Pope Francis summons Big Oil to Vatican for “Climate Change” sermon

Pope Francis summons Big Oil to Vatican for “Climate Change” sermon

Ireland has long been seen as a bastion of the Catholic Church, but its May 25 vote to end national ban on abortion is evidence that the nation is taking a secular turn. Interestingly, Pope Francis was silent during the campaigns on this matter and will not visit Ireland.

I suspect that this lack of action is at least partly driven by the fact that progressives are on the opposite side of this issue. It would take a saint to endure the social justice scolding that would have ensued if Pope Francis interjected the Catholic religion into this matter.

However, “climate change” is an entirely different matter.

Pope Francis will meet with some of the world’s oil executives next week, likely to give them another moral nudge to clean up their act on global warming.

Climate change policy and science experts are cautiously hopeful but aren’t expecting any miracles or even noticeable changes.

The conference will be a follow-up to the pope’s encyclical three years ago calling on people to save the planet from climate change and other environmental ills, Vatican spokesman Greg Burke confirmed Friday. Cardinal Peter Turkson, who spearheaded the encyclical, set up the June 8-9 conference with the executives. The pope himself will speak to the leaders on the second day of the summit, organized with the University of Notre Dame, Burke said.

Readers will recall the Pope issued a climate change encyclical that was entitled Laudato Si (Praise Be: On the Care of Our Common Home). Parts of the message disparaged free market principles while indicating “global governance” as a solution to the politically created climate change crisis.

I believe that the papal opinion on the free market or real science have not changed, so it will be interesting to see which Big Oil executives are willing to enter the “lions den” of green justice activism.

The conference, organized by the University of Notre Dame in the United States, is expected to be attended by the heads or senior executives of companies including Exxon Mobil, Eni, BP, Royal Dutch Shell and Pemex, the source said.

The chief executive officers of Exxon, BP and Norway’s Equinor will attend the event, the companies confirmed. Shell declined to comment.

…Companies are betting on increased demand for gas, the least polluting fossil fuel, and to a lesser extent on renewable power such as wind and solar, to meet global targets of net zero emissions by the end of the century.

“We’re hopeful that this kind of dialogue can help develop solutions to the dual challenge of managing the risks of climate change while meeting growing demand for energy, which is critical to alleviating poverty and raising living standards in the developing world,” Exxon spokesman Scott Silvestri said.

Perhaps Pope Francis might be more effective if he chatted with Chinese and Indian officials instead.

But to keep up with the increasing demand for electricity, India must add about 15 gigawatts of generating capacity annually for the next 30 years. Most of the country’s electricity (two-thirds) is supplied by coal-fired plants and more such plants are likely to be built. India has the fifth largest coal reserves in the world at 94.8 billion metric tons, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, and its technically recoverable coal resources are more than triple that number. India plans to double its coal production by 2020, making it the second largest producer of coal in the world, behind China.

As an aside, I would like to remind Legal Insurrection readers that Pope Francis worked closely with Obama on the awful deal to normalize relations with Cuba. He recently made a few remarks about the upcoming summit between the US and North Korea that failed to mention Trump and focused on the Koreas (“Artisans of Peace”).

I am going to go on the record by stating that based on this lack of papal intervention, I predict the Korean Peace Deal is going to be a spectacular success.

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