonder that nonbelievers are grumbling about the tithes, known commonly as subsidies, exacted from them to support these sources of energy.
Factionalism has not yet escalated to schism. Sun, wind, abstinence—believers in all of these unite around one single proposition: The fires that burn when fossil fuels are alight must be extinguished. Although deniers of this proposition are not tolerated, doubters remain. One such group consists of former deniers who have come around to a belief that something must be done, that the pope and the president can’t both be wrong. Some of these onetime apostates run major European oil companies and have expressed a willingness to atone by paying the costs created by their plundering of the Earth for its carbon-containing riches. Well, not quite paying, but they will support measures to have their customers pay. And not quite for using all of their fossil fuels, but only the liquid ones, leaving natural gas to continue to drive the real evil, coal, from the market by heavily taxing it.
The second group consists of doubters willing to concede that environmental religion might, just might, contain some enduring truths. These skeptics are not certain that the evil environmentalists seek to expunge is real, and have a nagging suspicion that it is concocted for the purpose of devolving more and more power to the environmental priesthood. But they are willing to take prudential steps, like imposing taxes to reduce the use of the objectionable fuels and redistributing the proceeds to lower-income families, a step that would surely appeal to the pope, whose redistributionist beliefs parallel those of the president.
All of these groups, from some 200 countries, are preparing for a synod in Paris in December. Political leaders of the G7 industrialized countries want to “decarbonize” the global economy over the course of this century. Less-developed countries think that is a great idea—so long as richer countries mobilize from public and private sources the $100 billion per year they have been promising to the poorer countries by way of penance for developing their wealthy economies with fossil fuels. True practitioners of the environmental faith will undoubtedly consider the $100 billion merely the price one pays to ease one’s conscience—a modern-day version of simony.
It won’t be easy to meet the goal of cutting carbon-dioxide emissions by 40-70 percent from 2010 levels by 2050. Barack Obama, who frequently seeks forgiveness for the sins he believes America has committed, will happily make promises for others to keep. A new president might not, and a certainly hostile Congress will not. Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, sums it up best: “I don’t think we should fool ourselves, nobody’s going to shut down their industries or turn off the lights.” And few are even willing to keep hybrid and electric vehicles at trade-in time, when 55 percent of owners are switching to gasoline-powered vehicles. Yet 69 percent of Americans tell Pew pollsters that global warming is a “very” or “somewhat serious” problem. So much for the answers concocted to please pollsters.
Unlike in past such meetings, Obama and like-minded European leaders will now have the moral authority of the pope behind them. The pope might not have any divisions, as Stalin pointed out when asked by the French to ameliorate the condition of Russia’s Catholics, but as Churchill later noted, the holy father has “a number of legions not always visible on parade.” Perhaps the papal legions can combine with people more sensitive to the fiscal reforms a carbon tax would make possible, to produce a sensible result in Paris. But only perhaps: True believers are not naturally given to compromise, or to worries about the cost in human misery of achieving their growth-stifling dreams.
Irwin M. Stelzer is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and a columnist for the Sunday Times (London).
