"We have to listen to the cries of the earth and the cries of the poor. The vision has to become action" he said.

Coleridge stressed the insufficiency of ongoing discussions without tangible outcomes.

In a decisive move to address the pressing issues of environmental degradation and social injustice, the Brisbane Archdiocese on Thursday launched the Laudato Si' Action Plan 2024-2026 at the Francis Rush Centre.

Action-oriented strategy

Crafted through a collaborative effort among various agencies within the Brisbane archdiocese, the plan presents seven targeted goals.

These goals are designed to echo and respond actively to Pope Francis's environmental and social advocacies in the encyclical Laudato Si'.

The goals range from directly addressing the environmental crisis and aiding those in poverty, to transforming economic, educational and spiritual practices within the Brisbane Archdiocese.

Emma Beach, who spearheads the Laudato Si' Action Plan, underlined the commitment to realising these ambitions.

"It's going to happen" she said, signaling a shift from planning to implementation.

The action plan includes significant changes such as adjusting investment strategies, revamping the archdiocesan vehicle fleet to decrease fossil fuel dependency, and revising procurement processes.

Immediate steps and future goals

A standout feature of the plan is its actionable steps, each accompanied by specific deadlines and responsible parties.

For example, to combat reliance on fossil fuels, the first order of business is updating the archdiocese's car fleet within the next four years.

Moreover, in an effort to align financial practices with ethical standards, investment policies will be revised by January 2025 to include reports on fossil fuel investments and other non-congruent activities.

The action plan also emphasises ecological education, aiming to involve 15 parishes in developing their own Laudato Si' commitments by 2025-2026.

This strategy seeks to educate and empower communities to contribute actively to environmental stewardship and social justice.

The plan outlines seven goals in a four-year time frame:

• Responding to the Cry of the Earth
• Responding to the Cry of the Poor
• Ecological economics
• Adoption of sustainable lifestyles
• Ecological education
• Ecological spirituality
• Community resilience and empowerment

Beyond dialogue

The Brisbane Archdiocese's Laudato Si' Action Plan signifies a pivotal leap from dialogue to action in the face of global ecological and social challenges.

By setting clear goals, actionable steps and strict timelines, the Archdiocese underscores its dedication to making a substantive difference.

This initiative stands as a testament to the belief that effective response to the cries of the earth and the poor goes beyond talk, requiring immediate and committed action.

Source

• Catholic Leader

The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research's (NIWA) summer climate summary was released Tuesday, showing it was the ninth warmest summer on record, with a nationwide average temperature of 17.6C.

The sunniest spot in New Zealand this year has been Nelson, with 618 sunshine hours, closely followed by Tasman at 605 hours, Marlborough at 604 hours and Taranaki at 595 hours.

The highest temperature recorded over the summer was on 5 February in Hanmer Forest... Read more

That's according to a prominent climate scientist's analysis, as global agencies report that 2023 looks likely to go down as the planet's hottest in recorded history.

In assessing the local picture, Professor Jim Salinger compared October-to-November temperature data from 22 land sites against a 1951-80 average.

The result came in at 1.15C above that three-decade baseline - the highest for any such period in records stretching back to 1870. Read more

My first university degree was in electrical and electronic engineering, with a subsequent master's in control systems.

Combine this, perhaps surprising, academic pathway with a lifelong passion for the motorcar, and you can see why I was drawn into the early adoption of electric vehicles.

I bought my first electric hybrid 18 years ago and my first pure electric car nine years ago, and (notwithstanding our poor electric charging infrastructure) I have enjoyed my time with both very much.

Electric vehicles may be a bit soulless, but they're wonderful mechanisms: fast, quiet and, until recently, very cheap to run.

But increasingly, I feel a little duped.

When you start to drill into the facts, electric motoring doesn't seem to be quite the environmental panacea it is claimed to be.

As you may know, the government has proposed a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030.

The problem with the initiative is that it seems to be largely based on conclusions drawn from only one part of a car's operating life: what comes out of the exhaust pipe.

Electric cars, of course, have zero exhaust emissions, which is a welcome development, particularly in respect of the air quality in city centres.

But the situation is very different if you zoom out a bit and look at a bigger picture that includes the car's manufacture.

In advance of the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow in 2021, Volvo released figures claiming that greenhouse gas emissions during the production of an electric car are nearly 70% higher than when manufacturing a petrol one.

How so?

The problem lies with the lithium-ion batteries fitted currently to nearly all-electric vehicles: they're absurdly heavy, huge amounts of energy are required to make them, and they are estimated to last only upwards of 10 years.

It seems a perverse choice of hardware with which to lead the automobile's fight against the climate crisis.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of effort is going into finding something better.

New, so-called solid-state batteries are being developed that should charge more quickly and could be about a third of the weight of the current ones - but they are years away from being on sale, by which time, of course, we will have made millions of overweight electric cars with rapidly obsolescing batteries.

Hydrogen is emerging as an interesting alternative fuel, even though we are slowly developing a truly "green" way of manufacturing it.

It can be used in one of two ways.

It can power a hydrogen fuel cell (essentially, a kind of battery); the car manufacturer Toyota has poured a lot of money into the development of these.

Such a system weighs half of an equivalent lithium-ion battery and a car can be refuelled with hydrogen at a filling station as fast as with petrol.

If the lithium-ion battery is an imperfect device for electric cars, concerns have been raised over their use in heavy trucks for long-distance haulage because of the weight; an alternative is injecting hydrogen into a new kind of piston engine.

JCB, the company that makes yellow diggers, has made huge strides with hydrogen engines and hopes to put them into production in the next couple of years.

If hydrogen wins the race to power trucks - and as a result, every filling station stocks it - it could be a popular and accessible choice for cars. Continue reading

Communities are shoring up seawalls with old tyres.

I was raised on the beautiful island of Tonga.

When I was a child, my parents and grandparents would come out every morning to look at the horizon. They would look at the clouds and see the patterns to understand what laid before us that day.

Nowadays, things are different.

Children playing and swimming at the beaches see the patterns in the clouds and run back to alert us to a disaster.

This is now becoming a regular occurrence.

After storms, I visit my people and I am always lifted by their resilience and their spirit of helping each other.

But when I delve deeper, they share their real emotions, which are full of pain, heartache and fear.

You see, in the Pacific our people are strong. We are resilient, but even we have our limits. And we have reached our limit.

Nowadays, when I wake up in the morning and look out to sea, I see two clouds. Two dark and looming clouds. One is climate change. This cloud brings rising sea levels, more frequent cyclones and king tides like we have never seen before.

It is joined by another cloud. This one is debt. Increasingly frequent and severe weather means that Pacific Island nations are struggling to rebuild. We feel like we are going backwards.

Vital infrastructure such as homes, bridges, farms and fisheries, take years to rebuild while crops and livestock take a similar period to restore. It is extremely expensive, and it is money we simply don't have.

Last year at the United Nations climate talks, nations agreed on a Loss and Damage fund; a fund created to compensate developing countries impacted by climate change, like my home of Tonga in the Pacific Island nations.

We don't contribute much to climate change. In fact, we contribute less than 0.5 per cent of all global emissions. But we certainly pay for it in our futures, and the futures of our children. We need compensation for this injustice.

The Loss and Damage fund is an important step towards climate justice, but we can't forget that the 2009 pledge to spend $100 billion a year in climate aid has still not been met. In fact, the pledge to spend $100 billion a year is far from achieved.

Right now, the Pacific region needs nearly US $1 billion per year in financing to adapt our infrastructure to climate change. We receive much less than this. Continue reading

• Cardinal Soane Patita Paini Mafi is Bishop of Tonga

The continent is facing a looming food crisis caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

In better times, between 2018 and 2020, Africa imported 44 percent of its wheat from Russia and Ukraine.

"A striking phenomenon is the link between food insecurity, violence and climate change," says Secretary General of Caritas Internationalis, Aloysius John.

"They are interlinked. When people find themselves in extreme conditions and highly vulnerable, survival becomes the motivation for any kind of activities and often ends in violence and conflict."

The situation is worst in the Horn of Africa and the arid Sahel region, John says.

"In the Sahel region, more than 12.7 million people are exposed to a highly vulnerable situation of hunger as well as exile from their rural homesteads," he says.

Caritas - a confederation of Catholic relief and development agencies - is concerned about Africa's reliance on food imports.

"Africa has been the dumping site for the surplus of large-scale industrial production of food," says John.

"It's destroyed food supply chains and local traditional farming - and needs immediate and quick attention."

Of the 160 million people living on the Horn of Africa, 45 percent will be affected by food insecurity, he says.

The formerly "fertile land of the Nile" is worst affected by severe drought and scarce rainfall.

Violence and conflict in the region compound the problem.

One percent of the land is irrigated. It's "totally insufficient" to feed the population.

People are on the move.

They and their livestock have been forced to leave their traditional homelands in search of humanitarian aid or any means to sustain their survival.

"A recent Caritas report calls for "the implementation of just food systems - from production to consumption" as "key for the development of global South nations".

Food injustice has been meted out in different forms, John says.

Traditional agriculture has been destroyed and replaced by vested interests. Market-oriented, large-scale agriculture is suffering today due to climate change and droughts, he says.

In some parts of Africa, cheap industrially-raised imported chicken, milk and meat are endangering locally raised produce.

Restoring justice to the global food systems means stopping using Africa as a dumping site.

Promoting and socialising local communities to water harvesting, natural fertilisers and pest control is also vital.

The Ukraine-Russia war shows how the global South needs to take ownership of its own food chains, John says.

"It is important to develop local agriculture, traditional farming, identify local food habits and mainstream them into development projects.

"A community-oriented and community-based development paradigm which takes integral ecology into account needs to be developed.

"This will help promote local food systems and supply chains leading to food independence," he says.

Source

• Crux Now

Gathering the heads of some of the world's largest oil and gas corporations - including ExxonMobil, BP, and Royal Dutch Shell - to the recent "Energy Transition and Care for our Common Home" Vatican conference, the pope told the CEOs that meeting the energy needs of everyone, especially the more than 1 billion people without electricity, must urgently be undertaken, but in ways "that avoid creating environmental imbalances resulting in deterioration and pollution gravely harmful to our human family, both now and in the future."

The pontiff appealed to the energy executives to see the necessary moral interconnectedness of the elimination of poverty and hunger - including providing "energy for all" - with "sustainable development of renewable forms of energy" to replace dirty fossil fuels that are greatly contributing to a dangerous rise in global temperatures thus leading to harsher environments, and not surprisingly, increased poverty.

"Temperatures over the planet as a whole continue the rapid warming trend we've seen over the last 40 years," said NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt.

According to NASA, during the past century the Earth's average surface temperature has risen about 2 degrees Fahrenheit - largely due to increased human-made global warming emissions like carbon dioxide.

Hottest since 1880

And the past four years are the hottest years on record - since 1880.

"Our common home," as Pope Francis likes to call our planet, is indisputably warming up causing more frequent, more intense hurricanes, wildfires, floods, droughts and heat waves.

The Holy Father reminded corporate oil executives that the 2015 Paris climate agreement signed by 196 nations to make the necessary changes to limit global warming was not on track, and that there is real concern that carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases still remain dangerously high.

Here it is important to note that President Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, despite the fact that historically the U.S. has put more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than any country, and is currently the world's second largest emitter of heat trapping gases.

Poor countries suffer most

And the world's poor nations, which have generated the least amount of global warming gases, are the countries that are, and will, suffer the most. Here Pope Francis laments, "It is the poor who suffer most from the ravages of global warming, with increasing disruption in the agricultural sector, water insecurity, and exposure to severe weather events.

"The transition to accessible and clean energy is a duty that we owe towards millions of our brothers and sisters around the world, poorer countries and generations yet to come.

"There can be no renewal with our relationship with nature without a renewal of humanity itself."

Appeal to oil and gas leaders

In a heartfelt appeal to oil and gas corporate leaders, the Holy Father asked them to put their skills and privileged positions to "the service of two great needs in today's world: the care of the poor and the environment."

And with urgent warning to all of us Pope Francis concluded: "There is no time to lose: We received the earth as a garden-home from the Creator; let us not pass it on to future generations as a wilderness."

• Tony Magliano is an internationally syndicated social justice and peace columnist. He is available to speak at diocesan or parish gatherings about Catholic social teaching. His keynote address, "Advancing the Kingdom of God in the 21st Century," has been well received by diocesan and parish gatherings from Santa Clara, Calif. to Baltimore, Md. Tony can be reached at tmag@zoominternet.net.

Now it is an image of our fellow human beings, millions of them, battling on the frontlines for survival.

While the west debate the merits of climate science, in large parts of Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islands climate change is a daily reality.

Many of these communities rely on fishing and farming for their subsistence — but unpredictable weather and extreme weather events are wreaking havoc.

This is especially true of East Africa where I have just returned from visiting communities on the brink of famine.

Over 20 million people throughout the region are facing what the UN has characterised as the greatest humanitarian crisis since the Second World War. Everything I saw confirmed this assessment.

Widespread malnutrition and in many cases starvation, is sweeping through Somalia, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Kenya, South Sudan, Malawi and Yemen.

The crisis is being fuelled by conflict in certain areas while rising food prices and a large scale drought are affecting the region as a whole.

In 2016 East Africa was hit by a supercharged El Niño — a warming of temperatures on the surface of the Pacific Ocean.

While dry spells are not uncommon for the region, abnormally high temperatures have intensified both the severity and the length of the drought.

For farming and pastoralist communities the effects have been devastating.

With over 30 years of involvement in global affairs, I have never seen anything on this scale.

Millions of men, women and children are, literally, desperate for food and water.

Released just last month, the Disaster Alley report warns that, if left unchecked, global warming will cause increasingly regular and severe humanitarian crises not unlike the one taking hold in East Africa.

Images of droughts, famines, and mass migration are what we must now conjure up when thinking about climate change.

But all is not lost. Continue reading

• Image: Eureka St

Water carriers walk for hours, bucket handles digging into their hands. Goats and cows, grazing for absent pasture, stagger with protruding ribs. Families ration portions of turbid water.

At underfunded hospitals, emaciated infants on stretchers are fed rehydrating salts. Maryangel, a young doctor, shakes her head. "We've had pregnant mothers come in weighing less than 30 kilograms."

Far from access to proper medical care, shovels cut the suffocated soil to make way for bodies. Government figures indicate that thousands of children here have died of malnutrition and preventable illnesses in the last few years. Many more die unregistered, without noise. "Why would you inform the state of the death of a person they have abandoned?" a father asks.

The majority of these children are Wayúu, from Colombia's most populous indigenous nation. Across the country, the fate of the Wayúu has largely been met with chronic indifference or ephemeral outrage. Politicians and state departments have played down the crisis, engaging instead in finger-pointing. But the brutal epidemic of hunger continues, its multiple causes unsolved or unrecognized.

At first glance, the drought's origin appears to be primarily atmospheric: The absence of water stems from climate change and a fierce El Niño, which have ravaged the landscape and disrupted patterns of precipitation.

As Armando Valbuena, a Wayúu leader and former president of the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia explains: "Here in the desert, we live on the blade of a knife. It's a very fragile system. With climate change, sea temperatures increase. Fish move deeper into the sea to find colder waters and our fishermen are left without food." Continue reading

Sources

• Article by Daniel Macmillen Voskoboynik, a writer and activist, in The Week
• Image: Breaking News

"In 30 years, the area has shrunk approximately by half," said a scientist who examined the onslaught. "There doesn't seem anything able to stop this."

In the Pacific this spring, the enemy staged a daring breakout across thousands of miles of ocean, waging a full-scale assault on the region's coral reefs. In a matter of months, long stretches of formations like the Great Barrier Reef—dating back past the start of human civilization and visible from space—were reduced to white bone-yards.

Day after day, week after week, saboteurs behind our lines are unleashing a series of brilliant and overwhelming attacks. In the past few months alone, our foes have used a firestorm to force the total evacuation of a city of 90,000 in Canada, drought to ravage crops to the point where southern Africans are literally eating their seed corn, and floods to threaten the priceless repository of art in the Louvre.

The enemy is even deploying biological weapons to spread psychological terror: The Zika virus, loaded like a bomb into a growing army of mosquitoes, has shrunk the heads of newborn babies across an entire continent; panicked health ministers in seven countries are now urging women not to get pregnant.

And as in all conflicts, millions of refugees are fleeing the horrors of war, their numbers swelling daily as they're forced to abandon their homes to escape famine and desolation and disease.

World War III is well and truly underway. And we are losing. Continue reading

Sources

• New Republic article by Bill McKibben, the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and co-founder of the climate group 350.org.
• Image: Daily Star, Albany

Naturally, we segued into survivalist-apocalyptic jokes. My kid wields swords and sticks with a bit of flair, I offered. My friend said that would come in handy when the bullets run out. It was a bleak exchange, hovering between the smallness of our lives and harsher, larger realities.

This week in Pakistan, mass graves are being dug in anticipation of a heat wave. Last year, more than 1500 people perished from the heat, too many to bury at once. 'Thank God, we are better prepared this year,' a Karachi gravedigger says. At least 300 holes in the ground are ready.

In Rajasthan, India, a weeks-long heat wave spiked to 51-degrees Celsius last week. It has overlapped the drought in more than 13 states, affecting more than 330 million people. Life has wilted to a halt in parts of the country.

There is a temptation, when such unusual severity unfolds, to minimise it as anomalous. Heat waves aren't uncommon in certain regions, and can be part of the seasonal cycle. In this way the scale of casualties, damage and response may be framed in terms of preparedness, something to be managed.

But it is getting harder to suppose that human efforts could long outrun the inevitable. Recent data visualisation of global temperatures from 1850 to 2016 indicates the heat is set to reach levels never seen in all of human civilisation. Every single month since August 2015 has been the hottest on record.

Among other things, this means that many cities will become uninhabitable by mid-century. My kid will only be 42 years old then.

According to Johannes Lelieveld, director at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, 'the climate in large parts of the Middle East and North Africa could change in such a manner that the very existence of its inhabitants is in jeopardy'. Heat waves could occur ten times more frequently, and last longer — up to 80 days each year. Lelieveld says such conditions 'will surely contribute to the pressure to migrate'. Continue reading

• Fatima Measham is a Eureka Street consulting editor.

Francis said this in his conversation with journalists on board the flight from Bangui to Rome.

The Pope also responded to a couple of questions about the Vatileaks scandal: "Vallejo and Chaouqui's appointments in the COSEA commission were a mistake," he said and went on to give significant recognition to the work Ratzinger had started.

In Kenya, you met poor families and listened to their stories of exclusion from fundamental human rights such as access to drinking water. What did you feel when you listened to their stories and what needs to be done to end such injustices?
"I have spoken about this problem on a number of occasions. I do not recall the statistics precisely but I seem to recall reading that 80% of the world's wealth is in the hands of 17% of the population, I don't know if that's true.

"It is an economic system that places money at the centre, the god money. I remember a non-Catholic ambassador once speaking in French and saying "Nous sommes tombés dans l'idolatrie de l'argent".

"What did I feel in Kangemi? I felt pain, great pain! Yesterday I went to a children's hospital, the only one in Bangui and in the whole country. In the intensive care unit there's no oxygen, there were children that were malnourished. Idolatry is when a man or a woman loses his or her ID card, in other words their identity as God's children and prefers to seek a tailor-made God.

The bottom line is this; if humanity does not change, poverty, tragedies, wars and injustice will continue. Children will go on dying of hunger. What does that percentage of people that holds 80% of the world's wealth in their hands think of this? This is not communism, it is the truth. And seeing the truth is not easy." Continue reading

Source and Image

• Vassallomalta

Particular attention was placed on the failings of political leaders and the importance of people changing their lifestyles, making sacrifices to help combat climate change.

Then the pope, having become the darling of environmentalists, departed Sunday on a whirlwind tour of Latin America.

The pope's journey from Rome to Ecuador, Bolivia and Paraguay will inevitably involve a considerable amount of air travel, known to be a form of transportation that is incredibly damaging to the environment.

Francis' first journey of the trip was a VIP flight from Rome to Quito, the Ecuadorean capital, put on by Alitalia especially for the papal visit.

The pope's Latin America trip will see him travel more than 14,900 miles, mostly by air, creating a large carbon footprint that appears to go against his environmental message.

A quick glance at the pope's 2015 foreign travel agenda — 11 countries across five continents — and the size of the pope's carbon footprint starts to look quite large.

As explained by James Lees from the U.K.'s Aviation Environment Federation, which campaigns for sustainability in the industry, air travel accounts for about the same amount of emissions as Germany produces as a country.

"So for both individual and collective action, aviation has the potential to undo good work to cut emissions elsewhere," he said.

But Lisa Sideris, director of the Indiana University Consortium for the Study of Religion, Ethics and Society, said the pontiff is just one of a number of climate activists who must travel extensively to achieve their goals.

"On purely utilitarian grounds - judging these actions in terms of their consequences - the pope's carbon footprint could easily be justified. The good that he does by raising awareness of climate change, particularly given the pope's great symbolic significance, outweighs the carbon expenditure his travels entail," she said.

Selling the encyclical in bookstores and broadcasting the pope's voice from the Vatican is simply not as effective as having him speak in person to crowds around the world.

Francis is already bringing his environmental message to Latin America. On Tuesday, he told an audience that people must no longer turn their backs on "Mother Earth." Continue reading

Rosie Scammell is a freelance journalist in Rome. She tweets Italy & international news and takes photos.

Actually, Pope Francis himself is making them look more ridiculous and isolated than ever.

He's poised to put his moral imprimatur on the scientific consensus about man-made climate change, with a much-anticipated summer encyclical, and this is driving the conservative deniers batty.

It's also putting Republicans, most notably Catholic presidential candidates Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, in a very awkward position.

They've got to keep pandering to the anti-science nuts in The Base without appearing to diss the popular pro-science pontiff.

The pope has been discomfiting the deniers since last winter, when he cited human activity as a key factor in climate change:

"In great part, it is man who has slapped nature in the face. We have in a sense taken over nature." Cardinal Peter Turkson, a top Vatican official, says the pope "is pointing to the ominous signs in nature that suggest that humanity may now have tilled too much and kept too little."

And yesterday, at a Vatican summit meeting, religious and science leaders (along with business and political leaders) released a joint statement. The key quote: "Human-induced climate change is a scientific reality, and its decisive mitigation is a moral and religious imperative for humanity."

Best of all, Pope Francis is slated to address Congress in September (roughly 30 percent of its members are Catholic), at the express invitation of John Boehner. Buy your popcorn now.

As the Rev. Thomas Reese, an analyst at the National Catholic Reporter, told the press the other day, "I think Boehner was out of his mind to invite the pope....Can you imagine what the Republicans will do when he says, 'You've got to do something about global warming?'"

What they'll do, of course, is dismiss and deny. Yes, the pope has great moral power (and a grassroots global following, thanks to his social media savvy), and yes, he's helping to build momentum for a United Nations climate change accord in December. Continue reading

Image: EcoWatch

This is a comprehensive and timely book.

Klein says in part one, "If there has ever been a moment to advance a plan to heal the planet that also heals our broken economies and our shattered communities, this is it."

In the introduction she says "this is the hardest book I have ever written because climate change puts us on such a tight and unforgiving deadline."

This book is about our "climate moment" with all its challenges and opportunities.

First, Klein says we have to stop looking away.

We deny because we fear letting in the full reality of a crisis that changes everything.

The need to change everything is not something we readily accept.

If we are to curb emissions in the next decade we need a massive mobilisation larger than any in history.

She quotes the Bolivian Navarro Llamos who suggests it is time for a "Marshall Plan for Earth".

The question is posed: What is wrong with us?

What is really preventing us from putting out the fire that's threatening to burn down our collective house?

The global economy always takes centre stage. Market fundamentalsim has systematically sabotaged our collective responses.

Our economic system and our planetary systems are at war.

We are faced with a stark choice: "either we allow climate change to disrupt everything about our world or we change pretty much everything about our world to avoid that fate".

We need a radical rethink for these changes to be remotely possible.

Our "climate moment" is accompanied by what she calls a "fossil fuel frenzy".

A wild dig is going on in most nations on the planet. Aotearoa/NZ being no exception. Continue reading

• Fr Peter Healy is a Marist priest who lives and works in Otaki.

"Just as South Africa's Apartheid era policies sought divisions along race lines, today the world's environment and energy policies divide man from nature," said the Cardinal.

Midway through the Climate Change Conference, the main issue still on the table is the extension of the Kyoto protocol.

The world's two biggest emitters and major economies, China and the United States, are not signatories of the protocol, which sets legal limits on green house gas emissions, have yet to commit to agreeing to a binding deal.

"How long will countless people have to go on dying before adequate decisions are taken?" Rodriguez said during his Sunday homily.

"It's true that in faith we wait 'for the new heavens and the new earth' but this does not mean indifference or complicity with those who destroy this land where we live," he added.

"'Living holy and saintly lives means living in justice with creation and the environment, and especially with the poor people who are the primary victims of this serious problem."

The Cardinal urged the Durban Climate Change Conference not to remain as a voice silenced by economic power.

Concluding his homily Rodriguez challenging delegates to make the Conference a success and the world a better place. "May this conference be a success for global solidarity, and embody a desire to make a better world for future generations."

Sources

• Vatican Radio
• Image CNS

Pell maintains the causes of climate change were "unclear".

The report released this month by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences called on "all people and nations to recognise the serious and potentially irreversible impacts of global warming" caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

"By acting now, in the spirit of common but differentiated responsibility, we accept our duty to one another and to the stewardship of a planet blessed with the gift of life," it read.

"Climate change is real. The causes are unclear, and our ability to influence climate change [is] even less certain," Pell said.

He agreed to read the document carefully.

Earlier this year Cardinal Pell had dismissed the head of the Bureau of Meteorology, Greg Ayers, as a "hot air specialist" for suggesting that he had been "misled" by the geologist Ian Plimer, whose book on climate change had been criticised by scientists.

Cardinal Pell had relied heavily on Professor Plimer's work when he argued against human-induced global warming in a written submission to a Senate estimates hearing, claiming increases in carbon dioxide tended to follow rises in temperature, not cause them.

Sources

• The Age
• Image: Herald Sun