Transcript

It's no secret Pope Francis is a big fan of so-called green energy.

He mentions it frequently in Laudato Si' and Laudate Deum.

And some people say you aren't a good Catholic unless you think fossil fuels shouldn't be expanded but must be replaced as soon as possible with wind and solar power.

Father Thomas Reese, the former editor of America magazine, even wishes the Pope would declare, quote, Climate change deniers heretics, and put their books, articles, Facebook pages and tweets on the index of forbidden books.

He also says, Nothing would give me more illicit pleasure than having the governors of Florida and Texas, along with the leaders of the oil and coal industries excommunicated.

It always amazes me when liberal Catholics say on the one hand, Catholics are too political for wanting it to be illegal to kill babies, and that the church should excommunicate pro-abortion politicians, but on the other hand, they say Catholics must support political things, they must support green energy and even the so-called Green New Deal.

In 2023, the National Catholic Reporter criticized the US bishops for not divesting from fossil fuels because they could take, quote, relatively easy steps towards a more just future or any future for that matter, for life on earth.

Since then, some Catholic dioceses have taken a step to reach carbon net zero.

But in today's episode, I'll give you four reasons why Catholics shouldn't embrace radical so-called green energy policies.

Number one, the church doesn't require it.

Papal encyclicals contain statements of church doctrine as well as non-doctrinal statements that don't reflect the deposit of faith or the church's teaching.

In Laudato Si', this can be seen in statements like, The problem of warming temperatures is aggravated by a model of development based on the intensive use of fossil fuels, which is at the heart of the worldwide energy system.

Since those are scientific statements, they aren't church teachings, and so Catholics are not required to give them religious assent.

We should take statements like that seriously in a papal encyclical, but they do not require assent in the same way religious teachings require assent.

But why would encyclicals or other magisterial documents contain non-magisterial statements like scientific summaries?

Well, bishops, including the pope, don't simply recite what the church teaches.

They also apply church teachings in different historical, social, and cultural contexts, and in the face of novel challenges.

So in order to do that, they may speak from a Catholic perspective that engages with non-Catholic sources of truth, like scientific discoveries.

They may also be proposing a particular set of approaches to address novel challenges, especially if they're addressing non-Catholic audiences, rather than imposing something that must be believed.

In fact, Laudato Si' is addressed to people of goodwill, or basically every person on earth, which means that only a minority of the intended audience of Laudato Si' is Catholic.

So given this wide audience, Laudato Si' says it offers, quote, Broader proposals for dialogue and action, and admits that, quote, On many concrete questions, the church has no reason to offer a definitive opinion.

She knows that honest debate must be encouraged among experts while respecting divergent views.

Now some critics may say we aren't bound to follow an encyclical summary of science, but if the encyclical says we must do something or something must be done, then that falls under the definition of morals and the church can teach on faith and morals.

But another non-doctrinal statement in these encyclicals are statements of aspiration.

These aren't moral commands, but a kind of shared hope the pope implores to his audience.

So we have to distinguish a magisterial command to act in a certain way on a moral issue from a non-binding statement of aspiration.

The latter are hopeful ideals the pope calls people to share, they aren't rules he binds the faithful to follow, especially since these appear, as I said, in a document addressed to the entire world rather than just to Catholics.

So when it comes to energy, Pope Francis says there is an urgent need for fossil fuels to be replaced without delay, and he also calls for the abandonment of fossil fuels.

But nowhere does the pope say there is a specific deadline for when fossil fuels must be abandoned, or that it is sinful or incompatible with the faith to not do this.

Laudato Si' even says, Until greater progress is made in developing widely accessible sources of renewable energy, it is legitimate to choose the less harmful alternative or to find short-term solutions.

Therefore, a Catholic is free to accept the pope's prudential judgment that this process must be done as soon as possible, or he may recognize that this just isn't possible, and so shifting to green energy as soon as possible shouldn't be a top priority for Catholics.

Catholics can question these prudential judgments and aspirational statements because another document, Donum Veritatis from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith says, When it comes to the question of interventions in the prudential order, it could happen that some magisterial documents might not be free from all deficiencies.

Bishops and their advisors have not always taken into immediate consideration every aspect or the entire complexity of a question.

And as we will see, I believe Pope Francis has not taken into account many other issues that complicate his call to rapidly switch the world over to so-called green energy.

Number two, green energy is a waste of resources.

As Catholics, we only have a finite amount of time, physical energy in our bodies, and money to address the many different problems that are affecting people today.

Some people claim this doesn't matter because climate change could bring about the end of life on earth as we know it.

About six years ago, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said the world would end in 12 years unless we did something about climate change.

The world is gonna end in 12 years if we don't address climate change, and your biggest issue- your, your biggest issue is, how are we gonna pay for it?

Yes.

If you want to do something, you need to be able to pay for it.

Jesus even said, For which of you desiring to build a tower does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it?

Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him.

It would cost $23 trillion to convert the US power grid to one that relies solely on wind and solar energy, assuming that this is even possible.

This kind of money could easily eradicate worldwide diseases like malaria.

Just 15% of that amount could end extreme poverty across the entire world.

To spend that money on switching to another form of energy that won't even impact global climate change is the height of foolishness.

But scientists agree that in the most realistic climate models, there will not be a global extinction or even a human extinction.

Catholics can believe climate change will have serious consequences and even cause thousands of excess deaths every year, but the climate, the environment itself killed far more people than climate change.

In fact, as CO2 has increased over the past 100 years, climate-related deaths have decreased by 90% because increased CO2 emissions from modern technology have mitigated the severity of floods, heat waves, hurricanes, blizzards, et cetera.

Moreover, focusing our resources on fighting climate change, it can be a waste of resources when they could be used to address other threats to human life.

So along with spiritual suffering from those who haven't been evangelized, which really should be the top priority of the Church of God, there is the physical suffering of millions of people who die from easily treatable illnesses today, like malaria, people who languish from easily treatable ailments like blindness due to cataracts, and millions of people who live in decrepit conditions right now.

Does an American diocese switching over to so-called green energy help any of these people?

Not at all.

Even if millions of American Catholics, an entire diocese, no longer emitted CO2 into the atmosphere, this would do absolutely nothing to change the overall trajectory of global temperatures.

Spending a few hundred dollars to heal someone blinded by cataracts would do more real good in the world than spending tens of thousands of dollars on green energy initiatives that won't affect the entire global climate in any meaningful way because it'll be counteracted by people who are still emitting more CO2.

One part of Pope Francis's exhortation, Laudate Deum, criticizes the United States for having twice the CO2 emissions per person that China does, but it neglects to mention that China produces twice as much CO2 as the US. And more importantly, the US has cut CO2 emissions by 25% in the last 20 years, whereas China has tripled its CO2 emissions during the same period.

Even if American Catholics do their best to reduce CO2 emissions, it won't do any good if other countries increase their emissions, so it represents a waste of resources that could have been used to address other problems that would result in immediate concrete help for real individuals around the world.

But the truth is also that many of these Catholic green initiatives aren't even green at all.

Most of them are just empty virtue signaling.

Sure, some dioceses in very sunny states might put solar panels on their roofs and cut down on electricity a little bit, but the majority of their electricity will still come from things like coal and gas power plants.

These Catholic groups promise to go net zero, not zero in carbon emissions, and they often do that by buying carbon credits that supposedly offset the amount of CO2 they put into the air.

Carbon credits can include paying for things like planting trees to absorb CO2 that make up for the CO2 you put into the atmosphere, but even environmental groups like Greenpeace call these carbon credit schemes scams because in some cases the money being used to plant trees is actually used to protect forests that no one was planning to tear down anyways.

But not only would Catholic emphasis on so-called green energy waste resources that could help the poor, pushing for this energy and abandoning fossil fuels actually hurts the poorest in the world, which brings me to reason number three, green energy hurts the poor.

You may have noticed that I've been saying so-called green energy.

That's because it's not completely clean or pollution-free.

If an American diocese switches to all electric vehicles, for example, that still creates tons of CO2 into the atmosphere from the mining operations that are needed to get the rare metals to make the car batteries and from the fossil fuels that are used to make the energy that charges the vehicles on most power grids.

And mining these materials creates ecological and humanitarian nightmares in places like China, Bolivia, and the Congo that require slave labor and toxic pollution for these mines to operate.

The same false green promise can be seen in waste created by mining materials for solar panels and the trash created by disposing of expired solar panels and wind turbines.

But there's also a growing problem for this young industry, what to do with all the solar panels and wind turbine blades after they wear out.

These windmill blades are being buried in the ground in Casper, Wyoming.

By 2050, the world's wind industry is estimated to produce more than 47 million tons of blade waste each year.

And as I mentioned earlier, billions of people around the world need access to clean energy in order to get out of poverty.

In Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis said that whereas lack of access to electric energy was not considered a sign of poverty in the past, it is today given the kind of flourishing humans can have in the modern world.

The poorest people on Earth will never escape poverty if they don't have reliable access to electricity.

One research paper says that there are no high income countries today with annual electricity consumption below 3,000 kilowatt-hours per capita, and it's not possible to give everyone on Earth enough energy to have a decent life through sources like solar power, which would require tens of billions of solar panels along with unfeasible mega-batteries.

Only a handful of countries on Earth get more than 20% of energy from wind power, and no decently sized country gets more than 20% of its energy from solar power.

If the most advanced countries on Earth still have to rely on fossil fuels for the majority of their energy consumption, how can we expect the poorest nations in the world to do better?

Instead of using so-called green energy, these countries will just use even worse forms of energy, like burning dung, if they're not allowed to use fossil fuels, and this has real consequences.Two and a half billion people around the world rely on cooking fuels like wood, coal, kerosene, or animal dung.

Burning these substances causes much more indoor air pollution than cooking with electricity or natural gas.

It leads to heart disease, lung cancer, and four million premature deaths, half of them in children under the age of five, who succumb to pneumonia after prolonged exposure to dirty air.

In 2021, the Sri Lankan government banned fertilizers because of their alleged impact on climate change, but this plunged the country into a catastrophic food shortage.

In the past 50 years, environmental alarmists have justified all kinds of evils in their quest to save the earth.

This 1967 LA Times article describes how environmentalists like Paul Ehrlich said the world could never feed six billion people in the year 2000, and so he recommended forcing people to use birth control and putting sterilizing agents in food and water to prevent famines.

Thankfully, Laudato Si condemns those who can only propose a reduction in the birth rate to solve environmental problems.

Laudato Si also says, For poor countries, the priorities must be to eliminate extreme poverty and to promote the social development of their people.

But that cannot happen without access to reliable electricity that powers the things that have eliminated extreme poverty, like refrigerators, water pumps, and factories that make materials that give people protection from harsh elements.

A myopic focus on ditching fossil fuels as fast as possible would only cause us to neglect the people Jesus described as the least among us.

And number four, there is a better alternative to green energy.

If Catholics really care about climate change, they can do something far more productive than putting solar panels on church roofs or requiring their diocese to use electric cars.

They can write a letter to their elected representatives demanding the continued operation and new construction of nuclear power plants.

Some Catholics point to articles describing countries like Sweden getting 95% of their power from, quote, low carbon sources, and they assume it's talking about wind and solar.

But in Sweden, only 1% of their power comes from solar energy.

70% of it comes from hydroelectric and nuclear.

70% of the energy produced in France comes from nuclear power.

Nuclear energy truly is green energy.

The stuff you see coming from nuclear power plants is just water vapor, and advances in storage technology have given us safe, reliable ways to store nuclear waste.

Nuclear material can even be harvested from nuclear weapons, which would promote the Church's long-held aspirations of nuclear disarmament.

Saying we shouldn't use nuclear power because of past disasters like Chernobyl is like saying you shouldn't go on a cruise ship because of the Titanic.

Even the nuclear accident at Fukushima in Japan during the 2011 tsunami resulted in only one death.

More people died during a hasty and ultimately needless evacuation.

And the statistics speak for themselves.

You're more likely to die installing a solar panel on your roof than you are working in a nuclear reactor.

If 50 billion solar panels were used to power the entire world, seven panels for every person, in 30 years, the panels would create a nightmarish amount of toxic waste due to the rare earth metals in the photovoltaic cells.

Now, in contrast, the entire world could be powered by just an additional 5,000 nuclear power plants, one plant for about every 1.4 million people.

So I am baffled that the pope's encyclicals and teachings on climate change do not endorse this obvious solution to the problem.

So to summarize, Church teaching doesn't morally mandate Catholics to support so-called green energy.

Catholic investment in this energy diverts funds from projects that actually help people, many of these projects are green in name only and hurt the poor, and Catholics would accomplish more good simply lobbying for sustainable power sources like nuclear energy.

If you'd like to learn more about this topic, check out my debate on climate change with Tony Annett in the description below, as well as the chapter in my new book, Confusion in the Kingdom, on the issue of climate change.

Thank you all so much, and I hope you have a very blessed day.