- - Sunday, December 4, 2016
Reuters
reports, “Pope Francis urged national leaders on Monday to implement
global environmental agreements without delay, a message that looked to
be squarely aimed at U.S. President-elect Donald Trump.
“Addressing
a group of scientists that included theoretical physicist Stephen
Hawking, the pope gave his strongest speech on the environment since the
election of Trump, who has threatened to pull out of the 2015 Paris
Agreement on climate change.
‘The ‘distraction’ or delay in
implementing global agreements on the environment shows that politics
has become submissive to a technology and economy which seek profit
above all else,’ Francis said.”
So the pope thinks opposition to the Paris Treaty stems from profit seeking?
How
about all the billions in profits sought by renewable energy
corporations like wind turbine makers General Electric and Siemens or
solar panel makers First Solar and Solar City, whose products can’t
compete economically with fossil fuels or nuclear without massive
government subsidies and mandates?
How about the billions of taxpayer dollars showered on Solyndra and similar now-bankrupt renewable energy companies?
How about all the billions of taxpayers’ dollars showered on the
climate-change research complex to fund its continued modeling that has
achieved the magnificent advance in scientific knowledge since 1978 of
narrowing the estimate of the warming effect of doubled atmospheric CO2
from 1.5-4.5 C to 1.5-4.5 C? (Yes, you read that right — no narrowing
achieved. Scores of billions spent over 38 years and no advance in what
we really need to know.)
How about all the profits sought by
carbon traders who expect to amass billions trading permits whose
economic value rests on nothing but empirically falsified climate models
that project 2 to 3 times the warming actually observed?
All this
isn’t even to mention the anti-capitalistic mentality apparent in the
pope’s implicit condemnation of profit seeking. “But he only condemns
seeking profit “above all else,” you say? Sorry, that doesn’t ring true
to Francis’ past. Despite the fact capitalism has lifted whole societies
out of poverty while socialism has only trapped them in or returned
them to poverty, Francis has been committed to Liberation Theology — a
Latin American variant of Marxism learned by Latin American priests
while studying mostly in Marxist-dominated French seminaries—since early
in his priesthood.
One can’t help
wondering if his embrace of climate alarmism rests on politics rather
than science. That wouldn’t be unique to him, as former U.N. Framework
Convention on Climate Change Secretary General Christiana Figueres said
as much last year.
Certainly the absence of any hard science in
the four paragraphs on climate change in Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’
suggests science didn’t much factor into his opinion. That’s why
hundreds of scientists — including climate scientists — signed the
Cornwall Alliance’s Open Letter to Pope Francis on Climate Change, and
were joined by economists, theologians and ethicists.
If politics
has become submissive to a technology and economy that seeks profit
above all else, the technology is that of renewable energy, which is
subsidized 60 (wind) to 400 (solar) times as much per megawatt-hour of
electricity generated as fossil fuels. How else do you explain
governments’ willingness to sign onto a climate treaty implementation of
which will cost $70-$140 trillion by century’s end while, on the IPCC’s
own assumptions, reducing global average temperature by no more than
0.17 C.
Perhaps Pope Francis, who purports to care so much about
the world’s poor, should consider how much more that money could achieve
to lift people out of poverty if spent on things like water
purification, sewage sanitation, nutrition supplements, infectious
disease control, and health care.
Meanwhile, President-elect
Trump, at whom the pontiff was preaching, should stick to his guns. He
should announce that because President Obama never submitted the Paris
treaty to the Senate for ratification, which the Constitution requires
for the United States to be bound by any treaty, the U.S. is not a party
to the treaty. Then, on the day he’s inaugurated, he should submit the
treaty to the Senate, where it will die the ignominious death it
deserves. Washington Times
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