The previous LOTRW post, occasioned by the conjunction of Easter, Earth Week, and the passing of Pope Francis, took a brief retrospective look at his climate-change encyclical Laudato si,’ published in 2015.
As noted many times in this blog, I continue to marvel with a mix of lament and delighted wonder at the ability of eight billion people to accomplish so much, on matters both great and small, while my back is turned. Unsurprising that FOMO is a thing.
This week’s belated catch? Perhaps I’m the only one, but ICYMI, in 2023 Pope Francis issued what the Vatican called an apostolic exhortation (not an encyclical) entitled Laudate Deum – a follow-up to Laudato si’. A much shorter read, it revisits the same ground after the passage of eight years. Papal frustration with the slow pace of progress (and possibly with the lack of any evidence that his prior encyclical had worked significant change), though controlled and thoughtfully expressed, is evident throughout.
In Laudate Deum, the pope argues that the science, which he had considered established in the earlier document, is indisputable, and chastises deniers. He is vexed that the powerful continue to minimize the threat through marketing and misinformation. He continues to push back against the idea that technology and economic power together will be sufficient to stem the damage. He reiterates the moral nature of the challenge, pointing out that the impacts of the environmental degradation will primarily affect the already-poor-and-disenfranchised of the world and will persist for hundreds of years at a minimum, diminishing the prospects of generations yet unborn. He reemphasizes the need for concerted action, sustained by all nations, by international leaders and governments, and by each of us as individuals. But he sees mixed benefits at best from climate conferences. He notes the increasing urgency of the problem.
It’s natural to share the Pope Francis’ concerns (a sign of our mental and spiritual health, really). Here in the United States, the pace of progress is threatened by formal U.S. withdrawal from climate-change agreements, the reopening of federal lands to fossil-fuel extraction, the dismantling of NOAA and EPA now underway, the termination of climate-change related work in other federal agencies, other federal-level policy inconsistencies and more.
However: at the same time, American corporations, especially those competing in global commerce, have ignored such policy shifts in favor of competing for market share worldwide. Renewable energy costs are falling rapidly, slowing growth In world- and domestic appetite for fossil fuels. At the state- and local levels, climate-change abatement policies remain in force. Artificial intelligence, while increasing demand for electricity, points the way toward energy-saving across a range of economic activities. There are reasons for hope.
To repeat a forecast I’ve made before[1]: two-three hundred years from now, humanity will look back on this period in history. From that vantage our descendants will see the year 2000 (plus-or-minus) as a turning point. They’ll say that high-tech observing tools and computing technology produced a flowering of understanding about the Earth system, and that the information arrived just in time, because eight billion people had been inadvertently turning the planet into an ash can. They’ll envy us. They’ll say: It must have been exciting to live and work during that period of discovery and positive progress. At the same time, they ‘ll talk about their present circumstance (living in the year 2200 or thereabouts): It’s not like today. Today all we have is a polarized population and governmental dysfunction as we confront a raft of unsolvable problems. That’s a mere forecast, so of course it carries uncertainty.
But I can also provide a near-guarantee: like Pope Francis, never, during the rest of our lifetimes, will we feel anything but frustration with our slow pace of progress towards this desired end.
Unspeakable personal and institutional tragedies, compounded on one another. Pain and suffering beyond description. But sometimes this is how it feels on the ground when things are going well…
[1] Living on the Real World: How thinking and acting like meteorologists will help save the planet, William H. Hooke, American Meteorological Society 2014, Epilogue, pp 235-237.