NEWS Pope Francis’s global metaphor for wealth and climate

NPR Piece with Scott Tong on the Cli­mate Encycli­cal (Sep­tem­ber 22, 2015)

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Pope Fran­cis, in speak­ing about cli­mate change this week, is like­ly to use the term “glob­al north and south.” The term isn’t heard much in the Unit­ed States. But it is the pontiff’s view of where the world’s wealth tends to be, and where the envi­ron­men­tal effects caused by devel­op­ment are.

Before the white smoke at the Vat­i­can declared him pope, he was some­times called Bish­op of the Slums at home in Argenti­na. He fre­quent­ed the so-called “mis­ery vil­lages” of Buenos Aires.

Argenti­na at the begin­ning of the 20th cen­tu­ry was one of the wealth­i­est coun­tries in the world,” said pro­fes­sor Joseph Kabos­ki, who teach­es eco­nom­ics at Notre Dame. “And they’ve fall­en. Now they’re a mid­dle-income coun­try. So mate­r­i­al pover­ty is a big­ger issue in a place like Argentina.”

Places, that is, where inequal­i­ty is rel­a­tive­ly high.

As far as the world’s rich and poor, the pope speaks to an “eco­log­i­cal debt” between the glob­al north and south.

The south­ern hemi­sphere is poor­er than the north­ern, and still-devel­op­ing coun­tries, main­ly in the south, suf­fer out­sized effects from min­ing and drilling for min­er­als and energy.

They also suf­fer out­sized effects of cli­mate change, said econ­o­mist Jef­frey Sachs of Colum­bia University’s Earth Insti­tute. He advised the pope’s Vat­i­can coun­cil on climate.

The pope is mak­ing a point that they are already suf­fer­ing mis­er­ably from increas­ing envi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion,” Sachs said. “And they are like­ly to suf­fer the most, the earliest.”

A defin­ing paper on cli­mate eco­nom­ics, called the Stern Review, found devel­op­ing coun­tries tend to be warmer to start out. They rely more on farm­ing and sta­ble rain pat­terns. When the rains aren’t, Sachs said, it looks like Syria.

The droughts were unre­lent­ing — lead­ing to crop fail­ures as well as soar­ing food prices,” he said. “And that turned into mass protests, gov­ern­ment crack­downs, and into a blood­bath and a catastrophe.”

Syr­ia, of course, is not in the south­ern hemi­sphere, but the pope’s con­struc­tion of a glob­al north and south is also a metaphor.

The north and the south is a com­mon­ly used dichoto­my to divide the rich and the poor,” said Bri­an Mur­ray, an envi­ron­men­tal econ­o­mist at Duke University.

There is a pol­i­cy impli­ca­tion here: The Kyoto cli­mate treaty — the basis of glob­al cli­mate change talks — and the pope’s encycli­cal assume rich coun­tries bear more respon­si­bil­i­ty for address­ing cli­mate change.

As the think­ing goes, they indus­tri­al­ized and pol­lut­ed first, and their green­house gas­es can linger for centuries.

What this will do, though, is pro­vide the devel­op­ing coun­tries some bar­gain­ing pow­er, if you will, by ref­er­ence to the moral author­i­ty of the pope,” Mur­ray said.

The focus on poor and rich has drawn crit­i­cism in the U.S.: that the pope is Marx­ist, which he’s denied; or that he’s reviv­ing a doc­trine of pref­er­ence for the poor known as Lib­er­a­tion Theology.

At the very least, this is meant to shake up the rich coun­tries, Berke­ley ener­gy physi­cist Dan Kam­men said. He also advised the Vatican.

We don’t want to reduce the qual­i­ty of life,” he said, “we want to reduce the foot­print of that life. And that hasn’t been empha­sized so much in West­ern cap­i­tal­ist economies. But it’s where we’re start­ing to see a very inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion around liv­ing with­in our resource means.”

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