Pope Francis on Thursday urged the world to act
quickly to prevent "extraordinary" climate
change from destroying the planet and said
wealthy countries must bear responsibility for
creating the problem and for solving it. In a
radically worded letter addressed to every person on the planet, the leader of the world's
1.2 billion Catholics blames human greed for the
critical situation "Our Sister, mother Earth" now
finds itself in.
"This sister now cries out to us because of the
harm we have inflicted on her by our
irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with
which God has endowed her," he writes in his
long-anticipated Encyclical on the environment.
Arguing that environmental damage is intimately
linked to global inequality, he goes on to say
that doomsday predictions can no longer be
dismissed and that: "The earth, our home, is
beginning to look more and more like an
immense pile of filth." Green activists hailed the charismatic Argentinian
pontiff's widely-trailed intervention as a potential
game-changer in the debate over what causes
global warming and how to reverse it.
"Everyone, whether religious or secular, can and
must respond to this clarion call for bold urgent action,"said Kumi Naido, the International
Executive Director of Greenpeace.
Environmentalists hope the pope's message will
significantly increase the pressure for binding
restrictions on carbon emissions to be agreed at
global talks in Paris at the end of this year. But
even before the official publication, climate
change sceptics had dismissed the document's argument that the phenomenon is primarily
man-made and that humanity can reverse it
through lifestyle changes including an early
phasing-out of fossil fuels. "I don't get economic policy from my bishops or
my cardinal or my pope," US presidential
candidate Jeb Bush said on the eve of the release
in comments that underlined the depth of
opposition in the United States to a binding
agreement to curb greenhouse gases.
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Hear what Pope tells Buhari, other world leadersCreated at 2016-02-10
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