Pontiff laments that some ‘ridicule those who speak of global warming’, days after Trump’s claims of ‘con job’
Pope Leo XIV has taken aim at people who “ridicule those who speak of global warming” as he embraced Pope Francis’s environmental legacy and made it his own in some of his strongest and most extensive comments on the subject to date.
Leo presided over the 10th-anniversary celebration of Francis’s landmark ecological encyclical, Laudato Si (Praised Be), at a global gathering south of Rome. The encyclical cast care for the planet as an urgent and existential moral concern and launched a global grassroots movement to advocate for caring for God’s creation and the peoples most harmed by its exploitation.
Leo told the estimated 1,000 representatives from environmental and Indigenous groups that they needed to put pressure on national governments to develop tougher standards to mitigate the damage already done. He said he hoped the upcoming UN climate conference “will listen to the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor”.
He did not name names but history’s first American pope spoke just days after Donald Trump complained, with false statements, to the UN general assembly about the “con job” of global warming. Trump has long been a critic of climate science and polices aimed at helping to transition to green energies such as wind and solar power.
