By Philip Pullella
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Pope Francis challenged governments on Sunday to take “drastic measures” to combat global warming and reduce the use of fossil fuels, saying the world was experiencing a climate emergency.
Francis issued his appeal, a written message for Sunday’s World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, ahead of the United Nations Climate Action Summit this month in New York, a follow up to the 2016 Paris Agreement to curb global warming.
Calling the U.N. summit “of particular importance,” he added:
“There, governments will have the responsibility of showing the political will to take drastic measures to achieve as quickly as possible zero net greenhouse gas emissions and to limit the average increase in global temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius with respect to pre-industrial levels, in accordance with the Paris Agreement goals.”
Francis has made many calls for environmental protection and has clashed over climate change with skeptics leaders such as U.S. President Donald Trump, who has taken the United States out of the Paris accord.
“We have caused a climate emergency that gravely threatens nature and life itself, including our own,” the leader of the world’s 1.3 billon Roman Catholics said in the message for the prayer day, which is marked by various Christian Churches.
“Our prayers and appeals are directed first at raising the awareness of political and civil leaders,” he said, adding that governments should “renew commitments decisive for directing the planet towards life, not death”.
He listed constant pollution, continued use of fossil fuels, intensive agricultural exploitation and deforestation as being among the man-made causes of global warming and said the Amazon, where fires are raging, is “gravely threatened”.
“Now is the time to abandon our dependence on fossil fuels and move, quickly and decisively, towards forms of clean energy and a sustainable and circular economy,” he said.
Other phenomena, such as the melting of glaciers and the presence of plastic and microplastics in the oceans “testify to the urgent need for interventions that can no longer be postponed,” he said.
“Egoism and self-interest have turned creation, a place of encounter and sharing, into an arena of competition and conflict,” he said.
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"We have caused a climate emergency that gravely threatens nature and life itself."
Hard to know who is more ridiculous — the Red Pope or Greta the Climate Puppet.https://t.co/Lth7FqwDiX
— Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) September 2, 2019
Special Report 2015: ‘Unholy Alliance’ – Exposing The Radicals Advising Pope Francis on Climate
‘The Vatican relied on advisors who are the most extreme elements in the global warming debate. These climate advisors are so far out of the mainstream they even make some of their fellow climate activists cringe…The Vatican advisors can only be described as a brew of anti-capitalist, pro-population control advocates who allow no dissent and are way out of the mainstream of even the global warming establishment.’
Pope at White House compares action on climate change to Martin Luther King
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Climate Skeptics In Rome Warn Pope Francis of ‘Unholy Alliance’ With UN Climate Agenda – More on Heartland Institute’s sponsored skeptical trip to Rome here.
Watch Now: Marc Morano’s Presentation in Rome to Vatican – April 28, 2015
Watch video here: Marc Morano, executive editor and chief correspondent at ClimateDepot.com, gives a presentation at The Heartland Institute’s climate science and policy event outside the Vatican on April 28, 2015.
