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Should we Care what the Pope Says About Climate Change?

Part of: The Pope’s Encyclical and Climate Change Policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Daniel Bodansky
Daniel Bodansky*
Affiliation:
Arizona State University
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The brokerage firm, E.F. Hutton, used to have a tagline that went, “When E.F. Hutton speaks, people listen.” On climate change, the Pope has spoken, but will people listen? And should they? The first question is empirical; the second, normative.

The papal encyclical, Laudato Si’, was released in May 2015 to much acclaim. It is an extraordinarily wideranging document. Although I will focus, in particular, on its discussion of climate change, it is worth noting that the encyclical addresses virtually the entire litany of environmental problems—loss of biodiversity, hazardous chemicals and wastes, marine pollution, replacement of virgin forests with monoculture plantations, and lack of access to clean drinking water, among others—as well as related social problems such as extreme poverty and urban overcrowding.

Type
Symposium: The Pope’s Encyclical and Climate Change Policy
Information
AJIL Unbound , Volume 109 , 2015 , pp. 127 - 131
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of International Law 2015

References

1 Pope Francis, Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ of the Holy Father Francis on Care for our Common Home, para. 21 (2015).

2 Id. at para. 162.

3 Id. at para. 144.

4 Id. at para. 122.

5 Id. at para. 114.

6 Id. at para. 210.

7 Id. at para 192.

8 E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (1973).

9 John Dryzek, The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses 153 (1997).

10 Fenton, Joseph Clifford, The Doctrinal Authority of Papal Encyclicals, 121 Am. Ecclesiastical Rev. 136 (1949)Google Scholar.

11 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Inputs from Parties received during Adp 2-11.

12 Bodansky, Daniel, The Copenhagen Climate Change Conference: A Postmortem, 104 AJIL. 230 (2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Yale Program on Climate Change Communications, The Francis Effect: How Pope Francis Changed the Conversation about Climate Change (2015).

14 The Pope is, of course, not the first to emphasize the moral dimensions of the climate change problem. See, e.g., Donald A. Brown, The Ethics of Climate Change: Navigating the Perfect Moral Storm (2012); Stephen M. Gardiner et al., Climate Ethics: Essential Readings (2010); Dale Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle against Climate Change Failed – and What it Means for our Future (2014).

15 Pope Francis, supra note 1, at para. 171.

16 Id. at para. 102.

17 The Ipat formula was originally put forward in Ehrlich, Paul R. & Holdren, John P., Impact of Population Growth, 171 Science 1212 (1971)Google ScholarPubMed. For a discussion, see Daniel Bodansky, the Art and Craft of International Environmental Law 39-44 (2009).

18 Pope Francis, supra note 1, at para. 50.

19 Id. at para. 193.

20 Id. at para. 50.

21 Id. at para. 60. For a quite different perspective than the Pope’s, see Sagoff, Mark, Do We Consume Too Much?, Atlantic, June 1997.Google Scholar

22 Pope Francis, supra note 1, at para. 43-47.

23 Id. at paras. 21, 161.

24 After all, his namesake, Saint Francis of Assisi, has been called the “patron saint” of ecology. White, Lynn Jr., The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis, 155 Science 1203 (1967)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

25 Wall Street J., Rahm Emanuel: You never want a serious crisis go to waste, Youtube (Nov. 19, 2008).

26 Kwame Anthony Appiah, the Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (2011).

27 Probably not totally apocryphal, Tel Aviv University, Science and Technology Education Center, Knowledge Technology Lab. Although the story has become legend, recent evidence suggests that Zhou thought the questioner was asking about the student uprising in Paris in the 1960s, not the 18th century French Revolution, Dean Nicholas, Zhou Enlai’s Famous Saying Debunked, Historytoday, June 15, 2011.