ROME — Pope Francis has sent a message to the participants of the United Nations’ COP29 climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, urging immediate action to reduce carbon emissions.
“The scientific data available to us do not allow any further delay and make it clear that the preservation of creation is one of the most urgent issues of our time,” states the pontiff’s text, read at the conference by the Vatican’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin.
The pope’s message paints a grim portrait of the global state of affairs, marked by “growing disillusionment with multilateral institutions and dangerous tendencies to build walls.”
“Selfishness – individual, national and of power groups – feeds a climate of mistrust and division that does not respond to the needs of an interdependent world,” the text declares, for which the only solution is a multilateral, globalized effort.
Along with a dangerous nationalistic trend, the pope asserts that economic development “has not reduced inequality” but has rather “favored the prioritization of profit and special interests at the expense of the protection of the weakest.”
The cost of addressing the climate crisis should fall on the shoulders of the wealthier nations, the pope suggests, which should also “determine to forgive the debts of countries that will never be able to repay them.”
More than a question of generosity, debt forgiveness “is a matter of justice,” the pope declares, which is made all the more serious because of a true “ecological debt” between the global North and South, “connected to commercial imbalances with effects on the environment and the disproportionate use of natural resources by certain countries over long periods of time.”
The pope’s message comes at an interesting time, given the recent landslide presidential election of Donald Trump, who is committed to regaining America’s energy independence and who has been highly skeptical of the U.N.’s climate programs.
In 2017, President Trump formally announced that the United States would withdraw from the Obama-era Paris Climate Accord, “in order to fulfill my solemn duty to protect America and its citizens.”
“As President, I can put no other consideration before the wellbeing of American citizens,” Trump stated in his Rose Garden speech. “The Paris Climate Accord is simply the latest example of Washington entering into an agreement that disadvantages the United States to the exclusive benefit of other countries.”
The agreement left American workers and taxpayers “to absorb the cost in terms of lost jobs, lower wages, shuttered factories, and vastly diminished economic production,” Trump declared.
The Paris Accord imposed “draconian financial and economic burdens” on our country, he explained, such as “the Green Climate Fund which is costing the United States a vast fortune.”
“As someone who cares deeply about the environment, which I do, I cannot in good conscience support a deal that punishes the United States — which is what it does – the world’s leader in environmental protection, while imposing no meaningful obligations on the world’s leading polluters,” Trump said.
In his speech, Trump noted that America is in a unique position to benefit from fossil fuel production and should not easily throw it away.
“We have among the most abundant energy reserves on the planet, sufficient to lift millions of America’s poorest workers out of poverty,” he said. “Yet, under this agreement, we are effectively putting these reserves under lock and key… and leaving millions and millions of families trapped in poverty and joblessness.”
The fact is, he said, “that the Paris deal hamstrings the United States, while empowering some of the world’s top polluting countries.”
As the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board quipped about COP29 on Tuesday: “The real joke of these summits is that so many people still take them seriously.”
Apparently, Pope Francis has not gotten the memo.