What pope Francis told Buhari and other world leaders

Pope Francis on Thursday urged the world to act
quickly to prevent “extraordinary” climate change from
destroying the planet and said wealthy countries must
bear responsibility for creating the problem and for
solving it. In a radically worded letter addressed to
every person on the planet, the leader of the world’s
1.2 billion Catholics blames human greed for the
critical situation “Our Sister, mother Earth” now finds
itself in.
“This sister now cries out to us because of the harm
we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and
abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her,”
he writes in his long-anticipated Encyclical on the
environment.
Arguing that environmental damage is intimately linked
to global inequality, he goes on to say that doomsday
predictions can no longer be dismissed and that: “The
earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more
like an immense pile of filth.”
Green activists hailed the charismatic Argentinian
pontiff’s widely-trailed intervention as a potential game-
changer in the debate over what causes global
warming and how to reverse it. “Everyone, whether
religious or secular, can and must respond to this
clarion call for bold urgent action,”said Kumi Naido, the
International Executive Director of Greenpeace.
Environmentalists hope the pope’s message will
significantly increase the pressure for binding
restrictions on carbon emissions to be agreed at global
talks in Paris at the end of this year. But even before
the official publication, climate change sceptics had
dismissed the document’s argument that the
phenomenon is primarily man-made and that humanity
can reverse it through lifestyle changes including an
early phasing-out of fossil fuels.
“I don’t get economic policy from my bishops or my
cardinal or my pope,” US presidential candidate Jeb
Bush said on the eve of the release in comments that
underlined the depth of opposition in the United States
to a binding agreement to curb greenhouse gases.
– Fast track to disaster –
The Encyclical references the arguments of the
sceptics by acknowledging that volcanic activity,
variation in the earth’s movements and the solar cycle
are factors in climate change. But it maintains that
“most global warming in recent decades is due to the
great concentration of greenhouse gases released
mainly as a result of human activity”.
And
it
leaves no doubt that Francis believes the world is on a
fast-track to disaster after decades of inaction. “If
present trends continue, this century may well witness
extraordinary climate change and an unprecedented
destruction of ecosystems, with serious consequences
for all of us,” he writes.
Bemoaning the “remarkable” weakness of political
responses to this, Francis accuses the sceptics of
cynically ignoring or manipulating the scientific
evidence. “There are too many special interests, and
economic interests easily end up trumping the common
good and manipulating information so that their own
plans will not be affected,” he writes.
“We know how unsustainable is the behaviour of those
who constantly consume and destroy, while others are
not yet able to live in a way worthy of their human
dignity,” he adds, saying the time has come for parts of
the world to accept decreased growth.
– Conflict and war –
The consequences of climate change, he argues, will
include a rise in sea levels that will directly threaten
the quarter of the world’s population that lives near or
on coastlines, and will be felt most acutely by
developing countries. Highlighting warnings that acute
water shortages could arise within decades, he writes
that, “the control of water by large multinational
business may become a major source of conflict in this
century”.
He adds: “It is foreseeable that, once certain resources
have been depleted, the scene will be set for new
wars,” with the ever-present risk that nuclear or
biological weapons could be used. One of the strongest
themes in the encyclical is that rich countries must
accept  responsibility for having caused climate change
and should “help pay this debt” by cutting their carbon
emissions and helping the developing world adopt
sustainable forms of energy generation.
“The land of the southern poor is rich and mostly
unpolluted, yet access to ownership of goods and
resources for meeting vital needs is inhibited by a
system of commercial relations and ownership which is
structurally perverse,” the pope writes in perhaps the
most radical passage of the document.
Francis says fossil fuel-based technology needs to be
“progressively replaced without delay.” Developing
countries will need financial help to do this from
“countries which have experienced great growth at the
cost of the ongoing pollution of the planet” and this
pact has to be enshrined in binding accords.




Source:
Vanguard