Vatican City, Nov 13, 2024 / 09:20 am (CNA).
Referencing the concept of “climate finance,” Pope Francis said in a message to the U.N. climate summit on Wednesday that ecological debt and foreign debt both impact a nation’s future.
Francis warned that both foreign debt and ecological debt are “mortgaging the future” of nations.
“Efforts should be made to find solutions that do not further undermine the development and adaptive capacity of many countries that are already burdened with crippling economic debt,” the pope’s message said.
A “New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance” is one of the goals of the COP29 — the 29th Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change — taking place in Baku, Azerbaijan, Nov. 11–22.
Climate finance refers to local, national, or transnational financing that supports climate change mitigation actions.
Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin, who is representing the Holy See at the conference, read the pope’s message to the assembly on Nov. 13.
In his message, Francis said there is considerable indifference toward environmental problems in the modern era: “We cannot wash our hands of it, with distance, with carelessness, with disinterest. This is the real challenge of our century.”
“Indifference,” he underlined, “is an accomplice to injustice.”
The U.N.’s climate change conference, known as the “Conference of the Parties” (COP), has been held annually since 1995 to discuss the goals of the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
The Holy See joined the UNFCCC and the 2015 Paris Agreement in 2022.
Pope Francis said the Holy See continues to support the endeavors of the COP29, especially in the area of integral ecology education and in raising awareness of the environmental problem as a human and social issue.
“It is essential to seek a new international financial architecture that is human-centered, bold, creative, and based on the principles of equity, justice, and solidarity,” the pontiff said.
“A new international financial architecture that can truly ensure for all countries, especially the poorest and those most vulnerable to climate disasters, both low-carbon and high-sharing development pathways that enable everyone to reach their full potential and see their dignity respected,” he said.
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TO CHANGE CLIMATE WE WOULD HAVE TO:
1. Force the sun to maintain a constant energy
output
2. Stop the solar system from moving through the Milky
Way galaxy
3. Stop the Earth’s orbit from changing
4. Stop the variation of the Earth’s tilt on its axis
5. Stop the Earth from wobbling on its rotational axis
6. Stop nearby stars from going supernova
7. Stop the ocean currents from changing
8. Control the reflectivity of snow and ice
9. Regulate the evaporation of water from the oceans
10. Stop the molten core of the Earth from varying its
rotation
Oh, yeah. It all makes perfect sense.
Where did Bergoglio and the rest of the climate geniuses on the left ever get the idea that climate stability is even a thing?
Great symbolism, holding the conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, also a former republic of the USSR. In the late 19th Century, upstart Baku accounted for 90% of the world’s new oil production, and in 1901 still about half. Today, ranking about 24th worldwide in oil production.
Also today, the highest contributors of carbon emissions from all sources are China at 11 million metric tons/year (mmt/y), followed by a combined equal amount from the next four contributors (US at 5 mmt/y, India at 2.8, Russia at 1.6 and Japan at 1.0).
The Holy See’s linkage of climate science to international debt relief, and generally the vulnerability/ adaptive capacities of less-industrial nations, is a digestible message in a hugely complex world. On the multi-century and cultural timeline, the needed adaptive shift from a projected worldwide industrial society (e.g., with a car in every garage and a garage for every walk-up/high-rise apartment unit) will be a legitimate—what’s that word again, oh yes— paradigm-shift.
What more does the boundary-free Church have to say about a correctly “human-centered” (surely meaning “person”-centered) world where the rationalist/Enlightenment version of modernity is bumping up against boundary (!) conditions of an ecological nature on spaceship earth? Details matter: the 1986 Challenger comes to mind.
So, how to be locally synodal in some legitimate sense, without also being doctrinally, morally and ecclesiastically centrifugal, and institutionally and spiritually incoherent?