Particular Attention

That is what the Holy Father says that we ought to pay to climate change. It is a very carefully chosen phrase.

This is a Pope as Augustinian as his predecessor, and likewise beset by Pelagians and Donatists, which are not mutually exclusive categories.

By grace, human beings participate in the Divine Work of Creation, Redemption, Sanctification and Consummation. Making the weather is what we do. It is what we are for. It is what we are.

No one disputes that climate change is real, and no one should worry that it is caused by human action. Why should it not be?

We need an approach to climate change which protects and extends secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, which encourages economic development around the world, which upholds the right of the working classes and of non-white people to have children, which holds down and as far as practicable reduces the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and which refuses to restrict either travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich.

That includes the full compatibility between, on the one hand, the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and, on the other hand, the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past.