Holy Trinity: Religion, Politics, and Climate Change

By Keith Johnson - Wall Street Journal, Environmental Capital blog
Tuesday, July 15, 2008 - Web Link
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July 14, 2008

Pope Benedict XVI’s message to 5 million Australian Catholics 10,000 miles away from Washington might seem remote from the U.S. presidential race and the politics of climate change. It isn’t.

Pope Benedict, pacing the aisles on his longest-ever flight as pontiff, laid out his key message before even touching the tarmac down under. Christians, he said, need to embrace the biblical message of caring for the earth, and that includes taking steps to fight climate change.

Australians may talk differently and play a different brand of football, but where politics, religion, and the environment mix, the land down under holds plenty of lessons for election-year America.

Until its recent change of government, Australia (like the U.S.) was one of the world’s premier bashers of the Kyoto Protocol to fight climate change. Australia’s recent adhesion to the treaty left America alone in the company of Monaco and Lichtenstein as Kyoto holdouts—but it took a lurch to the left for Australia to shift gears on climate policy. The former Australian premier, John Howard, was as enthusiastic in his support for the Iraq war as he was lukewarm about climate change; current Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has recharted Australia’s course.

n the U.S., it doesn’t matter who wins in November—both senators John McCain and Barack Obama support cracking down on emissions of greenhouse gases. That alone would make Australia’s tortured efforts to square tougher environmental policies with economic growth worth watching, because a similar debate in the U.S was forestalled by the early Senate demise of the main climate-change bill.

But Pope Benedict’s message that Church doctrine mandates tough environmental action may have even more resonance in the U.S. Not just among Catholics, though many U.S. catholics are already crusading against global warming. Benedict’s environmental preaching since his election two years ago dovetails with a growing movement among U.S. evangelicals toward environmental stewardship.