Hefty Global Goals from a Vatican Meeting: Stabilizing the Climate, Energy for All and an Inclusive Economy - by Andrew C. Revkin, NY Times

A group statement has emerged from “Sustainable Humanity, Sustainable Planet, Our Responsibility,” the Vatican meeting of scientists, economists, theologians and others that I participated in earlier this month.

The workshop was remarkable both because it was only the second joint meeting of the Pontifical Academies of Sciences and Social Sciences and because of the range of participants: from Archbishop Roland Minnerath (of Dijon, France) to the 96-year-old Scripps Institution oceanographer Walter Munk to Paulus Zulu, a South African sociologist.

The statement divides humanity’s task, appropriately, into the technical and scientific enterprise of nurturing human societies with sustainable sources of clean energy and food — which the participants deemed “available or within reach,” and the much greater challenge of building the moral commitment and governmental and financial structures that can reduce inequity, profiteering and other social ills.  It held echoes of Pope Francis’s writings:

Human action which is not respectful of nature becomes a boomerang for human beings that creates inequality and extends what Pope Francis has termed “the globalization of indifference” and the “economy of exclusion” (Evangelii Gaudium), which themselves endanger solidarity with present and future generations.

Hefty Global Goals from a Vatican Meeting:  Stabilizing the Climate, Energy for All and an Inclusive Economy - by Andrew C. Revkin, NY Times