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The Pope’s Latest Climate Banger

Before getting on the plane for COP28 next week, Pope Francis had some words for Western Society.

Pope Francis.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Pope Francis is heading to this year’s COP summit in Dubai next week, fresh off releasing an encyclical, Laudate Deum, that takes wealthy countries to task for their failure to curb greenhouse gas emissions. NPR dedicated its Sunday cover story on All Things Considered to the new document, and I highly recommend you listen to the whole segment. Christiana Zenner, a Fordham University professor who’s studied the pope’s writings on climate change, described the publication as a follow-up to Laudato Si, his 2015 encyclical that first mentioned climate change. But whereas Laudato Si was, in Zenner’s words, “reflective, rhapsodic and almost devotional,” this year’s is focused solely on climate change — and far more critical. This quote in particular stood out:

The [Pope] in this document thinks that almost everything hinges on the success of the upcoming COP meeting, which is partly why he’s going there. It's partly why he released this document, and it’s partly why, in this document, he is hypercritical of Western developed — hyperdeveloped — nations in particular, who, in his view, have become complacent and not lived up to the responsibility that is properly theirs on the world stage for leading on climate remediation and all sorts of related questions.

You know, it is no accident how this document is constructed. He starts out by citing the U.S. bishops on climate change. And that’s a brilliantly underhanded move in some ways, brilliantly rhetorical move, because he then turns back at the end of the encyclical to say, you know, consumption, overconsumption in particular, is most pronounced in the United States. And so in paragraph 72, he says, “If we consider that emissions per individual in the United States are about two times greater than those of individuals living in China, and seven times greater than the average of the poorest countries, we can see [sic]...” and he goes on to talk about critiques of Western consuming lifestyles. So there's this kind of parabolic beginning and return to the question of how climate change is framed in the West and the failure of leadership to really address these questions.

Francis will address world leaders on Dec. 2. In the meantime, you can listen to the full recording on NPR’s website, or below.

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Neel Dhanesha

Neel is a founding staff writer at Heatmap. Prior to Heatmap, he was a science and climate reporter at Vox, an editorial fellow at Audubon magazine, and an assistant producer at Radiolab, where he helped produce The Other Latif, a series about one detainee's journey to Guantanamo Bay. He is a graduate of the Literary Reportage program at NYU, which helped him turn incoherent scribbles into readable stories, and he grew up (mostly) in Bangalore. He tweets sporadically at @neel_dhan. Read More

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Sparks

What Do Rich Countries Owe Their Old Colonies? More Than Once Thought.

A new report from Carbon Brief shows how accounting for empires tips the historic emissions balance.

British colonialists in India.

The British pose in India.

Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

At the height of Britain’s power, it was said that the sun never set on its empire. The crown’s tendrils stretched around the world, with colonies on every continent but Antarctica — though I’m sure if there had been anybody around to subjugate on the ice, the crown would have happily set up shop there, too.

The British were not, of course, the only colonial power; many of their European brethren had empires of their own. All that colonization takes energy, and the days of empire were also, for the most part, the days of coal. But as countries around the world gained their independence, they also found themselves responsible for the historic emissions that came from their colonizers burning fossil fuels within their borders.

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