Pope Less Than Impressed with Climate Deniers
May 14, 2015
Apparently the climate-denying Heartland Institute effort to change the Pope’s mind on climate change did not work.
However, you can expect that sound bite to be turned on them by the Rush Limbaugh “enviros-are-watermelons” crowd.
If I was advising the Vatican on messaging, I’d say – you can be just as tough in your language as you wish, by all means, use the words “greedy”, “sociopathic”, “lying”, “criminals”. But if you put the word “capitalism” in there, – even if you’re technically correct – a portion of your target audience will turn it off.
Just sayin’.
Pope Francis’ closest cardinal advisor on Tuesday blasted “movements in the United States” hostile to the pontiff’s forthcoming document on the environment, claiming the criticism is fueled by a form of capitalism protecting its own interests.
“The ideology surrounding environmental issues is too tied to a capitalism that doesn’t want to stop ruining the environment because they don’t want to give up their profits,” said Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga.
Rodríguez is the coordinator of a group of nine cardinals that serves as Pope Francis’ informal cabinet.
He said both the church and the wider world are awaiting Francis’ ecological manifesto, known as an encyclical letter, “with hope,” especially in tandem with a U.N.-sponsored agreement on Sustainable Development Goals and a U.N. summit on climate change in Paris later this year.
Rodríguez spoke at a press conference in Rome to mark the beginning of a general assembly of Caritas Internationalis, a global federation of Catholic charitable groups.
“I have already heard criticism over the encyclical,” Rodríguez said at a news conference, referring to reaction in the United States. He called it “absurd” to reject a document that hasn’t even been published yet.
Climate Denial Crock of the Week 
May 14, 2015 at 5:24 am
🙂
Pope Francis: Environmental Sinners Will Face God’s Judgment
May 14, 2015 at 8:27 am
“But if you put the word “capitalism” in there, – even if you’re technically correct – a portion of your target audience will turn it off”.
It’s time to stop avoiding the real issue. AGW and all the other insults that humans have delivered to the biosphere have their roots in CAPITALISM. Our technological advances have been driven mainly by greed and the profit motive, not a desire to “do good”, and the damage they have done is ignored in the name of “progress” and “growth”.
Rush Limburger and the rest of the stinky conservatives and Repugnants can NOT be allowed free rein to spread their poison and delay action. The words “greedy”, “sociopathic”, “lying”, and “criminals” ARE appropriate descriptors and modifiers for modern day “capitalism”, and Francis needs to point that out—-he has a far bigger audience and more influence than Limbaugh (or Bill Nye, The Science Guy). Just sayin’
May 14, 2015 at 7:49 pm
The money behind the climate change denial industry is indeed from the predator capitalists who give a fuck about our future. This kind of capitalism is the real enemy of the planet and the human race. And the pope is surely not alone with this notion.
Lord Turner, formerly Britain’s top financial regulator, has become the latest finance sector grandee to warn that investment industry valuations are in need of urgent review in the face of the threat posed by climate change.
The former chairman of the Financial Services Authority (FSA) warned of “a major set of problems … in the relationship between finance and the real economy”. He said national economies, banks and businesses were effectively being encouraged to prioritise short-term returns and “do nothing about climate change whatsoever”.
Turner is regarded as uniquely placed to assess the long-term investment industry’s readiness for climate change threats having largely authored the UK pension reforms a decade ago and served as the first chairman of the influential quango, the Committee on Climate Change.
=> Former FSA chief warns of carbon bubble threat from climate change
May 15, 2015 at 10:03 am
Let’s hope someone listens to Turner and the others who seem to “get it” about the risks of not dealing with AGW sooner rather than later. The various divestiture movements seem to be slowly gaining ground. Maybe the gamblers who call themselves financiers will start to recognize the bad bets they’ve made?
May 14, 2015 at 8:47 am
I think criminals and sociopaths everywhere will take umbrage and being lumped with the braindead lumps of protoplasm at the Heartland Institute.
May 14, 2015 at 8:55 am
The “braindead lumps of protoplasm at the Heartland Institute” ARE criminals and sociopaths of the highest order who are driven to tell lies by their greed.
Far from “taking umbrage”, their counterparts “everywhere” probably admire them greatly and are sorry they didn’t come up with the scam first.
May 14, 2015 at 11:31 am
hey its time to recognize the root. we’ve hit a big wall.. #climate.
May 14, 2015 at 1:51 pm
The Pope should excommunicate that one fella – James Dellingpol – or however his name is spelled.
May 14, 2015 at 2:01 pm
Delingpole is not likely a Catholic, so the Pope can’t throw him out. It will be enough if Francis ridicules him and tells him that he’s going to hell with the other deniers.
May 14, 2015 at 8:33 pm
Australian PM, Tony Abbott once trained to be a catholic priest in a seminary and claims to still be a devout catholic. No doubt he’ll claim the Pope is a UN conspiracy theorist.
May 14, 2015 at 8:34 pm
I meant he’ll claim the pope is part of the conspiracy………ugh where’s my coffee?
May 16, 2015 at 3:06 pm
164 (30.6%) of the US Congress is Catholic. 81 are Republicans.
May 18, 2015 at 11:25 am
Capitalism is not the root of the problem. Though it’s certainly a problem, it’s also a symptom; the root cause of the ecological crisis is also the cause of both capitalism and Soviet style state capitalism. If we mistake the root of the problem we’ll simply work hard to trade one fatal symptom for another, possibly prolonging our death agony and only taking more innocent species with us.
The root cause is the psychological condition that causes and is spread by civilization. Call it Wetiko, Emotional Plague, cultural autism, complex PTSD… whatever… we need to acknowledge that as the problem, and at least begin to address it appropriately to avoid the worst of the disaster we’ve entered.
One way we can begin to address the psychological nature of our illness is to frame our concepts effectively. For example, instead of taking capitalism head-on, talk about “crony capitalism”, “hyper-capitalism” and other ways of phrasing the extreme forms we’re seeing as the problem. While that would reduce anxiety by not seeming to indict capitalism itself, only those extreme forms, in fact it does indict capitalism–by association, by putting it in a frame that links it with the destruction it causes. It creates a scapegoat (accurately diagnosing the problem however) at the same time it chains the entire system to the goat. Then we drive the goat into the wilderness and hey! Not our fault when the whole system gets dragged along.
We also have to talk about the alternatives; offer a positive vision while healing and educating both children and adults. We need to heal our society from millennia of emotional stunting caused by, well, almost everything we do, and especially we have to heal people from the last 60 years of conservative lies told as truth in every form of media there is. That’s the job of psychologists and psychotherapists, artists and other healers, not economists.