GLASGOW, Scotland (LifeSiteNews) — The Catholic bishops in Scotland called on global leaders at the U.N. COP29 climate conference to “commit all nations to a rapid and just transition away from fossil fuels.”
In a November 14 statement, the Bishops Conference of Scotland (BCOS) sent a plea to the national leaders and international activists currently gathered in Baku at the United Nations’ COP29 climate change conference.
The forthright statement called on pressure to be exerted on all nations in order to cease using fossil fuels:
To mark COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, three years after Scotland hosted COP26 in Glasgow, we, the Catholic Bishops of Scotland, encourage world leaders to agree to and establish a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty to commit all nations to a rapid and just transition away from fossil fuels.
The bishops attested that such a transition was “vital to address the urgent needs of our planet and its people both in Scotland and overseas; those currently suffering from economic precarity, poverty and environmental destruction; and the unborn future generations from whom we are borrowing the Earth.”
They called on Scotland to join the “global effort for the common good” and to play its part in the “rapid transition” away from fossil fuels – a process that they said must have “justice at its core.”
Accepting that much of the Scottish workforce and community rely on fossil fuels “for their livelihoods,” the BCOS stipulated that a transition to a fossil free future must provide “clear commitments to a just and equitable transition for all, in particular those in need of secure jobs in the post-carbon economy.”
Farther afield from Scotland, the BCOS petitioned that the international community act justly “for those who are already the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and who cannot endure further global warming caused by any more fossil fuel extraction.”
They made a notable move of supporting the activist movement Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, making its aims their own and calling on global leaders to act at every level to protect the climate as mankind’s “common good.”
Echoing the Pope
Pope Francis has made similar calls previously to move away from fossil fuels, calling on the 2023 COP28 summit to “institute a rapid and equitable transition to end the era of fossil fuel.”
READ: Pope Francis calls for an ‘end’ to ‘the era of fossil fuel’ in Prayer for Creation message
This call, the Scottish bishops have thus made their own. Their statement comes one day after Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin delivered Francis’ own message to the COP29 event. On this occasion, Francis focused chiefly on the U.N.’s aims to “green” the global financial sphere in order to funnel money toward implementing the goals of the pro-abortion 2015 Paris Climate Accord.
READ: Pope Francis calls for global financial revolution to fight ‘climate change’
Fossil fuels’ impact disputed
While climate change activists have made the eradication of fossil fuels a key point, many others – across a broad spectrum of disciplines – have rejected the necessity of phasing out fossil fuels.
Particularly notably, the UAE’s Dr. Sultan Al-Jaber, the COP28 president, rejected the argument that fossil fuels need to be eradicated in order to achieve the Paris Accord’s goal of limiting warming to 1.5C. “There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C,” he stated last year.
Lord Peter Lilley, a life peer in the U.K. House of Lords and former MP, revealed that he previously discovered there were no studies accepted by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that predicted “the extinction of humanity if the world takes no action to phase out fossil fuels.”
Nor, he added, was there “a serious threat of humankind being reduced to poverty, hunger and wretchedness if we don’t reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.”
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2022, Dr. John Clauser has also disputed the rhetoric bolstering the calls to remove fossil fuel usage. At a conference last year, Clauser said that “I don’t believe there is a climate crisis,” and accused the IPCC of promoting misinformation.
Commenting on climate alarmism, Clauser has also said that “the popular narrative about climate change reflects a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people.”
Tom Harris, executive director of the International Climate Science Coalition and a former climate change alarmist, rebuffed the mainstream hysteria on the topic in 2022.
Climate science is “a very immature science,” Harris stated, echoing the book that dismantles the claims of thousands of articles about the climate crisis, showing that “there is no foundation” to the proposition.
READ: Don’t be fooled by claims of ‘consensus’ on climate change, science is not a popularity contest
“There are thousands of references here which talk about the fact that there is no foundation to the climate scam,” he said. “It’s all based on models that don’t work.”