The pope’s journey to climate outrage
With his latest missive, he has moved from grief and exhortation to a more strident position
In 2015, Pope Francis came out as an environmentalist, with his landmark encyclical Laudato Si, later called by Bill McKibben “the most important document yet of this millennium” and by Pankaj Mishra “arguably the most important piece of intellectual criticism in our time.”
Last week, with a follow-up apostolic exhortation called Laudate Deum, the pope came even further out — as a climate alarmist, a techno-skeptic and a degrowther, sympathetic to activists and, most improbably, a reader of the feminist futurist Donna Haraway, the author of “A Cyborg Manifesto.” He also emphatically endorsed the “abandonment” of fossil fuels — outing himself as a “keep it in the ground” guy as well.
He is also much angrier than he was eight years ago. Since Laudato Si, the pope writes, “I have realized that our responses have not been adequate, while the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point.” In his new exhortation, he invokes the immediate urgency of faster action, takes pains to offer point-by-point rebuttals of climate denial and climate complacency, including corporate complicity and widespread greenwashing, attacks the “technocratic” worldview he sees behind planetary exploitation, defends climate protesters by describing them as filling a vacuum of global leadership, and calls out “the ethical decadence of real power.” He describes unignorable episodes of extreme weather as the “cries of protest on the part of the earth that are only a few palpable expressions of a silent disease that affects everyone.” And he returns to a two-part mantra he says he reiterates often: “Everything is connected” and “No one is saved alone.”
This is quite radical language, even for a pope who has long plotted his own complicated course as an outspoken progressive, alienating many Catholics along the way. But he is also on a journey familiar to many of those most concerned about climate, from grief and lamentation through exhortation to a position of more strident and more pointed outrage. Last month, I wrote about the change in tone from activist groups and climate establishmentarians toward the fossil-fuel industry. In Laudate Deum, Pope Francis channels that frustration, too, but he is more focused and withering on the failures of climate geopolitics since the publication of Laudato Si.
A lot has changed between 2015 and 2023 when it comes to climate, and yet an awful lot hasn’t as well. Emissions from the global electricity sector may soon be reaching their peak, the energy research group Ember just announced, and the International Energy Agency recently declared that there was still a workable pathway to net zero emissions in 2050 — and that following it would save the world $12 trillion.
On the other hand, emissions are still setting records, and climate extremes and disasters, often powered or supercharged by warming, have come to seem like so many features of our news wallpaper.