June 24, 2015

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Christopher Booker in Telegraph, UK starts off our day of the Pope.

… When future historians come to look back on our age, few things will puzzle them more than the extent to which our politics became so dominated and bedevilled by two belief-systems, each based on an obsessive attempt to force into being an immensely complicated political construct which defied economic, psychological and scientific reality.

One of these was the peculiar way in which Europe’s politicians, with full support from the US, had set out to unite their continent under a form of supra-national government unlike anything the world had seen before. The other was the way those same politicians fell for the idea not just that human activities were disastrously changing Earth’s climate, but that by taking the most drastic measures they could somehow change it back again.

Although for quite a time these two belief systems seemed to carry all before them, each was essentially based on a fantasy view of the world; and it is in the nature of trying to act out a fantasy that it must eventually overreach itself, to the point where it collides unpleasantly with reality. …

… the Pope, under the spell of his chief scientific adviser, a fanatical German climate activist called Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, calls for an end to use of the very fossil fuels which keep the Vatican’s own lights on. In asking us to pray for that global climate treaty, Pope Francis solemnly trots out all those familiar plaints about “melting polar ice caps”, “rising sea levels”, unprecedented droughts, “extreme weather events” and the rest of that greenie litany which has no basis in honest science whatever. …

 

 

 

John Hinderaker thinks someone should tell the Pope how environmentalism crushes the poor.

… It is easy for Pope Francis, Tom Steyer, Barack Obama and others who don’t have to worry about money to say that government policy should make electricity and gasoline more expensive so that other Americans–the poor and middle class–can’t afford to consume so much energy. But if you aren’t wealthy, government-mandated increases in energy costs mean very real cuts in the rest of your budget–a budget that goes almost entirely for food, clothing, shelter and health care. These are the necessities that millions of Americans have to forgo because of arrogant liberal policies.

We can’t un-elect the Pope–although perhaps we can educate him–but for God’s sake let’s not vote for any more Democrats who care more about discredited global warming theories than about the well-being of poor and middle-class Americans.

 

 

Robert Tracinski wants to know how thick the Pope’s bubble is.

I have started Laudato Si, Pope Francis’s newly release papal encyclical on global warming, and it’s something of a slog. As one of my colleagues put it, popes never seem to use one word when 500 will do.

I feel somewhat free to take things slowly when analyzing these documents. There’s something about an institution that’s been around for 2,000-odd years that makes you feel less beholden to the 24-hour news cycle (or the 5-minute news cycle of the Twitter era). But I’m ready to make one preliminary observation, which stands out with particular clarity in the early sections of Laudato Si.

These are the sections in which Francis lays out what he sees as the facts about a global environmental crisis, and it is a series of blatantly one-sided errors and exaggerations, including many which have been well-discussed and refuted, even in the New York Times.

For example, we’re told that the earth is “laid waste’” and that “the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life.” This, at a time when agricultural production across the world is higher than it has ever been, surely not a sign of “sickness in the soil.” Francis uncritically repeats scary stories about mass extinction, in which “each year sees the disappearance of thousands of plant and animal species which we will never know, which our children will never see, because they have been lost for ever,” even though this is based on misleading projections that have been debunked.

The centerpiece of the encyclical, of course, is the papal endorsement of the global warming hysteria. …

 

 

 

The Editors of the Manchester Union-Leader have thoughts.

Pope Francis leapt last week into the rising waters of climate change hysteria, where his exclamations showed that he was in over his head.

In an encyclical released Thursday, he called for swift action to cool the planet. For good measure, he criticized capitalism. …

… Capitalism is the greatest antidote for poverty that humanity has ever created. Free-market capitalism creates the “financial activities” that allow the poor to replace subsistence farming with more lucrative work, and it funds the social services that aid the needy.

Rising standards of living created by free-market capitalism also lead to better environmental protections than in more repressive and less developed nations.

Pope Francis’ mistaken foray into economic theory shows, once again, the pitfalls of basing complex policy prescriptions on simple moral impulses.

 

 

 

John Hinderaker catches another one. We live in an age where we have a stupid president and a stupid pope.

Pope Francis is rapidly convincing me that he is not just a leftist, but a dope. Speaking to a group of young people in Turin, he departed from his script and launched into a rambling denunciation of, among others, arms manufacturers:

“It makes me think of … people, managers, businessmen who call themselves Christian and they manufacture weapons. That leads to a bit a distrust, doesn’t it?” he said to applause.

He also criticized those who invest in weapons industries, saying “duplicity is the currency of today … they say one thing and do another.”

We are a long way from “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.” Pope Francis then went on a tour of world history that included this gem:

“The great powers had the pictures of the railway lines that brought the trains to the concentration camps like Auschwitz to kill Jews, Christians, homosexuals, everybody. Why didn’t they bomb (the railway lines)?”

With what? Oh yeah, that would be bombs. Dropped out of bombers. Manufactured by…whom?

Pope Francis needs to pull out of his recent tailspin before he becomes an international laughingstock.

  

 

Roger Simon closes with his comments about Hillary jumping on the PopeMobile.

There’s no stopping Hillary Clinton when it comes to either outright lies or distortions of truth.  At 2PM on June 19, Our Lady of Chappaqua jumped on Pope Francis’ climate bandwagon with the following tweet…

.@Pontifex is right—climate change is a moral crisis that disproportionately harms the neediest among us. We need leadership, not denial. -H

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) June 19, 2015

Say what?  The neediest suffer most from climate change?  What horse hockey.  The poor suffer most from restrictions on their energy based on Climate Mythology that raises their bills.  That’s how they suffer most.

As for the Pope’s sadly morally narcissistic encyclical, where else but the indispensible Watts Up With That climate blog do you find the proper rejoinder? There, Dr. Tim Ball asks Is the Catholic Church Burned by the Sun Again, reminding us that we’ve all heard this song before: …

 

The cartoonists are on the Pope Bandwagon too.