The Pontifical Academy of Sciences has invited California governor Jerry Brown to deliver a keynote address in their upcoming meeting on climate change to be held in the Vatican.
The Nov. 2-4 Vatican workshop titled “Health of People, Health of Planet and our Responsibility: Climate Change, Air Pollution and Health” will attempt to link up the health risks posed by air pollution with anthropogenic climate change driven by carbon emissions.
This is not the first time the Vatican has offered a platform to the contentious California governor from which to proclaim his views on global warming.
Invited to speak at a similar Vatican event in 2015, Jerry Brown, a darling of Planned Parenthood, railed against climate-change skeptics, calling them well-financed “troglodytes” who are determined to “bamboozle” the gullible.
The Vatican hosted 10 U.S. Democrat mayors as well as Governor Jerry Brown of California at its event, while no Republicans were present. At the conclusion of the event, Brown joined the other politicians in signing a declaration stating that “human-induced climate change is a scientific reality, and its effective control is a moral imperative for humanity.”
In his address, Brown said that climate change is “the biggest threat of our time” after nuclear annihilation. “If we don’t annihilate ourselves with nuclear bombs then it’s climate change,” he said.
He called for a crusade against the “fierce opposition and blind inertia” of “well-financed” climate change skeptics.
“We have very powerful opposition that, in at least my country, spends billions on trying to keep from office people such as yourselves and elect troglodytes and other deniers of the obvious science,” Brown said at the conference.
The governor said that despite the opposition he kept a positive viewpoint, citing Italian communist leader Antonio Gramsci, who spoke of the “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”
During his Rome visit, Brown—who was a Jesuit seminarian in the 1970s—reportedly met with Father Adolfo Nicolás, the superior general of the Jesuit order.
Although nominally Catholic himself, Brown has been a passionate supporter of abortion-on-demand in opposition to the Catholic Church’s defense of unborn children, and has called himself “an uncompromising champion of a woman’s right to choose.” He also supports federal funding of Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers, leading Planned Parenthood to refer to him as “the REAL pro-choice candidate for governor.”
Unsurprisingly, California accounts for a disproportionately high number of U.S. abortions, and although only 12 percent of the national population lives in the state, 29 percent of all the nation’s abortions take place there.
The Vatican point man behind the workshop is Argentinian Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, the Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Sánchez came under fire in May of 2016 for offering a Vatican platform for other known proponents of abortion and population control, like Jeffrey Sachs and UN General Secretary Ban Ki-moon, as well as population hoaxer Paul Ehrlich.
When questioned about the decision to enlist speakers so divergent from Catholic teaching, Sánchez shifted the blame to the Tea Party and the oil industry, and suggested he was not responsible because “I am only the Chancellor.”
Sánchez was also criticized for the homogeneous composition of the May workshop and his efforts to silence anyone who brought a vision of climate change at variance with the official party line.
The November conference will address both pollution and climate change in an attempt to link the two very different issues.
The brochure for the workshop states: “Climate change caused by fossil fuel burning leads to increased risks of extreme events such as heat waves, droughts, fires, severe storms, floods which in turn have major health effects.”
At the same time, the workshop will also address the negative health effects of air pollution, rightly noting that “there is now an immense body of evidence on how air pollution harms health.”
In a major study, the Lancet journal has revealed that pollution-related diseases were responsible for an estimated 9 million premature deaths in 2015, or some 15 times more than from all wars and other forms of violence combined.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the level of air pollution in the United States is among the lowest on the planet.
In the most recent WHO report on air pollution, the U.S. was listed as one of the countries with the cleanest air in the world, significantly cleaner than the air in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, the UK, Japan, Austria and France, not to mention major polluters such as India, China, Egypt and a number of former Soviet republics.
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