Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy met with senior Vatican officials Friday to “discuss the moral obligation” of the Roman Catholic Church to act on climate change, according to the EPA.
The meeting comes as Pope Francis is preparing to issue an encyclical — an official papal letter given to the church’s 5,000 bishops and 400,000 priests — on the environment and climate change.
“McCarthy applauded Pope Francis’s engagement with the issue and conveyed President Obama’s commitment to cutting carbon pollution and detailed what EPA, through its Clean Power Plan, and other federal agencies are doing to address climate change and demonstrate leadership,” an official EPA readout stated.
The readout referenced a proposed EPA carbon emissions limits for power plants, which aims to slash U.S. electricity emissions 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. The proposal has excited liberals and environmentalists but angered conservatives and industry who say the regulation will hike energy costs.
Francis has positioned his argument on climate change as a biblical duty to be good stewards of the planet. Nicknamed the “pope for the poor,” he notes extreme weather events and changing food production patterns, which scientists have linked to a warming planet, are likely to disproportionately affect more impoverished communities.
But the pope’s advocacy has divided the church’s liberals and conservatives. While some in the church have urged action based on moral grounds, some evangelicals have said a changing climate signals the biblical end of days, or the apocalypse.
