April 6, 2018 at 1:53 p.m.
Choose now, not later, to fix the climate
The Pope notes that "the environment is God's gift to everyone, and in our use of it we have a responsibility to the poor, toward future generations and toward humanity as a whole."
More specifically, Pope Benedict states emphatically that "the international community has an urgent duty to find institutional means of regulating the exploitation of non-renewable resources, involving poor countries in the process, in order to plan for the future."
From Dec. 7-18, under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, leaders of the world will meet in Copenhagen. Originally, many hoped this summit would produce a comprehensive new treaty on climate change by adopting less-polluting energy technology and helping poor countries adapt to climate change.
Weather not
While reasonable people can disagree how bad climate change will eventually be if nothing is done, and some doomsday scenarios may be overblown, virtually all scientists concur climate change is now a reality.
Last year, Mexico had the worst floods in over 50 years, and huge swaths of Africa, from the Atlantic seaboard to the Indian Ocean, were under water. In 2008, out of the 40 humanitarian emergency appeals that were launched from Caritas Internationalis, a Catholic foreign aid agency, 28 were climate-related.
Rising sea levels, violent storms, floods, drought, en-croaching deserts, diminishing supplies of glacier water and erratic weather patterns will have the greatest impacts on people living in poverty in developing countries, who are least able to adapt. As we saw so dramatically with Hurricane Katrina, the poorest are the first victims of floods, droughts and famines.
Unfortunately, an international and legally-binding agreement at Copenhagen, modeled on the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 - which the United States, for decades the world's leading emitter of climate altering gasses, has never ratified - will probably not be achieved this month.
This is due in no small measure to the inability of our own Congress to enact climate and energy legislation that sets targets on greenhouse gases in the U.S. and contributes our fair share to assist poor nations to adapt to climate change.
First step
Consequently, the revised goal for the Copenhagen Con-ference is to achieve a provisional agreement as a stepping stone to a fuller agreement next year in Mexico City. White House officials say President Obama will tell the delegates that the United States intends to reduce its greenhouse emissions "in the range of 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050."
These figures reflect targets passed by the House of Representatives in June but still stalled in the Senate.
The House bill (Markey-Waxman) devotes virtually all its funding to the causes of climate change, placing relatively strict caps on carbon dioxide emissions from coal, oil and natural gas, but provides less than a billion dollars to help developing countries. Thus, the citizens of these poor nations, who are the least responsible for causing climate change, will likely experience the brunt of its devastating ecological impact.
Financial impact
The U.N. estimates that adaptation for underdeveloped countries will require $25 billion to $68 billion dollars annually. That is astronomical. However, if we took the lower figure of $25 billion annually, the United States share would be $7 billion.
Recently, along with members of a national interfaith coalition on climate change, I met with Sen. John Kerry, chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and co-sponsor of the Senate climate change bill (Kerry-Boxer), currently being crafted by that body.
We presented a moral argument for providing adequate funding to help poor nations adapt to climate change.
Sen. Kerry told us that given the lack of awareness in Congress on the climate and our staggering budget deficits, it is highly unlikely that the United States will come anywhere near to doing our just share. But he was quick to note that if our government can spend $12 billion a month in Iraq, we should be able to find a billion or two a year for climate change.
Best defense
Moreover, helping underdeveloped nations adapt is in our own national interest. The links between climate change and violent conflict are clear. Increasing pressures on natural resources, particularly water, coupled with food shortages and crop failures as a result of floods, droughts and shorter growing seasons, are straining fragile social and political systems around the globe.
Therefore, campaigns to tackle climate change must be linked to development and to emergency humanitarian work. International cooperation to reduce carbon emissions needs to be accompanied by foreign assistance to enable vulnerable states to adapt to climate change.
To underscore this point, consider two Aug. 20 letters to the New York Times from Lee Gunn, a retired vice admiral of the U.S. Navy, and James Morin, currently involved in the efforts to bring peace to Iraq and Afghanistan.
To the letter
"During my recent testimony on this issue before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee," Admiral Gunn writes, "I highlighted how climate change will lead to increased conflicts around the world because of water and agricultural shortages, changes in patterns of human migration and further destabilization in areas like South Asia, potentially fostering an increase in global terrorism.
"Climate change has already contributed to conflicts in regions like Darfur; it has already affected United States military operations; and it will increasingly affect American military planning for contingencies around the world. And if we don't lead the way on curbing these changes, others will."
In his missive, Mr. Morin writes: "Serving as an infantry platoon leader in both Iraq and Afghanistan, I witnessed firsthand the impact America's reliance on foreign energy has on our armed forces and how poverty and resource scarcity create the conditions for extremism to flourish. Drought, famine, population migration and other effects will increase if we allow global warming to go unchecked. These conditions threaten global security by creating humanitarian disasters and increasing instability.
"History has shown that instability breeds ethnic, religious and national conflict - as we've seen in Darfur, Somalia and other regions of the world. Climate change may be the ultimate destabilizer, serving to shake up every hornet's nest around the world.
"America undoubtedly will be called upon to react to those inflamed conflicts. Put quite simply, if we refuse to fight climate change, we're choosing to put more American military men and women in harm's way."
Mr. Morin concludes, "As someone who has been on the front lines and as a father of four, I think it's prudent to invest in clean energy and reduce global warming pollution now to save our children and grandchildren the burden of future strife. Otherwise, we as a nation are simply hoping that things will work out on their own, that the science is wrong or that another nation will step up and respond to these crises."
Covenant
To address the complex issues involved with climate change, our Bishop's Conference along with Catholic Relief Services recently inaugurated a campaign entitled, "The Catholic Climate Covenant" which focuses on the moral, environmental, and human dimensions of climate change.
We ask people, "Who is under your carbon footprint?" We seek to show how our local actions contribute to climate change and what can be done to reverse this global crisis.
During this Advent season when we are called upon to heed the words of the prophet to "prepare ye the way of the Lord," I would urge the members of our Catholic community to reflect upon how we contribute to and can alleviate the growing phenomenon of climate change.
Please consult the website www.catholicsandclimatechange.org for practical ways in which we can address this serious moral and environmental challenge and let our elected officials know of our support for constructive action on this issue.
Couples’ challenges
Negative elements included financial challenges, balancing work and family time, caring for children and elderly parents, concerns about health care, domestic violence and addictive behaviors.
These focus groups and other research have revealed that most Catholics do not have a well-differentiated grasp of Church teachings. With some exceptions, they tend to think in generalities.
For example, many stated that the Church’s teaching about commitment and permanence is most affirming to them. They are able to find practical support in this when the going gets rough. Some also mentioned the Church’s teaching about marriage being a vocation, a graced path to holiness, as something from which they draw strength.
Not surprisingly, and across all the age cohorts of couples, we heard that Church teaching and discipline about contraception and about annulments present major challenges.
One response of the initiative to these concerns has been to develop a series of spots for radio and TV to proclaim the importance of marriage; to reposition it within societal understanding and popular imagination; to help couples and society re-discover marriage and to live it with realism and hope. (Just this week I heard one of these spots on ESPN radio and it was great!)
Later this month at our meeting in Baltimore, we bishops will be reviewing a draft pastoral letter on marriage, which we hope will communicate in contemporary language the Church’s teaching about the beauty, goodness and truth of marriage as revealing divine love.
Why marry
To underscore how high the stakes are for this initiative, let me conclude by citing again Caitlin Flanagan’s article in Time magazine. She writes: “The fundamental question we must ask ourselves at the beginning of the century is this: What is the purpose of marriage? Is it — given the game-changing realities of birth control, female equality and the fact that motherhood outside of marriage is no longer stigmatized — simply an institution that has the capacity to increase the pleasure of the adults who enter into it?
“If so, we might as well hold the wake now: There probably aren’t many people whose idea of 24-hour-a-day good times consists of being yoked to the same romantic partner, through bouts of stomach flu and depression, financial setbacks and emotional upsets, until, after many a long decade, one or the other eventually dies in harness.
“Or is marriage an institution that still hews to its old intention and function — to raise the next generation, to protect and teach it, to instill in it the habits of conduct and character that will ensure the generation’s own safe passage into adulthood?
“Think of it this way: The current generation of children, the one watching commitments between adults snap like dry twigs and observing parents who simply can’t be bothered to marry each other and who hence drift in and out of their children’s lives — that’s the generation who will be taking care of us when we are old. What we teach about the true meaning of marriage will determine a great deal about our fate.”
How true!
(12-03-09)
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