Home » Posts tagged 'Laudato Si'
Tag Archives: Laudato Si
Beyond the Real Time Catastrophe of Capital
Beyond the Real Time Catastrophe of Capital
A Pundit Takes on the Pope: “Dynamists” and “Catastroophists”
In a recent column on Pope Francis’ latest encyclical, Laudato Si, the conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat says that “After this document, there’s no doubting where Francis stands in the great argument of our time….But,” Douthat elaborates, “I don’t mean the argument between liberalism and conservatism. I mean the argument between dynamists and catastrophists.” Here’s how Douthat understands that “great argument”:
“Dynamists are people who see 21st-century modernity as a basically successful civilization advancing toward a future that’s better than the past. They do not deny that problems exist, but they believe we can innovate our way through them while staying on an ever-richer, ever-more-liberated course….Dynamists of the left tend to put their faith in technocratic government; dynamists of the right, in the genius of free markets. But both assume that modernity is a success story whose best days are ahead.”
“Catastrophists, on the other hand, see a global civilization that for all its achievements is becoming more atomized and balkanized, more morally bankrupt, more environmentally despoiled. What’s more, they believe that things cannot go on as they are: That the trajectory we’re on will end in crisis, disaster, dégringolade…that current arrangements are foredoomed, and that only a true revolution can save us.”
Douthat puts Pope Francis in the “catastrophist” camp because of the pontiff’s call for humanity to take climate change seriously by undertaking global action and “radical change” to move off fossil fuels and selfish profiteering and consumerism. Thanks to anthropogenic global warming, the Pope writes, “Doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain. We may well be leaving to coming generations debris, desolation and filth.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Delusion of Control
The Delusion of Control
I’m sure most of my readers have heard at least a little of the hullaballoo surrounding the release of Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si. It’s been entertaining to watch, not least because so many politicians in the United States who like to use Vatican pronouncements as window dressing for their own agendas have been left scrambling for cover now that the wind from Rome is blowing out of a noticeably different quarter.
Take Rick Santorum, a loudly Catholic Republican who used to be in the US Senate and now spends his time entertaining a variety of faux-conservative venues with his signature flavor of hate speech. Santorum loves to denounce fellow Catholics who disagree with Vatican edicts as “cafeteria Catholics,” and announced a while back that John F. Kennedy’s famous defense of the separation of church and state made him sick to his stomach. In the wake of Laudato Si, care to guess who’s elbowing his way to the head of the cafeteria line? Yes, that would be Santorum, who’s been insisting since the encyclical came out that the Pope is wrong and American Catholics shouldn’t be obliged to listen to him.
What makes all the yelling about Laudato Si a source of wry amusement to me is that it’s not actually a radical document at all. It’s a statement of plain common sense. It should have been obvious all along that treating the air as a gaseous sewer was a really dumb idea, and in particular, that dumping billions upon billions of tons of infrared-reflecting gases into the atmosphere would change its capacity for heat retention in unwelcome ways. It should have been just as obvious that all the other ways we maltreat the only habitable planet we’ve got were guaranteed to end just as badly.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Peak oiler? Not Catholic? You should still stand with the pope on climate
Peak oiler? Not Catholic? You should still stand with the pope on climate
I get it, you believe in peak oil. So do I, despite gas at $2.50 a gallon. But peak oil is no excuse for either you or me to just sit around waiting for the final oil crash to make the climate problem moot by bringing down industrial civilization.
Even if you’re the world’s biggest doomer, you have to admit that the timing is too uncertain — will the über-crash come in five months or five decades? Nobody knows for sure.
So far, the puppet masters of the world economy have been pretty good at keeping the party going longer than anybody had a right to expect. Who’s to say that oil wars, extreme energy production and various accounting tricks can’t keep mass consumerism running in many places into the middle of the century or beyond?
So don’t hold your breath waiting for collapse. Instead, leave your cynicism behind and let Pope Francis inspire you to finally get serious about climate, a problem that we know is already here and whose future consequences will be unthinkable — unless the world seriously changes its ways, oil crash or not.
A blessing of papal awesomeness
And if you do care about climate change, then what’s not to like in the pope’s encyclical that came out this week?
OK, well, maybe he could have been better about recognizing overpopulation as part of the climate problem. But he’s right that it’s hypocritical for rich countries to use climate as an excuse to pressure poor ones about population. All poor countries put together have done almost nothing to warm the atmosphere compared to the real culprits, the rich nations of North America and Europe.
– See more at: http://transitionvoice.com/2015/06/not-catholic-you-can-still-stand-with-the-pope-on-climate/#sthash.roDZr6r3.dpuf
