Views on Climate Change are Not Newsworthy
by Marcus Key, the Joseph Priestley Professor of Natural Philosophy
St. Pope John Paul II received a lot of media attention when he wrote in support of evolution. Our current pope has done the same with climate change. Both issues have been widely accepted throughout the Roman Catholic Church, but the American media seemed surprised by this “news.” It may be that some Americans have different views on evolution and climate change than the rest of the world. In my mind, the fact that the Roman Catholic Church supports evolution and climate change is as newsworthy as its support of gravity. Like the theory of gravity, global climate change is not a matter of faith and morals. The pope’s expertise is faith and morals, not science.
From my personal experience, loving my neighbor like myself as Jesus taught us is harder than reducing my carbon footprint. As the pope says in his latest encyclical, if you want to combat global climate change, simply reduce your personal consumption. As one who tries to be a devout Catholic, I think a more important and challenging message in the pope’s encyclical is the issue of the unsustainability of Western capitalism and global materialism; however, I am not an economic philosopher, so I’ll leave it at that.