The Greenhouse Gas Around Pope Francis

Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu, a Republican favorite, he is not. Pope Francis represents a faith that claims an American flock of almost 70 million registered followers (about half the Protestant segment in the US), which covers about 22% of all Americans, heavily weighted by a Latino demographic. In fact the United States has the fourth largest Catholic population of any nation on earth. While estimates vary, a consensus tells us that there are just under 7 million Jewish folks in the United States, placing them somewhere around 2% of the total.

What do Bibi and the Pope have in common? They have both been invited to address a joint session of Congress, Bibi in March and the Pope in an upcoming visit to the United States in September. They both represent clear religious blocs and both are equally passionate about their faith. But Bibi is a creature of politics, and while the Pope reigns over the Vatican, his role is primarily as a most senior cleric over one of the largest religious groups on earth.

But as much as the Evangelical stalwarts, that Tea Party amalgamation of social conservatives, cry out for Christian values to decide the American political direction, the words from the Pope himself seem to fly in the face of so many of their seemingly immutable issues. Catholics are, after all, Christians, and there are a whole lot more of them than there are Evangelicals. Even the Pope has more tolerance for gays than the Tea Party, but where the schism really hits home, it has to be on whether or not global warming, which now everyone seems to accept as “not a hoax,” is man-made or not. If it were man-made, you see, then having environmental regulations would make rather obvious sense, but if as the Evangelical deniers maintain, global warming is just a normal climate cycle, the government’s limiting emissions (which the Tea Party maintains is an economy-killer) would be a futile and unnecessary regulations meddling in the free market.

This social conservative view of climate change represents a very, very small segment of global opinion in the developed world, even here in the U.S. We already know “that 97 percent of scientists believe climate change is caused by humans… The latest surveys show that 89 percent of Democrats, 79 percent of independents and 70 percent of Republicans already believe global warming is happening and is at least partly caused by human actions.” ScientificAmerican.com, June 24, 2014. A little over half of Americans see a clearer and more direct connection between man’s actions and global climate change.

The rest of the educated world is more certain. “At 93 percent, China is the number one country that agrees that humanity's activity is the cause of climate change. Other countries that agree that climate change is humanity's fault include France at 80 percent; Brazil at 79 percent; and Germany at 72 percent, CBS News reported.” LatinPost.com, July 27, 2014. And so it goes.

But a recent Pew survey tells us that this theory is fairly uniformly rejected among the Evangelical movement which is the force that guides Tea Party philosophy and, as a result of the GOP tripping all over itself to appease this Base, the Republican Party itself. A according to that Pew study (backed up with subsequent substantiating polls conducted by Gallup and LifeWay noted below), “Evangelical Protestants were not only the least likely to attribute global warming to human actions (34 percent), but also the largest group to flatly say there is no scientific proof to validate the theory.

“A 2011 survey of 1,000 randomly selected pastors from the Christian research organization LifeWay concluded that few Protestant church leaders believe global warming is real and that humans are responsible for the phenomenon. According to the data, evangelical pastors were the most skeptical, with 68 percent of respondents disagreeing with the statement that global warming is real and manmade, compared with 45 percent of mainline pastors.” International Business Times, February 14, 2102.

But Evangelicals, where climate change deniers are most heavily concentrated, aren’t exactly the spokes-faith for all of Christianity. “There are an estimated 285,480,000 Evangelicals, corresponding to 13.1% of the Christian population and 4.1% of the total world population… The United States has the largest concentration of Evangelicals.” Wikipedia.

Yet this narrow, unscientific denial of man’s involvement in climate change hardly represents even the view of a majority of Christians. Enter the Pope with his latest admonitions, which simply have to infuriate the Republican Base, just as the GOP desperately tries to figure out how to lure Hispanic Americans into their conservative fold. The Tea Party seems to prefer sticking to its guns on this issue, even if it hurts recruiting new members into the GOP, seemingly necessary if that party is to survive the massive demographic shifts going on in the United States. The Pope is an unwelcomed troublemaker to them, but his views on global warming seem to reflect those of his constituency.

The strong Latino presence in the Catholic faith, particularly here in the United States, already seems to believe in man-induced global warming, taking the resultant threats rather personally. The February 9^th New York Times found the statement of one Carrizo, Texas insurance lawyer, Alfredo Padilla, to be a good summary of that sentiment, a feeling that is also supported in relevant polls: “‘It’s obviously happening, the flooding, the record droughts,’ said Mr. Padilla, who agrees with the science that human activities are the leading cause of climate change. ‘And all this affects poor people harder. The jobs are more based on weather. And when there are hurricanes, when there is flooding, who gets hit the worst? The people on the poor side of town.’

“Mr. Padilla’s concern is echoed by other Hispanics across the country, according to a poll conducted [in January] by The New York Times, Stanford University and the nonpartisan environmental research group Resources for the Future. The survey, in which Mr. Padilla was a respondent, found that Hispanics are more likely than non-Hispanic whites to view global warming as a problem that affects them personally. It also found that they are more likely to support policies, such as taxes and regulations on greenhouse gas pollution, aimed at curbing it.”

Not only is Pope Francis speaking his mind on global climate change, he’s making waves on other sticky GOP issues like immigration. The Pope has proven that he cares not if his message is warmly received by his hosts. He is trying to change the world.

“The good news for Congress is that Pope Francis has accepted an invitation to visit. The bad news is that elected officials might not like what he has to say…On issues like poverty, immigration, abortion and climate change, the pope is likely to raise concerns that challenge his hosts. And the pontiff has already made clear that he is willing to be direct with political leaders. As he told the European Parliamentin November, ‘Europe seems to give the impression of being somewhat elderly and haggard.’

“‘If they’re expecting a talk only on how wonderful America is, they will be surprised,’ said the Rev. James Martin, an editor at large at the Jesuit magazine America. ‘I think he will be an equal opportunity disturber.’... The pope has expressed repeated concern about the treatment of immigrants around the world – a divisive issue for the Republican Party. In a letter the pope wrote in December, but became public [at the beginning of February], he decried ‘people who only see in immigration a source of illegality, social conflict and violence.’

“The pope has also made clear that he believes humans contribute significantly to climate change, telling reporters last month, ‘It is man who gives a slap to nature continually.’ That, too, is contested among Republicans.” New York Times, February 6^th.

As the majority of our Congress men and women belong to a party that still denies man’s impact on climate change, thinks we need to tighten up our border where the brown-skinned cross (nothing on the other white border), cut support programs for the poor while reducing taxes and regulations for the rich (which they call “job creation”), it seems increasingly that the GOP is pushing itself into an untenable corner of white old men with old-school rural values governing a racially and ethnically diverse and primarily urban population swept up in accelerating modernity.

Watching how they behave when they have a majority, rather dramatically out of step with the rest of the world, augurs badly for their longer-term hold on the American body politic. Can they do it with the help of bumbling Democrats, and their proclivity for exclusionary gerrymandering and voter ID law to keep their opposition silent? Or is that tide beginning to form the tsunami that they do not believe is coming?

I’m Peter Dekom, and it is amazing how few governments remain in power when they try to stop change and cling to a past that has long since been over.