Conservatives blasted Pope Francis’ treatise on climate change and the environment because they said it denounces free markets as a solution for bringing people out of poverty.
The pope’s encyclical, an official document that puts social issues in a Roman Catholic context and is meant to guide the church’s teachings, warned that when it comes to protecting the environment, “We need to reject a magical conception of the market.” He said the search for profits naturally invites environmental degradation and that markets often shut out the impoverished who lack institutional power.
“To ensure economic freedom from which all can effectively benefit, restraints occasionally have to be imposed on those possessing greater resources and financial power. To claim economic freedom while real conditions bar many people from actual access to it, and while possibilities for employment continue to shrink, is to practice a doublespeak which brings politics into disrepute,” Francis wrote in the encyclical, Laudato Si.
Although the pope did not offer any policy recommendations, those types of comments brought the church into the realm of politics, critics said. They also called Francis’ slights against capitalism misplaced, contending that autocratic and command-and-control state structures invite more rampant corruption and plundering of natural resources.
“It tends to characterize free markets as unregulated, which is simply untrue. It also seems to blame markets for so many social ills which may perhaps in the case of developing countries reflect that they don’t have free markets,” Samuel Gregg, research director with the Acton Institute, a Grand Rapids, Mich., religious policy group that promotes free markets, told the Washington Examiner.
Francis devoted much of the 184-page document to his belief that the poor are disproportionately harmed by a warming planet. Some scientists have blamed worsening drought and floods, with shifting crop yields, on climate change. They contend that has pushed growing numbers of farmers off their land, caused destruction in ever-growing coastal cities and prompted food prices to spike.
The encyclical blamed those trends partly on companies — chiefly, those that extract greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels — that Francis and those on the political Left say have impeded action to reduce emissions to preserve their bottom lines.
“Is it realistic to hope that those who are obsessed with maximizing profits will stop to reflect on the environmental damage which they will leave behind for future generations? Where profits alone count, there can be no thinking about the rhythms of nature, its phases of decay and regeneration, or the complexity of ecosystems which may be gravely upset by human intervention,” the encyclical said.
Conservatives on and off Capitol Hill slammed the encyclical because they argued top-down policies to rein in emissions would raise energy costs that would hurt the poor. Most of the detractors are skeptical of human-caused climate change or oppose a carbon tax, which some on the Right have touted as a free-market approach to combating climate change.
“He says, ‘Oh no, I don’t want to tax the poor people.’ Well, you necessarily do when you’re embarking on a program to do away with [carbon dioxide] or with greenhouse gases because that’s how you do it. No one has figured it out in the last 15 years, unless the pope has figured it out. And I don’t think he has,” Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., told reporters Thursday.
Environmental groups, liberal Democrats and the Obama administration cheered the encyclical, saying it connected the dots among co-opting the legislative process, the effects warming has on numerous economic sectors and further economic inequality.
“We have to recognize the impact of climate change on the poor and we have to further recognize the impact of solutions to reversing climate — the climate crisis, solutions and their impact on the poor. And the pope in his statement talks so much about the impact on the poor,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
Gregg said some of the rebukes of the free market system stem from the pope’s Argentine upbringing. He noted the government and religion are more intertwined in Latin America, where states often operate robust social spending programs with an eye toward alleviating poverty. Detractors of such policies have noted the systems prevent foreign investment and trade while awarding handouts to cement political patronage.
Michael McKenna, a Catholic GOP strategist who lobbies for energy companies, told the Examiner in an email, “His holiness is wrong about technology, wrong about climate change, and — whether you like it or not — has spent his entire life marinating in the soft Marxism of the Latin American Left.”
Thomas Wenski, the archbishop of Miami, added that he thought some on the Right were being brash. He said the encyclical would have “considerable weight” that influences future policy long after the encyclical exits the news cycle.
“This is the reaction of a small group of people that we have to make sense of on the blogosphere. There’s an old saying that the dogs will bark, but the caravan moves along,” Wenski told the Examiner.
It’s not the first time that Francis has criticized capitalism. Other stances — such as his behind-the-scenes influence in getting the Obama administration to begin normalizing relations with Cuba — have earned the pope barbs from the Right.
But Dan Misleh, director of the Catholic Climate Covenant, said Francis is not the first pope to address inequality, given the church’s interest in caring for the poor.
“There has been over the years fairly consistent analysis by the previous popes on the shortcomings on all types of economic systems, including capitalism,” he told the Examiner. “This is not new teaching here. It’s pretty old.”
