The Pontifical Academy’s Sustainablity Conference Podcast

CLICK HERE TO GET TO THE PODCAST

Arrgh. I’m trying out a new podcasting plugin. It puts the podcasts into something-which-isn’t-a-post and which is impossible to find. So here is a regular post which links to the podcast. I won’t be using this plugin any more after today, but it’s too late to fix it for today. I’ll put up the real podcast here once I find a better plugin.

I was interviewed last Thursday for Marita Noon’s regular podcast “America’s Voice for Energy“. Few have yet heard the interview because there were some technical difficulties posting it. These were fixed Monday, and the broadcast is now available for one and all.

Noon interviewed some of the folks who were with the Heartland contingent at the Pontifical Academy’s curious sustainability conference. She also talked with me (I wasn’t in Rome).

Now Noon called the event the “Pope’s conference”, which it wasn’t. Rather, I don’t think it was. The PAS has a history of mixing green politics with actual science and it appears—I say appears—that this was their own doing. Everybody is anxiously expecting the Holy Father’s encyclical which, rumor has it, will cover, inter alia, the environment. Many want to share in its glory, including the PAS.

I wonder how close the guesses about the encyclical’s content will be to reality? Ought to be interesting. Regular readers will know that I haven’t said a word about what’s in a document I haven’t yet read.

Anyway, in the podcast, Cal Beisner, of the Cornwall Alliance For the Stewardship of Creation, is first up and tells us why Jeffery “Abortion Abortion” Sachs is not to be heeded.

Our friend Marc Morano batted second (starting at 15:13). Marc was muscled out of the conference by the PAS’s Open Dialog Police. Among other topics, Marc points out the cynicism of folks like Al Gore who facetiously say they’ll covert to Catholicism because Pope Francis is solid on climate “justice.”

The real ranting and raving and raillery—Yours Truly—comes at 30:45. I start by giving a textbook example of tongue tied. And I go downhill from there. I do give a shout-out to the National Association of Scholar’s sustainability report, which is worth reading.

It was Noon’s questions that gave me the idea of defining sustainability, incidentally, which I did in that piece for Crisis.

The last interviewee is Heartland’s Sterling Burnett (at 45:45) who gives an overview of Heartland’s counter conference.

Incidentally, another Catholic “environmental” conference is taking place as I type this. Caritas, an official umbrella charity group, is meeting in Rome.

During the five-day Caritas gathering that opens Tuesday, leaders of Catholic charitable organizations from around the world will focus on growing inequalities as well as the impact of climate change…

Beyond Rodríguez and Gutiérrez, other keynote speakers during the five-day Caritas Internationalis will be Ghana’s Cardinal Peter Turkson, president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, who helped write a draft of Francis’ environment encyclical; South African Prof. Beverley Haddad, an expert in the intersection of religion and the HIV epidemic; and famed American economist Jeffrey Sachs, a United Nations special advisor.

Jeffrey “Abortion Abortion” Sachs sure does show up a lot at Catholic conferences, eh?

Now what’s interesting (in this same article) we have Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga “blasting” folks who are critical of the Church’s newfound green love. The Cardinal said, “The ideology surrounding environmental issues is too tied to a capitalism that doesn’t want to stop ruining the environment because they don’t want to give up their profits.” Hmm. Not many of those profits are coming my way, so this doesn’t explain why I’m against folks like Sachs.

Also see this: Environmentalists are thrilled that Francis is lending his moral authority to provide an ethical foundation for action to stem climate change.