Oil Industry Patsies And Right Wing Extremists Want Pope To Hush Up On Climate Change

A Commentary by Niagara At Large publisher Doug Draper

“This guy sounds like a Marxist. … He doesn’t even disguise it folks in this encyclical. …”

“Every other word seems to be about how unfettered capitalism is destroying the world. …. (According to him), the U.S. is guilty. Western nations are rich. They’re polluting the world, they’re destroying the climate, and they’ve got a duty to stop and give more money to the poor and so forth.”

“If the left can get to a Pope and corrupt an encyclical, they’re gonna be inspired to keep going and try to corrupt the whole thing.”

• From a burst of rants this past June 2015 by American right-wing radio show host Rush Limbaugh around the release of Pope Francis’ encyclical on climate change.

Sure is one tarrying picture Rush is painting for us, isn’t it?

Lefties corrupting the words of a Pope? And dare we ask, who or what will these devilish hordes try corrupting next?

Sounds like a scene right out of the original 1950s version of the horror flick ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ – a film set right in the thick of the Cold War and communist scare, and one that had the communist boogeyman very much in mind.

In the middle of his rant, Limbaugh also noted in so many words that the Pope should stay away from “politics” and get back to praying on his beads and citing passages from the Bible – a sentiment I heard and read numerous times during Pope Francis’ recent American visit from individuals on the far right of the political and religious spectrum.

And this ‘the-Pope-should-stick-to-the-business-of-religion’ line was almost always pumped out when, during his September 24^th and September 25^th addresses to the U.S. Congress and United Nations General Assembly, the Pope urged his audiences to take action on climate change.

I am not a Catholic but what are these right wingers on both sides of the Canada/U.S. border trying to say or do when they argue that the Pope shouldn’t use his moral suasion to wade in on the climate change issue?

Is this part of a concerted effort by both witting and unwitting stooges of the petro-chemical industry to discredit the words of a person in an influential enough position to shake up the status quo? Or do these individuals actually believe that the values and morals this Pope embraces have no place in a discussion over the responsibility we humans have to protect the life-sustaining resources of this planet for present and future generations?

If that’s the way they feel, they might just as well dump on leaders of the Jewish faith while they are at it since many of them, Rabbis included, have openly supported Pope Francis’ call for action on climate change.

You may have noticed that many of these right wing extremists never accuse evangelists like Pat Robertson of ‘meddling in areas where they don’t belong’ for calling anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change a hoax or for taking cheap shots at people like former U.S. president Al Gore or Canadian scientist David Suzuki for lobbying for action on the issue.

Indeed, Robertson and his brethren get so involved in politics on a broad range of issues, from abortion and same-sex marriage to gun control and whether or not the nation should get involved in foreign wars, arguments have been made that their “ministries” should lose their tax exemptions. “If they want to get that involved in public policy,” the late American satirist George Carlin once said, “then let them pay the price of admission (their share of taxes) like everyone else.”

Yet you don’t hear right wingers telling Robertson and his ilk to stick to their Bible readings, do you? They are free to lobby all they want for laws that would impose their beliefs on everyone else.

Getting back to the Vatican, do any of you remember right wingers complaining about Pope John Paul II openly supporting y political movements to end Soviet domination in his native Poland and other eastern European countries. When every Pope up to and including Francis affirmed the Catholic Church’s opposition to abortion, right wingers have had no problem with that either.

Speaking out for the sanctity of the unborn is fine but standing up for the sanctity of all life in the face of environmental pollution – well all of a sudden the Pope is out of bounds. Reports from medical association estimate that tens of thousands of people across Canada and the U.S. die prematurely each year from breathing pollutants spewing from many of the same sources that fill the atmosphere with gases that contribute to climate change.Yet you don’t hear an outcry from the right to lifers over that.

They are too busy ragging on Pope Francis for speaking out about climate change even though it is obvious to a growing majority of people around the world that Pope Francis is on the right side of history and science.

There is little doubt left among scientists that the continued heavy use of the earth’s atmosphere as a dumpster for oil and other carbon-based pollutants is contributing to floods, droughts and other severe bouts of weather that are wreaking havoc on food supplies, countless hundreds of billions of dollars of property, and the healthy survival of wildlife and human populations around the world.

The idea that scientists are evenly split on this matter is an illusion created by a mainstream media that believe a “balanced story” on climate change means inviting one scientists to argue ‘yes’ and another scientists to argue ‘no’.

The real balance is eight or nine scientists arguing that climate change is real and one or two arguing that it isn’t. One polling after another now shows that more than 90 per cent of the world’s scientists are convinced, based on the evidence, that carbon-based pollution is contributing to the more extreme and destructive shifts in weather we have been witnessing in recent years.

And God help those who, through ignorance or self-interest continue to engage in a cult of denial.

They will be cursed in their graves if they don’t live long enough to be asked by younger generations of people in their communities and families why they refused to heed the calls to act on what leading experts around the world say is one of the most serious threats to the health and welfare of our species in this 21^st Century.

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