To the Editor
Of all the senior ecclesiastical Christian leaders in the world today, one you’d expect to thoroughly understand Africa’s problems would be Ghanaian cardinal Peter Turkson. Born into a poor family in Western Ghana, Cardinal Turkson was the fourth among ten children of a carpenter father and a mother who sold vegetables in the open market.
Ghana has less than 4 per cent the GDP per capita of Canada and a life expectancy at birth 20 years less than that in developed countries. This is largely because about 40 per cent of its citizens lack access to electricity.
Happily, a 1,200 MW coal-fired electricity generating station is being developed to come on line in Ghana by 2018. This will help pull millions of people out of poverty.
As President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Turkson gave the opening address at the Vatican’s April 28 climate change conference, an event to provide support for next month’s papal letter, the first ever devoted entirely to the environment.
Given his background and the Council’s strong focus on social development, you would expect that Turkson would have warned delegates that fulfilling the critical needs of today’s people should be their paramount objective. In their zeal to cut back on the use of hydrocarbon fuels to supposedly stop climate change, they must do nothing that would interfere with providing inexpensive electricity to countries such as Ghana.
Given the Council’s interest in social justice, you would also expect Turkson to focus on the importance of helping vulnerable people adapt to climate change today, whatever the cause. He should have condemned the fact that, of the $1 billion spent every day on climate finance across the world, only 6 per cent of it goes to adaptation, the rest being devoted to trying to stop climate change that might someday happen.
Sadly, Turkson said nothing about energy and little about adaptation in his speech. Instead he reinforced the reasons many at the conference want to block further development of inexpensive coal-fired power plants, asserting, “Today, the ever-accelerating burning of fossil fuels that powers our economic engine is disrupting the earth’s delicate ecological balance on almost-unfathomable scale.”
Turkson then listed “the increasing prevalence of extreme weather events” as a consequence of climate change, a connection that has been disputed by leading scientists across the world. Blaming developed nations for the climate problems of poor countries, he encouraged the conference to “think of the positive message it would send for churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples all over the world to become carbon neutral.”
Turkson thereby set the stage for the conference’s final “Declaration of Religious Leaders, Political Leaders, Business Leaders, Scientists and Development Practitioners.” The declaration included the nonsensical ‘King Canute clause’ about keeping global warming below 2 degrees C, as if we had a global thermostat. It totally ignored the dire energy needs of the world’s poorest people and said little about adaptation. Instead Pope Francis’ advisors promoted a dangerous “rapid world transformation to a world powered by renewable and other low-carbon energy.”
Calling for “brave and determined” guidance from religious leaders, Turkson told delegates that actions on climate change must be “measured in terms of human flourishing and well-being.” If June’s papal letter is to encourage this objective, then the Pope must discount the politically correct but irresponsible advice of his advisors, and simply tell the truth: climate will continue to change no matter what we do. We therefore need to help the world’s poor to the degree we can afford and stop pretending we have a crystal ball to future climate states.
Tom Harris
Executive Director of the Ottawa-based International Climate Science Coalition
