Cdl. Parolin calls for ‘limit’ on ‘global warming’ as poor denied basic electrical needs

ANALYSIS

December 5, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) –  Cardinal Parolin, the Secretary of State of the Holy See, speaking at the latest UN climate talks, was content merely to echo the wealthy global elite in declaring support for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s inadequate science and unsound economics. The Cardinal uttered platitudes about “building our common home”.

“It is still possible to limit global warming, but to do so will require a clear, forward-looking and strong political will to promote as quickly as possible the process of transitioning to a model of development that is free from those technologies and behaviors that influence the over-production of greenhouse gas emissions,” said Cardinal Parolin.

Like the Pope, however, he was culpably silent on the sufferings of the 1.2 billion people – a sixth of the world’s population – who, according to the International Energy Agency, do not have access to electricity. The Agency defines “access to electricity” as being able to turn on a single 60-Watt light bulb for four hours a day. Those 1.2 billion do not even have that much.

Lack of access to electricity is the chief avoidable cause of mortality in the Third World. According to the World Health Organization, 4.3 million people a year die from just one consequence of no electricity – particulate pollution from open cooking-fires in smoke-filled huts. Another 500,000 women a year die in childbirth owing to lack of electricity, to say nothing of the children whose lives are also thus lost, or of the uncounted millions who die each year because they cannot get life-saving operations or store refrigerated food or medicines. 

Life expectancy in the electrified West is 80 years. In the unelectrified Third World, it is 60 years. The blunt truth, which the Cardinal could and should have spoken at Katowice, is that a growing fraction of the 20 million people who die worldwide each year is due to an increasingly totalitarian international elite who will not let them have electrical power. The excuse for this murderous refusal is “global warming”. 

In the name of Saving The Planet from this clumsily-fabricated bugaboo, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank will not lend for the construction of the coal-fired power stations that could provide the cheapest and most reliable continuous, base-load electricity and would be easy for third-world engineers to maintain. 

Next year the World Bank will refuse to lend for extraction of oil and gas as well, even though the world is warming at a harmless and net-beneficial one-third of the midrange predicted rate, deaths from extreme weather are at their lowest since global records began, CO₂ fertilization has increased the net primary productivity of trees and plants by 15-30% in three decades, crop yields are at record highs, Arctic ice has not vanished as predicted, Antarctic ice shows a 30-year rising trend, sea level is rising at only 8 inches per century, the economic cost of preventing global warming is orders of magnitude greater than just letting it happen, the consensus that we are chiefly to blame for it is not 97% but 0.3%, and the whole scare is based on a strikingly elementary error of physics by which models predict three times the warming that is at all likely to occur.

And what has the dictator Pope or his mouthpiece in Katowice to say about the callous and growing outrage: the annual Holocaust of preventable but unprevented deaths from lack of electricity, perpetrated and perpetuated by the canting profiteers of doom who laugh all the way to the bank while dodging the corpses of the millions whom their dishonesty and indifference has left to die?

Nothing.

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