Oh God, don’t let the Pope be a climate fanatic

In his latest encyclical Pope Francis will apparently describe global warming as a ‘major threat to life on the planet’. If the leaked reports are accurate, his Holiness is absolutely right. Here are some examples of the havoc ‘global warming’ has wrought in the past decade:

Honduras:US-backed security forces implicated in the killing of more than 100 peasant farmers involved in disputes with palm-oil magnates.

Kenya: Teenage boy shot in February this year while protesting against a ‘wind park’ in Nyandarua.

Mt Elgon National Park, Uganda: According to a newspaper report, more than 50 locals killed by park rangers and 6,000 evicted to make space for a ‘carbon offset’ plantation.

Britain: According to a report in the Independent, as many as 15,000 people may have died unnecessarily last winter because they could not afford to heat their homes.

Even allowing for media exaggeration, every year around the world thousands are dying, and many hundreds of thousands (especially in the developing world) being immiserated, because of ‘global warming’.

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But what appears not to have occurred to the Pope is that it’s not ‘global warming’ itself that is responsible. Rather it’s the measures adopted to ‘combat’ it: from green taxes forcing the vulnerable into fuel poverty to renewable energy and carbon-offset and palm-oil projects helping to drive up food prices, lay waste to the world’s virgin forests and disenfranchise those native peoples whom this crusading, progressive pontiff has hitherto professed to place at the heart of his ministry.

This is worrying, for papal encyclicals are a serious business. They comprise letters sent out by the Pope to his bishops, usually in order to clarify his personal credo on Catholic doctrine. Pope Francis’s predecessor Benedict XVI, for example, issued three: one on Faith, one on Hope and one on Charity.