In his Apostolic Exhortation on the Climate Crisis, Laudate Deum¸ published on the Feast of St Francis of Assisi (4 October) this year, Pope Francis emphasises how urgent the climate crisis has become. In the eight years since he published his Encyclical on Care for Our Common Home, Laudato Si’, the crisis has heightened, with no part of the earth unaffected by extreme weather phenomena. In coming years, we can only expect more destructive wildfires in many parts of the world, more devastating floods in coastal areas, increasingly severe droughts in arid areas. The toll of species going extinct because their habitat is destroyed by climate change will only increase. Sadly, “other creatures of this world have stopped being our companions along the way and have become instead our victims.”[1]
The picture for the future is very bleak. Traumatic weather-related events will worsen before they improve, and that, only if people, industries, and governments around the world – including in less-developed nations – transition from their use of fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy. For this to happen, stronger multilateral institutions are required, which have the leverage to hold countries accountable to their stated climatic goals. Pope Francis observes how civil society can be a complementary force to monitor governments’ compliance with the international treaties to which they have committed.[2] The aim of this civil-society activity is to “prevent even greater evils over time.”
While Laudate Deum is clearly dependent on Laudato Si’, it is not a ‘clone’ or a ‘part two’ of the earlier encyclical. Although 19 of the 44 footnotes of the recent exhortation cite the earlier encyclical, each document is authoritative in its own right. It may at first sight appear to be “more of the same,” but the exhortation focuses specifically on climate change, and targets the 28th Conference of the Parties (“COP”) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) which will take place in Dubai in November-December 2023. Thus, the scope of the exhortation is much more restricted than that of Laudato Si’, which is Francis’ magnum opus of the interrelatedness of all environmental challenges and their social dimensions.
In the exhortation, Pope Francis entertains no denial of the causal link between increasing concentrations of anthropogenic greenhouse gases and global climate change.[3] However, the climate crisis is not only about physics and biology. Because climate change is caused by humans, locked into a misleading technocratic paradigm, there is an “ethical goad” to interrogate “the economy and the way we conceive it.”[4] This is a recurrent theme of Francis’ papacy. The profit motive, which drives much economic activity, marginalizes many people, luring them with false promises to participate in “a world that is not being built for them.”[5] On the other hand, a few people who already have great power consolidate their privileges through a (smoke)screen of ‘meritocracy.’ What is needed is a greater “democratisation” of multilateral decision-making and the legitimizing of these decisions, so that the rights of the most powerful are not preserved at the expense of those of the majority.[6]
Having sketched the history of some significant and other disappointing COP’s, the exhortation urges those taking part in COP28 to “be strategists capable of considering the common good and the future of their children, more than the short-term interests of certain countries and businesses.”[7] The pope hopes that COP28 will produce energy-transition commitments that will be “efficient, obligatory and readily monitored”[8] and that any new process introduced will be “drastic, intense, and count on the commitment of all.”
In a recent webinar of African theologians dealing with the new exhortation, one participant questioned whether the pope is losing his authority, because the climate crisis has been getting worse, during the eight years since Laudato Si’ was published. Why have people not obeyed the pope and taken his instruction to reduce their output of greenhouse gases? In response, it is clear that the moral imperative to do whatever is in our power to reduce our carbon footprint cannot be enforced by papal authority – such as it is. The pope can appeal to people’s virtue of solidarity and care for creation – as he does in Laudate Deum[9] – but he cannot impose adherence to a particular moral activity. In addition, such is the scale of the climate crisis that any change in behaviour, culture, domestic activity, politics or economics aimed at immediately reducing greenhouse gas emissions, will only have perceptible effects in decades’ time.
The webinar also raised the issue of why the Church is always trying to “catch up” in the ethics of technological innovation. With few ethicists involved in the actual processes of invention, innovation and commercialization of technology, we are more often reactive rather than proactive. We consider the ethical implications of what has already been produced. A consistent ethic of valuing all life does not authorise us to control or pre-empt what technologists may or may not research. In addition, the potential applications of new technologies are not always evident in the design phases of the emergent technology. Ethicists need to remain informed of current technological advances, and to imagine the possibilities – both good and bad – of what is being developed. We should promptly offer our assessments, in order not to be consigned to the dust heap of irrelevance.
In Laudate Deum, Pope Francis cautions against the unquestioning use of technology, and names the technocratic paradigm as an ideology underlying an obsession. It maintains that we can “increase human power beyond anything imaginable, before which nonhuman reality is a mere resource at its disposal.”[10] History has shown how dangerous it is when technology ends up in the wrong hands. We need only think of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict to see what damage rockets do to civilian and non-combatant populations. Are we in an “age which was so advanced as to be actually the last one,” muses Pope Francis along with Vladimir Soloviev.[11]
The technocratic paradigm objectifies the natural world. Pope Francis counters this utilitarian approach, warning that its anthropocentrism is founded on a dualism that does not see humans as part of the world that surrounds us. It leads to a profound alienation of people from their environment. As a counter-example, the pope holds up indigenous cultures as healthy and harmonious ecological interactions between human beings and their environment. This provides food for thought for us “to rethink […] the question of human power, its meaning and its limits.”[12]
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[1] Laudate Deum (hereinafter LD) 15.
[2] LD 37 f.
[3] LD 13.
[4] LD 31.
[5] LD 31.
[6] LD 43.
[7] LD 60.
[8] LD 59. “Eficientes” of the original Spanish version is probably better translated as “effective.”
[9] For example, he writes in LD 59: “If there is sincere interest in making COP28 a historic event that honours and ennobles us as human beings….”
[10] LD 22.
[11] LD 28, citing Vladimir Soloviev, War, Progress and the End of History, Inclucing a Short Story of the Anti-Christ, London: 1915.
[12] LD 27.