The Mills Brothers — and dozens of others — sang “You Always Hurt the One You Love.” Somebody tell the pope it doesn’t have to be that way with sensible energy policy.

On June 14th, Pope Francis met with the executives of multi-national energy companies to promote schemes to mitigate what he says are the catastrophic effects of man-made global warming.

Speaking to CEOs of Occidental Petroleum, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleum and ConocoPhillips at the Vatican, the pope said that “today’s ecological crisis, especially climate change, threatens the very future of the human family, and this is no exaggeration.” He said that carbon pricing is “essential” to the goal of stemming global warming.

“Faced with a climate emergency, we must take action accordingly, in order to avoid perpetrating a brutal act of injustice toward the poor and future generations,” he said at a conference sponsored by the United States’ Notre Dame University.

The pope is apparently ignorant of the many inconvenient facts that dispute his notion of pending climate doom. That is compounded by the large amount of information on climate change that he believes to be true but is just not so.

Much of the Pope’s concern is based on his belief that significant greenhouse-driven warming will drive sea levels to dangerous and unprecedented heights, leading to mass migration and inundation of entire islands.

Contrary to the Pope’s belief, the oceans are nearly at historic low levels based on long-term tide gauges and proxy data going back to the end of the last ice age more than 10,000 years ago. Some of the lowest sea levels during our current interglacial period (Holocene) occurred in the mid-1800s and have increased a little more than a foot since then at a rate of less than 0.1 inch per year. This rise is due to the beneficial warming that started in the late 17th century. 

To confirm this, the pope needs only to stroll from the Vatican to nearby Portus Traiani Felicus, one of the many Roman ports constructed during or shortly after the time of Christ that are now well inland and meters above our modern sea level. This ancient period of naturally driven high sea level was due to high temperatures during the Roman Warm Period that saw citrus being grown in England as far north as Hadrian’s Wall. 

The Pope’s own voluminous library within the Vatican walls undoubtedly has information about the close relationship between temperature and the human condition. Contrary to alarming UN and media reports, past warming periods were correlated with times of great prosperity and bountiful harvests. Devastating to both humanity and the Earth’s ecosystems were cold periods.

Il Papa is also apparently unaware the modest increase in temperature has been associated with a huge decrease in severe weather-related deaths and that up to 20 times as many people die due to cold than to heat. Rising temperatures would spare many millions a premature death. 

It is estimated that pollution from dirty, inefficient cooking and heating fuels — often dung — lead to about 1.6 million premature deaths a year. Nearly half of the world continues to cook with solid fuels that give off a poisonous cocktail of particles and chemicals that could be avoided through the use of fossil fuels such as natural gas that the Pope wants to ban. 

If the world’s governments would adopt plans that Pope Francis promotes, the poor that he intends to help would be hurt the worst. Abandoning low-cost, reliable energy provided by fossil fuels and embracing expensive, intermittent “green” energy, as the pope proposes, would force the poor to pay a higher percentage of their income on energy — a regressive form of taxation that would only hurt the ones he loves.

Advancing the human condition requires full use of all of God’s Creation. Reliable, inexpensive energy is part of the solution which can lift billions of people out of systemic poverty and disease. Instead of promoting misguided, harmful policies to control global temperature, Christian leadership should embrace responsible environmental stewardship and make energy and all its benefits more affordable for everybody, including the impoverished.

This commentary was first published 6/20/19 at the EpochTimes. Article and images used with permission of the author.

Image by Tânia Rêgo/ABr (Agência Brasil) [CC BY 3.0 br (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/br/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons