Pope Francis was a climate hero to the core

Donald Trump announced his first run for president on June 16, 2015. He lashed out against Mexican immigrants, environmentalists and other supposed enemies foreign and domestic. Two days later, Pope Francis clapped back. Francis’ landmark climate change encyclical, “Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home,” wasn’t meant as a response to Trump. But the 184-page teaching served as a powerful call to action. Francis preached urgency and compassion. He asked the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics to open their eyes to the connections between the climate crisis, poverty and selfishness.

A decade later, Trump is serving his second term and Francis is no longer with us, having died on Monday at 88. But the late pope’s words are more relevant than ever. As I reread “Laudato Si” in the hours following Francis’ death, I was struck by his nuanced discussion of extreme weather and sea level rise, and the need to phase out fossil fuels — and his understanding that global warming isn’t just an environmental problem. I was especially moved by his explanation for how rising temperatures hurt society’s poorest families and nations most of all.

“Many of the poor live in areas particularly affected by phenomena related to warming, and their means of subsistence are largely dependent on natural reserves and ecosystemic services such as agriculture, fishing and forestry,” Francis wrote. “They have no other financial activities or resources which can enable them to adapt to climate change or to face natural disasters, and their access to social services and protection is very limited.” Looking out for society’s most vulnerable was a theme of Francis’ papacy, informed by his Latin American roots and expressed through his choice of a namesake, St. Francis of Assisi, who dedicated his life to the poor and also the environment. In “Laudato Si,” the Pope lamented the pain of climate migrants who are “forced to leave their homes, with great uncertainty for their future and that of their children.”

“They are not recognised by international conventions as refugees; they bear the loss of the lives they have left behind, without enjoying any legal protection whatsoever,” Francis wrote. “Sadly, there is widespread indifference to such suffering, which is even now taking place throughout our world.” Indeed, researchers have found that millions of people are displaced each year by climate-exacerbated disasters such as droughts, floods and crop failures — with the potential for hundreds of millions of climate migrants by mid-century, if governments and businesses don’t reduce heat-trapping pollution much more quickly. “Our lack of response to these tragedies involving our brothers and sisters points to the loss of that sense of responsibility for our fellow men and women upon which all civil society is founded,” Francis wrote. Sadly, President Trump and Vice President JD Vance — a Catholic who met with the pope shortly before his death — have chosen to treat many immigrants with terrible cruelty. They’ve sent masked agents to round up graduate students whose political views they don’t like; worked to end birthright citizenship for children of noncitizens; and in one case deported a man by accident — then defied a Supreme Court order to facilitate his return.

It’s no wonder Francis wrote a letter to US bishops rebuking Trump’s migrant crackdown, and taking direct aim at Vance’s claim that medieval Catholic theology supports the administration’s actions. As Francis wrote: “The act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness.” Meanwhile, Trump is doing everything in his power — including many things well beyond his constitutionally defined authority — to benefit the oil, gas and coal executives who funded his campaign, even though it means the planet will keep getting hotter and tens of millions more people may suffer or die. In that context, “Laudato Si” reads like a direct counter to Trump’s call for US “energy dominance,” and to his insistence that extracting as much fuel and timber as possible is the only way to create economic prosperity. As far as Francis was concerned, “the principle of the maximization of profits, frequently isolated from other considerations, reflects a misunderstanding of the very concept of the economy.”

“As long as production is increased, little concern is given to whether it is at the cost of future resources or the health of the environment; as long as the clearing of a forest increases production, no one calculates the losses entailed in the desertification of the land, the harm done to biodiversity or the increased pollution,” he wrote.

To hear Francis tell it, fighting poverty and confronting the climate crisis go hand in hand. “The same mindset which stands in the way of making radical decisions to reverse the trend of global warming also stands in the way of achieving the goal of eliminating poverty,” he wrote.

Alas, Trump and his appointees are undoing dozens of regulations limiting fossil fuels. They’ve given coal plants unprecedented exemptions from lifesaving air pollution standards and proposed a rule that would make it easier for oil and gas companies to kill endangered species. And in a significant shift from Trump’s first term, they’ve waged war on life-sustaining, job-creating renewable energy projects. Just last week, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum halted construction of an already approved wind farm off the coast of New York. Federal officials have also attempted to freeze billions of dollars in clean energy grants approved by Congress.

Perhaps even worse, Trump and his lackeys are dismantling the scientific institutions that have taught us — and continue to teach us — much of what we know about the climate crisis. They’re laying off researchers and finding other ways to force out experts at agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It’s all part of a broader, authoritarian attack on independent science and academia. And again, Francis might as well have seen it coming. “Due to the number and variety of factors to be taken into account when determining the environmental impact of a concrete undertaking, it is essential to give researchers their due role, to facilitate their interaction, and to ensure broad academic freedom,” he wrote in “Laudato Si.” The most astounding thing about the document might be that Francis wrote it at all.

“Laudato Si” is almost certainly the most famous climate essay ever written. It was one of just four encyclicals penned by Francis, and some climate advocates credit it with helping pave the way for the Paris agreement, the groundbreaking climate accord reached by nearly 200 nations in late 2015. Despite all that, Francis’ climate advocacy was largely an afterthought in immediate media coverage of his death. Obituaries from several major newspapers either ignored or only made passing reference to his encyclical.