Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, thought by many to be Pope Francis’s closest advisor, went out of his way at a press conference in Rome before the start of an assembly of Caritas Internationalis, a federation of Catholic charities, to condemn efforts by the Cornwall Alliance, the Heartland Institute, and others who met in Rome in late April to present an alternative view to the global warming alarmists who have had Francis’s ear heretofore.

“The ideology surrounding environmental issues is too tied to a capitalism that doesn’t want to stop ruining the environment because they don’t want to give up their profits,” he said, revealing his own socialist ideology and mischaracterizing our efforts as an attack on the Pope’s upcoming environmental stewardship encyclical.

Nonsense. And nobody better pointed out the nonsense than Dr. Hal Doiron, a former NASA engineer and now a leader of The Right Climate Stuff research team, who was one of the speakers at our meetings.

“We never attacked Pope Francis’s encyclical that hasn’t been released yet,” Doiron said. “We said we prayed for his discernment on the issue of the nature of the climate issue and on the UN’s justification for a world-wide agreement on CO2 emission controls before his encyclical on the environment is released.”

Doiron continued, “We also made it clear that we thought an encyclical on the environment was appropriate and we expected there would be much in it we could support. The specific issue of our concern was whether carbon dioxide, the colorless, odorless gas of life created by God to sustain all life on earth, should be considered an environmental pollutant with the need to be controlled, as Pope Francis was being advised by UN representatives during the climate conference.”

Precisely.

It’s always easier to construct a straw man and then destroy it than to grapple with the real positions of one’s opponents. We suggest that Cardinal Maradiaga keep that in mind.