National Review Online
Thursday, June 18, 2015
There is an undeniable majesty to the papacy, one that is
politically useful to the Left from time to time. The same Western liberals who
abominate the Catholic Church as an atavistic relic of more superstitious
times, who regard its teachings on abortion and contraception as inhumane and
its teachings on sexuality as a hate crime today are celebrating Pope Francis’s
global-warming encyclical, Laudato Si’, as a moral mandate for their cause. So
much for that seamless garment.
It may be that the carbon tax, like Paris, is worth a
Mass.
The main argument of the encyclical will be no surprise
to those familiar with Pope Francis’s characteristic line of thought, which
combines an admirable and proper concern for the condition of the world’s poor
with a crude and backward understanding of economics and politics both. Any
number of straw men go up in flames in this rhetorical auto-da-fé, as the pope
frames his concern in tendentious economic terms: “By itself, the market cannot
guarantee integral human development and social inclusion.” We are familiar
with no free-market thinker, even the most extreme, who believes that “by
itself, the market can guarantee integral human development.” There are any
number of other players in social life — the family, civil society, the large
and durable institution of which the pope is the chief executive — that
contribute to human flourishing. The pope is here taking a side in a conflict
that, so far as we can tell, does not exist.
It is important to appreciate that Pope Francis’s
environmental thinking is entirely embedded in his economic thinking, which is,
we say with respect, simplistic. “Economic powers continue to justify the
current global system where priority tends to be given to speculation and the
pursuit of financial gain, which fail to take the context into account, let
alone the effects on human dignity and the natural environment,” the pontiff
writes. “Here we see how environmental deterioration and human and ethical
degradation are closely linked. Many people will deny doing anything wrong
because distractions constantly dull our consciousness of just how limited and
finite our world really is. As a result, ‘whatever is fragile, like the
environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which
become the only rule.’” (The quotation is the pope citing himself, from
Evangelii Gaudium.) Taking a page from the neo-Malthusians, the pope predicts
that resource depletion will lead to wars, and he contemplates the possibility
that the weapons used in them may be nuclear or biological. He laments
“technocracy” and consumption that seems to him “extreme.”
This latter objection strikes us as particularly
objectionable: The economic progress of the late 20th century and early 21st
century — which is to say, the advance of capitalism — particularly in the
areas of agriculture, medicine, and energy, has not so much enabled consumption
that is excessive in the rich world but adequate in places such as India and
China, where famine, once thought to be a permanent and ordinary part of life,
has largely disappeared. This outcome was made possible not by the political
oversight of economic activity that the pope contemplates but by its partial
abandonment. The pope’s stridently anti-development vision would be the
opposite of a blessing for the world’s poor.
“Political institutions and various other social groups
are also entrusted with helping to raise people’s awareness. So too is the
Church.” Fair enough, but the Church, like any other institution, has an
ethical obligation to do so in an intellectually rigorous fashion, and here,
with respect, the pope fails, writing: “Doomsday predictions can no longer be
met with irony or disdain. We may well be leaving to coming generations debris,
desolation and filth. The pace of consumption, waste and environmental change
has so stretched the planet’s capacity that our contemporary lifestyle,
unsustainable as it is, can only precipitate catastrophes, such as those which
even now periodically occur in different areas of the world.” This is
inconsistent with science in many ways, the most obvious of them being that the
operating consensus among climate scientists is far from a doomsday scenario —
models have consistently offered an estimate of about 2 degrees’ warming a
century hence. That would impose real environmental costs and require difficult
choices regarding mitigation, but it is not what the pope here is contemplating
— literally the end of the world, a
scenario that the Catholic Church has always envisioned happening by other
means. Beyond that, the pope’s focus on lifestyles and consumption ignores the
fact that demographers predict that the world’s population will begin declining
only 40 years from now, peaking in 2055. That will probably relieve some of the
demands on the planet’s physical resources — and present us with an entirely
new set of social problems that the pope apparently has not contemplated.
Unless one takes the most alarmist view of the problem
and the least skeptical view of the proffered solutions — as, alas, the Holy
Father does in his encyclical, among other things by linking global-warming to
current events unrelated to it — then the global-warming debate is not really a
moral question, but a scientific and economic question. And while there are
persistent questions about the data and the models at issue in the
global-warming debate, those pale in comparison with the much greater challenge
— which is a technical challenge, not a moral challenge — of evaluating the
various programs of mitigation and prevention that are being offered up. The
pope is certainly right about honoring God and His creation — but the question
before us is about tradeoffs: How much certain economic damage to impose today
in exchange for possible economic and ecological benefits at the dawn of the
22nd century? How radically to transform the Western economies in light of the
fact that large greenhouse-gas emitters such as China and India have made it
abundantly clear that they will do nothing to reduce emissions in real terms?
How much symbolic local action is prudent in response to an issue that is by
definition global, about which there is no global consensus as to a course of
action? And, not irrelevant to the pope’s traditional concerns: How much
suffering to impose on the world’s poor right now — and it is they who will
suffer most acutely — in order to satisfy the moral appetites of Western elites
who normally hold the pope, the Church he serves, and the moral tradition
underlying this encyclical in comprehensive contempt?
To disaggregate the question: The rich world should
indeed feel itself morally obliged to help the world’s poor. It must do this by
helping them develop their economies, along lines the pope rejects, to enable
higher levels consumption — of the sort the pope criticizes. We should
appreciate that human dignity has in all observed cases been better served by
the private-property regime that alarms the pope than by the
political-discipline model that holds the property right to be a usufruct
granted by states and princes and subject to endless revision at their whim.
And when considering the specific question of global warming, we must face the
reality that all the preventative strategies currently under consideration
would impose radical costs on the compliant while the noncompliant are nearly certain
to render those measures ineffective. And even if there were global compliance,
the current costs in real terms would be very high relative to the predicted
benefits: a few points of global GDP a hundred years from now.
Which is to say, the challenge before us is not to ensure
that every tongue confess the global-warming creed; it is, rather, the familiar
problem of the organization of capital, balancing production and consumption,
and assigning relative weight to a very large and diverse array of possible
public and private goods. That is a task to which the pope is not especially
well suited, as he has, unhappily, here demonstrated.
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