Pope Francis and Climate Change; Si Se Puede! Posted March 15,
2013 in Curbing Pollution, Environmental Justice, Green
Enterprise, Health and the Environment, Living Sustainably,
Moving Beyond Oil, Saving Wildlife and Wild Places, Solving
Global Warming With a puff of white smoke, the world was greeted
this week with the announcement of a new pope, Jorge Mario
Bergoglio, the Argentine Cardinal now known as Pope Francis,
named after the patron saint of the poor St. Francis of Assisi.
The new pontiff’s role in assisting the world’s disadvantaged
will be inextricably linked to the ravages of climate change,
the fast-growing global crisis that will hit the rising global
impoverished populations hard with increasingly deadly droughts,
floods and storms as heat-trapping carbon pollution continues to
build in the atmosphere. Just this week, the United Nations
released a searing report about the catastrophic impacts climate
change will inflict on the world’s rapidly growing
population—predicted to hit 8 billion by 20