Tag Archives: Climate Change Encycical

JEB! & the GOP Try to Triangulate Papal Encyclical on Climate

By Walter Borden

Recently the standard taking point for climate science deniers regarding manmade climate disruption has been ‘I can’t say, I am not a scientist’. This no doubt thoroughly focus-grouped response is the equivalent of saying ‘I can’t say if smoking causes cancer, because I am not a scientist’. Yet here is Pope Francis, who also happens to have scientific training and work experience in chemistry, preparing to release an encyclical saying that climate change is real, mostly manmade, will primarily hurt the world’s poor, and represents a moral obligation for Catholics to take steps to combat.

Source: New York Times and The Pew Foundation
Source: New York Times and The Pew Foundation

Jeb Bush, showing a remarkable ignorance and/or naïveté of world history and the history of science pronounced he was skeptical of the pope expressing his views:

But I think religion ought to be about making us better as people and less about things that end up getting in the political realm.

The papacy of course has been involved in politics, sometimes for better and some for worse, since the founding of the church. Certainly many Catholics reference the papal edicts regarding abortion and marriage. And many great scientific discoveries and proofs come from monks and those who considered themselves Christian, such as Gregor Mendel, Pope John XXICopernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton and Boyle.

So here again, Big Oil and its politicians offer expediency and “truthiness” rather than logic, and sound science. All the while talking of what’s best for future generations and smart policy. Will this tactic play with voters? Maybe not as much as some backers of the GOP think. From the May 17th digital edition of the New York Times:

About 69 percent of adults say that global warming is either a “very serious” or “somewhat serious” problem, according to a new Pew Research Center Poll, up from 63 percent in 2010. The level of concern has still not returned to that of a decade ago; in 2006, 79 percent of adults called global warming serious….One small exception on climate change is that Catholic Republicans are slightly more concerned about climate change than non-Catholic Republicans, although the gap is small: Most Catholic Republicans are also skeptical that human activity is heating the planet.