'This Earth Day, We Should Defy Trump's Climate Denial And Honour Pope Francis Instead'
US President Donald Trump stands with Pope Francis during a meeting at the Vatican. President Joe Biden is scheduled to meet with Pope Francis on Friday, Oct. 29, 2021I don’t have to be a former newspaper editor to know that the death yesterday of Pope Francis is going to dominate the news pages at the expense of the annual commemoration of Earth Day.There is an extra sad irony in that, as he wrote Laudato si’, the first-ever encyclical by a pope on the subject of the environment, and warned that humanity needs “a new way of thinking about human beings, life, society and our relationship with nature”. The pontiff in that text provided a focus on all of human thought that fits well with the theme of this year’s Earth Day, “our power, our planet”.The late Pope Francis, pictured in 2020, was known for his enthusiasm for climate action.Some might have hoped that the Trump administration would for one day at least abandon its continual stream of announcements, leaks and heavily capitalised “Truth Social” posts, that is now the standard practice of Washington “flooding the zone”, crowding out almost all other news. But of course that did not happen.I am old enough to remember when “Kremlinology” was an anxious art, when Western media, lacking sources of information out of Moscow, would put great store in the order of officials in grainy black and white photos lined up for military parades or in the exact wording of stiff official announcements.History has, inevitably, proven lots of those thinly resourced conclusions wrong, but today it doesn’t take the overthrow of a regime to do that: give it a couple of hours and quite likely the Trump camp will contradict itself. And another flood of pixels will be expended on seeking to interpret the very latest blurted comment.Eventually, surely, and Earth Day is a good day to suggest it, there is a time that taking every social media post, every throwaway line of abuse, as reason for another screaming headline, as cause to displace every other piece of news, must end. To recognise that most are a sign no more meaningful than the tea-leaves splatted on a saucer by a fortuneteller. And to recognise that “the economy” cannot rule our lives, that the economy is a complete subset of the environment, the soil that grows our food, the fresh water we need to live, the air we breathe.
Whatever US President Trump might say, green measures are powering ahead around the world because they make economic as well as environmental sense
Floodgates have to be erected, to allow air and space for the real – not going to be reversed in an hour, a year, or a decade – news of today, the continuing decline of our battered, fragile planet, with six of the nine planetary boundaries exceeded. Space must be found for the increasing understanding of the public health risks of the damage, whether microplastics in human follicular fluid or PFAS (forever chemicals) appearing in home-produced eggs (via contaminated earthworms). Opportunities must be opened for the refutation of often-repeated, blatantly false, claims about the practical solutions to our environmental problems, whether the fact that the problem of expensive UK electricity comes from the price of gas, not the low-cost renewables, or that there is no issue with heat pumps in our climate: they are booming in Norway, Sweden and Estonia, whose winters are on average a great deal colder than ours.Donald Trump's administration is taking apart climate protections.And that can be space too for good news. For, whatever US President Trump might say, green measures are powering ahead around the world because they make economic as well as environmental sense: renewable energy is being installed (see for example the unexpected boom in solar energy in Pakistan), buildings are being insulated (although the UK is near bottom in the European league tables), agroecological farming practices, increasingly informed by indigenous knowledge combined with the understanding that food security is one of the issues of our age, being implemented.New thinking of the kind the late Pope Francis called for is being developed and put into practice. And I can say, as a former journalist, to my current-day fellows, and others who have influence over the news agenda, which is all of us, that it is in our hands whether it gets the attention that it deserves.Trade will be a big focus for news this week. Coverage should consider the massive deforestation behind so many products being traded around the world, on the human rights abuses associated with chocolate, cotton and so many other products. The International Monetary Fund meeting, what is it going to do to confront the humanitarian and environmental damage its loans with conditions of forced austerity have done? As the Catholic charity Caritas Internationalis points out with its #TurnDebtIntoHope campaign, Global South governments spend 12.5 times more on debt payments than on climate action.But above all we need to ensure that every person has a voice, can recognise their own agency in getting together with others to change this situation. We need to make politics what we do, not have done to us: opening up genuine democracy – the agency of thinking differently that Pope Francis identified.Related...Reform UK's Richard Tice Stuns Journalist By Declaring Man-Made Climate Change Is 'Garbage'Green MP Slams Government Over Delay To Climate Bill: 'A National Embarrassment'COP29: Host Of Climate Change Summit Praises Oil And Gas As 'Gift Of God'
