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Despite the santorum splattered about, the Pontiff of the Church Universal and Triumphant [EDIT: This is actually referring to the Roman Catholic Church, not the Church Universal and Triumphant] is going to agree with the climate change consensus in an encyclical to be released on Thursday. Early leaks give some idea of the content.
Pope Francis is preparing to declare humans as primarily responsible for climate change, call for fossil fuels to be replaced by renewable energy and decry the culture of consumerism, a leaked draft of his much anticipated statement on the environment suggests.
The source for this somehow concerns Australians, but we will take any indication of infallibility where we can get it.
So the humble submitter has to wonder, does this mean that climate-change deniers are now to be considered heretics, rather than just Petro shills or anti-environmental conservative conspiracy theorists? It does add a entirely new dimension to the debate, and I hope that God will forgive your Conservative asses for screwing up Her creation in the quest for profit.
UPDATE - janrinok 18 Jun 12:36UTC
is it possible to update/append aristarchus' post "Pope Affirms Anthropogenic Global Warming" (https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15/06/17/0317256), as follows:
Update: The encyclical can be read and downloaded here.
I am not affiliated with the submitter, aristarchus, or the pope. I have a slightly paranoid reason for asking for this update; it is my experience that, whenever politically important documents are published, the actual document often gets overshadowed by an enormous load of blog commentary, providing a bit of "damage control" and "spin". It is my fervent opinion that the readership of Soylentnews deserves to read the actual source documents. (It's only 82 pages long, in this case, anyway).
Original Submission
(Score: 4, Insightful) by fritsd on Wednesday June 17 2015, @06:57PM
Watch this website tomorrow: http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/it/encyclicals/index.html [vatican.va], something called "Laudato Si".
From aristarchus' summary:
So the humble submitter has to wonder, does this mean that climate-change deniers are now to be considered heretics, rather than just Petro shills or anti-environmental conservative conspiracy theorists?
Betteridge says no.
Maybe, you could now rephrase it to: climate-change deniers disagree with both the scientific evidence of climate change (but what's that mean to normal, non-intellectual people), and also with the current moral call-to-arms that we have a moral duty to keep our only habitat livable for our off-spring, be they catholics or non-catholics, rich 1st worlders or poor 3rd worlders ("stewardship").
Therefore, instead of labelling those people "heretics" and focussing attention on them: just stop listening to them.
They don't count, in the larger picture. They're not interested in keeping our only habitat livable. So screw 'em.
In every group there's always a few who don't play along well. Why do you want to listen to immoral people? Of course they have the right to free speech, but that doesn't mean you have to listen to their hypocritical crap.
The Heartland Institute? gimme a break.. God wants us to plant tobacco everywhere, and douse the soil in tetraethyllead. What could possibly go wrong?
We, the rest of the 7 billion, must take more responsibility, no matter how small our individual power is. Our planet is finite, and it's our only home. *If* you believe God created our world, it's probably safest to assume we're supposed to tend it, and not safest to assume that we'll get another one after we spoilt it, and then another one, etc. (modern version of Pascal's wager).
Let's do our best to transition during our lifetime and not leave the (infrastructure-and-energy-expensive!!!) big transition to renewable fuels to the next generation. Tax the externalities to impel sector-wide production technology changes. No company would change if that would disadvantage them relative to their competitors, so government influence is necessary.
We *have* large, fossil-fuel-powered functioning steel mills now. Let's use that to build wind pylons *now*, not in 30 years when it's all wind-powered and electricity becomes more expensive, including the electricity required to produce electricity generators. Yes, in 30 years Tata and Alcoa and British Steel and Rio Tinto probably need more batch-oriented processes than continuous, for use when electricity is cheapest. Yes, Rosneft and Shell and Gazprom might need to think about degassing the Laptev sea, converting it with the water gas shift reaction followed by a Fischer Tropsch factory, so we don't shoot ourselves in the head with the Clathrate Gun (CH4 >> CO2). All of those things can be done. We are not powerless, we are a global technological civilization. Let's try to keep it working thru this century.
There were beautiful discussions on the practicalities on the now-semi-defunct theoildrum.com [theoildrum.com] website. The archived discussions can still be read.
Thank you. This was one of my better rants, IMHO. Was I as good as mr. Santorum??
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2015, @07:45PM
Since when does Betteride's Law of Headlines apply to something that's not a headline?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 19 2015, @03:26PM
Let's use that to build wind pylons *now*
So you are saying we need to construct additional pylons?