By John-Henry Westen
Editor
LifeSiteNews.com
NEW YORK, May 24, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – On May 10, Archbishop Celestino Migliore, the Vatican’s representative at the United Nations, addressed the Economic and Social Council of the UN on the hot topic of climate change. His comments were disturbing to many since he seemed to indicate the Vatican was taking sides in the contentious debate around the causes of climate change.
Furthermore, by failing to clarify that the Vatican does not support population control as a means to address global warming his use of the terminology employed by groups advocating population control as the primary solution to avert disaster is also raising eyebrows.
Archbishop Migliore stated, “The scientific evidence for global warming and for humanity’s role in the increase of greenhouse gasses becomes ever more unimpeachable . . . and such activity has a profound relevance, not just for the environment, but in ethical, economic, social and political terms as well.”
While debate among climate scientists rages about the human contribution to climate change and global warming, many are concerned that the Vatican ambassador has chosen to take sides on this controversial issue.
A few months ago the Evangelical leadership of the United States ventured into similar territory when the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) published the Evangelical Climate Initiative. The statement claimed that “climate change” is “human-induced” and would result in the deaths of “millions of people…most of them our poorest global neighbors,” through climatological disasters such as hurricane Katrina.
Prominent Evangelical spokesmen, including Focus on the Family founder Dr. James Dobson, and the Southern Baptist Convention’s Richard Land called on the NAE to back down from its controversial stand “We believe there should be room for Bible-believing evangelicals to disagree about the cause, severity and solutions to the global warming issue . . . Global warming is not a consensus issue, and our love for the Creator and respect for His creation does not require us to take a position,” Dobson, Land and others wrote.
In language that could be equally addressed to the Vatican, Dobson told the NAE that certain individuals “are using the global warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time, notably the sanctity of human life, the integrity of marriage and the teaching of sexual abstinence and morality to our children.”
Another concerning comment in the Archbishop’s address to the UN was a glowing reference to “sustainable development”, UN lingo which has long been associated with population control. “There is still time to use technology and education to promote universally sustainable development before it is too late,” he concluded.
Those in the pro-life community who have been following developments at the United Nations for the past decade are well acquainted with the language employed by Archbishop Migliore. It is the same as that which has been spouted by those seeking to force population control on developing nations by inciting fear of climate disaster and false promises of prosperity from depopulation.
Joan Veon, a veteran UN expert who has reported on about 100 United Nations conferences explained what UN policy-makers mean when they use the term sustainable development. In 1992 during the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development Veon observed: “Sustainable development basically says there are too many people on the planet, that we must reduce the population.”
Not only UN experts but also national leaders have admitted publicly that population control lies at the heart of plans to combat global warming.
Last month China boasted that its one-child policy, which has been criticized by many nations for including forced abortion and sterilization, had reduced greenhouse gases. Speaking at a meeting in Oslo on the UN’s Kyoto Protocol, Hu Tao of China’s State Environmental Protection Administration said the one-child population control policy has slowed “global warming” by limiting the population to 1.3 billion. “This has reduced greenhouse gas emissions,” he said.
In 2004 Russian presidential economic advisor Andrei Illarionov called the Kyoto Protocol – a UN sponsored treaty to reduce greenhouse gases – an “undeclared war against Russia” since it required depopulation. Quoting a British team of scientists and government officials Illarionov said, “As long as you reduce your population, you can meet the Kyoto Protocol requirements.”
Recently population control advocates have become more open about their agenda. A report published May 7 by the Optimum Population Trust declared that the best “carbon-offset strategy” was to reduce the number of human beings and thus defeat the “global warming” phenomenon.
“Population limitation should therefore be seen as the most cost-effective carbon offsetting strategy available to individuals and nations,” read the report, A Population-Based Climate Strategy. “The most effective personal climate change strategy is limiting the number of children one has,” the report says. “The most effective national and global climate change strategy is limiting the size of the population.”
The stance of most of the pro-life movement regarding the environment was recently expressed by Czech President Vaclav Klaus in March of this year. “All of us are very much in favour of maximum environmental protection and protection of nature,” he said in an interview with the Cato Institute. “But it has nothing in common with environmentalism, which is ideological and practically attacking our freedom.”
Environmentalism is, he said “a way of introducing new forms of statism, new forms of masterminding human society from above.”
Should the Vatican wish to get into the game of prediction of man-made climate disasters perhaps they should revisit Biblical interpretations of natural disasters resulting from the sinfulness of mankind. The Biblical account of Noah’s Ark describes the whole known population of the earth being drowned in a flood except for Noah and his family, who were faithful to God.
To say nothing of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the flood was caused, teaches the Church, not by global warming, but by global sinning.
See the full text of the Vatican address to the UN:
https://holyseemission.org/10May2007.html