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New climate negotiator: Pope fights for science, denouncing consumerism
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By Rajendra Shende Pope Francis is on the way to address the United Nations Summit on
Sustainable Development that begins on September 25 in New York. He has
emerged, in a way, the most effective negotiator and the leading
environmental diplomat for developing countries.
His encyclical
also augurs well as possible game-changer in the climate talks in Paris
later this year, called by many as 'window of opportunity cracked open
for the world to take action'.
Reading through Pope Francis's 246
paragraphs of 'encyclical', issued three months before the United
Nations General Assembly meeting to agree on the post-2015 Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs) and six months ahead of the defining gathering
of Head of the States meeting on climate in Paris (COP21), is unusual.
The
uniqueness of the document stems not only from the Pope's developing
country origin but from its intended audience - not just 1.2 billion
Catholics of the world but almost every one or 'every child of our
Mother Earth' as encyclical intends. More than that, the Pope argues
very effectively on the points that developing country negotiators have
been drumming, without any impact, for the last 23 years since Agenda 21
was adopted and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change (UNFCCC) was signed.
Three years back, in 2012, at Rio+20
meeting, the world leaders agreed on the 'Future We Want'. That document
provided a mandate for all countries to propose the post-2015
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The global meeting of the world
leaders to agree on these SDGs starts this week at the United Nations
headquarters in New York. These two events would shape the Post-2015
world.
In 2014, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) released its synthesis report of the fifth assessment by
thousands of scientists around the globe and reviewed by the
governments. It delineates science, derives impacts and urges solutions.
An encyclical by the Pope staunchly supports the climate science,
recalls the faith and dares, mainly developed countries, to take moral
responsibility of the state of the world today.
In a way, it
provides a human face to the IPCC report and the document the 'Future We
Want'. The release of encyclical in June 2015 demonstrates the perfect
sense of timing by the Vatican. Apart from the timing of the release,
it's the unwavering support to the science of the climate change and the
way it wraps the reader into the fabric of challenging warps of faith
and wefts of morality.
Its uniqueness has one more historical
dimension. History of Church amply indicates that the Popes and the
papal community themselves had been 'deniers' of the emerging facts and
science in the past mainly to safeguard their interests and power. Those
acts have committed historic wrongs that caused huge and long-term
damage to the way we deal with the game-changing and faith-shaking
emerging science.
More than 350 years back, Catholic Church
condemned Galileo Galilee, one of the greatest scientists now called as
'father of modern science', for publishing a conclusive analysis that
the Sun and the rest of the cosmos did not orbit the Earth. His views
were called as false and erroneous.
Galileo was forced to recant
his proposition. That was before the advent of the industrial revolution
that triggered the global warming. More recently, 150 years back, after
the commencement of the industrial revolution, the Church called it as
atheist view and condemned Charles Darwin's theory of evolution through
natural selection.
Church has been responsive of its mistakes and
it has apologised for its stand of opposing and denying Galileo's
Copernican astronomical theory. The Vatican has also clarified that
there is nothing incompatible between the Bible's theory of theistic
evolution and Darwin's theory of natural selection and evolution. And
now, Pope Francis does not fall in the trap of putting theistic
interpretations above the climate science unravelled by the IPCC and
even proposes the way forward.
When the United Nations is on the
verge of finalizing the post-2015 road map by convening the world
leaders, Pope Francis is fully embracing the principles embedded in
Agenda 21. Polluters pay, precautionary approach and common but
differentiated responsibility - CBRD - are steadfastly advocated by him
throughout the encyclical.
The Pope gives clear and loud clarion
call to the world's rich nations to begin paying their "grave social
debt" to the poor and take concrete steps on climate change. "The
developed countries ought to help pay this debt by significantly
limiting their consumption of non-renewable energy and by assisting
poorer countries to support policies and programmes of sustainable
development."
Developing countries have been echoing the same
since 1992, in the global environmental negotiations. Stating that the
United Nations talks have failed to achieve the desired goal, he
declares that 23 years of summits have produced "regrettably few"
advances on efforts to cut carbon emissions and rein in global warming.
His
hitting statement that flags the arguments of developing country
negotiators is: "The failure of global summits on the environment make
it plain that our politics are subject to technology and finance. There
are too many special interests, and economic interests easily end up
trumping the common good and manipulating information so that their own
plans will not be affected."
He, surprisingly, denounces the
market mechanisms, hotly favoured by the developed countries, like
carbon trading and CDM. He calls them a quick and easy solutions that do
not allow for the radical change demanded by the situation. He
unwaveringly exposes the developed countries by calling market
mechanisms a ploy that permits maintaining the excessive consumption of
some countries and sectors.
The Pope's best defence for the fast
growing population in the developing countries comes when he argues that
the lifestyle with fast pace of consumption, waste and environmental
change has so stretched the planet's capacity that we are now facing the
catastrophes of unprecedented degree. To blame population growth
instead of extreme and selective consumerism on the part of some is one
way of refusing to face the issues, he proclaims.
It is time that
all the developing countries invite Pope Francis to be honorable
representative and leading negotiator during the climate negotiations in
December in Paris. It is also time that the leaders of the developed
countries seek window of confession, reconciliation or penance to
absolve themselves from mortal and moral sins. That confession window,
too, is only cracked open.
(24-09-2015- Rajendra Shende, an IIT
alumnus, and former UNEP director, is chairman of the TERRE Policy
Centre. The views expressed are personal. He can be contacted at
[email protected])