“Laudato Si’,” which celebrated its 10th anniversary on May 24, will surely stand among the most important components of Pope Francis’ legacy. The encyclical neatly laid out the church’s concerns regarding care of creation, the impact of climate change, and the moral obligations of wealthier societies and individuals in countering the social and spiritual ills of overconsumption. The people least responsible for climate change, the pope pointed out, are bearing the greatest burdens because of it.
There are some signs of progress in addressing the questions raised in “Laudato Si’.” There are also intimations of backpedaling, particularly by the Trump administration, which has joined a small chorus of deniers regarding the industrialized world’s malign effects on creation.
President Donald Trump’s efforts to reverse U.S. progress on sustainable energy, electric vehicle adoption and addressing the worst consequences of climate change began on the night of his inauguration, when he signed a flurry of executive orders on energy and environmental policy. He declared a dubious “national energy emergency,” ordered the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris climate agreement, and set a new policy that aims to maximize fossil fuel production in Alaska and encourage energy production on federal lands.
He rolled back Biden-era emissions standards and blocked new wind energy production. And his retrograde attention to the environment has continued apace. The president has vowed to end tax credits for electric vehicles and terminate a program meant to construct more charging stations for electric cars across the country.
The president’s efforts risk far more than reputational harm to the United States, says Dan Misleh, the executive director of Catholic Climate Covenant. Stifling progress now, Mr. Misleh warns, threatens to exacerbate existing climate difficulties, particularly in the form of extreme weather events. In the end, this will cost lives, especially in the places least able to build an infrastructure to mitigate the effects of climate change.
“It’s just heartless and it’s cruel because they’re now extending the period of climate catastrophe by probably decades.” But no one should be surprised, Mr. Misleh suggests. “If the administration can just wholesale cut [the U.S. Agency for International Development] and [in doing so] condemn millions of people to death, [it] can also pull back on the protections that we should be benefiting from—clean air, clean water, healthy land, healthy food, all of those things are now subject to the slash-and-burn tactics of this administration.”
The “Laudato Si’” Effect
Mr. Misleh recalls with fondness the “heady” days when “Laudato Si’” was first published. The pope already had been enjoying worldwide popularity because of his pastoral style and attention to the plight of global migrants. “And then he writes an encyclical on the environment, which with a name like Francis, I guess was to be expected.”
Ecological advocates in both the secular and ecclesial worlds were quickly singing the encyclical’s praises. “People were saying, ‘This is the most important document ever written on the environment,’ those kinds of superlatives. It really came out with a punch.”
The encyclical surely made Mr. Misleh’s job easier. Since its publication, “Laudato Si’” has been a prime mover in the expansion of church-based national and international efforts focused on addressing climate change and care of creation, including Catholic Climate Covenant, founded by Mr. Misleh. “We’ve relied heavily in the last 10 years on ‘Laudato Si’,’ not only as an excellent teaching document, but to motivate people to become engaged in the issue,” he says.
Covenant-sponsored, parish-based “creation care” teams “didn’t even exist when ‘Laudato Si’’ came out.” Now more than 400 of them work through the national campaign, and 35 have been established at the diocesan level, he reports.
“We’ve put a lot of time and resources into developing our youth and young adult programming, which is going very well,” Mr. Misleh says. “Young people are really happy to see that their church is engaged in these issues.” And a spinoff consultancy to develop sustainable energy infrastructure at Catholic churches and other sites, Catholic Energies, has been engaged for more than 30 projects in 14 states and in Puerto Rico.
Before “Laudato Si’” was published, Catholic environmental advocates had plenty of data and scientific reports about the dangers of climate change and the acute need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But the encyclical succeeded in tying the science together with a moral call to address the social inequities created by climate change.
The pope taught that “we don’t have a social problem and an environmental problem. We have a problem that’s both social and environmental,” Mr. Misleh says.
“Laudato Si’” first promoted the pope’s notion of integral ecology and integral economics, identifying the self-inflicted spiritual and material wounds of affluence at the heart of the crisis. Francis, Mr. Misleh says, “connected it all together—those three relationships that all need attention: our relationship with God, with each other and with the planet,” and taught that “when any one of those was not tended to, the others suffer.”
That insight has been a key part of the success of “Laudato Si’” as a teaching document, framing the environmental crisis as synonymous with social and spiritual crises, and prescribing a response “not as an add-on [but] central to the practice of our faith.” Francis began using terms that became central themes of his papacy, Mr. Misleh adds, admonishing a “throwaway culture” and the “globalization of indifference.”
Clean energy, an unstoppable force?
There has been notable progress since the publication of “Laudato Si’” as a transition to renewable energy has been accelerating around the world.
And while the United States now leads the world in oil and natural gas production, the World Resources Institute reports that renewable energy “vastly outpaced other generation sources and collectively accounted for around 90% of the United States’ new installed capacity in 2024.” The report continues: “With the new projects online, renewables (including wind, solar, geothermal and hydropower) and battery storage now make up 30% of the country’s large-scale power generating capacity. In 2024, all carbon free electricity sources, including nuclear, supplied nearly 44% of electricity, while renewables, including small-scale solar, supplied nearly 25%.”
Though the rate of adoption of battery electric-powered vehicles has slowed, and new administration policy directly targets the continued expansion of the electric vehicle market, in 2024 a record-breaking 1.3 million electric vehicles were sold in the United States, about 9 percent of all new cars sold.
Mr. Misleh appreciates that progress but worries that much more needs to be accomplished. “Emissions have flattened, that’s for sure, but they’re not going down,” he says. “‘Flattened’ is not good enough. We need to continue to try to reduce our emissions, simplify our lifestyles, embrace not just the technology, but the disposition that we need to take care of this planet for future generations.”
People are more aware of the importance of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, he says, to prevent what climatologists predict would be catastrophic 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) warming above pre-industrial levels by 2050. (A new analysis reports that the 1.5-degree threshold has already been breached.)
If spiritual and scientific evidence is not enough to raise public awareness, contemporary market forces are likely getting people’s attention, according to Mr. Misleh. “People are realizing that to put solar [panels or shingles] on my home, in many places, is now less expensive than paying for the dirty energy that comes from power plants. That’s why our Catholic Energies program has been successful—because it makes economic sense to do this.”
Sharp increases in homeowners’ insurance because of the increasing threat of fire and flood, he adds, help connect the dots for many individuals between greenhouse gas emission and increasingly common extreme weather events.
“Everybody’s been impacted in some way by climate change, whether they know it or not—these massive floods, these extended droughts, these crazy wildfires that take out thousands of buildings in Los Angeles—all of this,” he says. “People are beginning to wake up and say, ‘Oh, maybe, there is something to this climate crisis after all.’”
That does not seem to be the case in Washington under the new administration, which has taken unprecedented steps to squash new climatological research that would likely support the global scientific consensus on climate change. Mr. Trump seems uniquely, almost vindictively, determined to push back progress already made.
But a report from Columbia Business School suggests market forces and an activist role among state governments, which are more likely to appreciate the positive local impact of the sustainable energy transition, could frustrate the president’s desire to “drill, baby, drill.”
The president has recently frozen clean energy investments that were part of the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act. But that may prove a temporary setback. Researchers at Columbia write that the I.R.A. “is an effective and popular piece of legislation with significant bipartisan support in and out of Congress.”
They add: “Since its passage in 2022, around three-fourths of clean energy investments have been made in Republican states, fueling job creation in regions that have historically depended on oil and gas.”
The clean energy transition, these researchers report, is no longer an artifact of a political or ideological agenda but “an economic reality, with red and blue states alike leveraging federal and state incentives to attract investment and modernize infrastructure.”
In fact, the red state of Texas “has surged ahead of former solar leader California, reaching 27.5 GW of utility-scale capacity in 2024—approximately one-fifth of the country’s total.”
But the substantial progress in Texas has perversely become targeted by the state’s Republican legislators, following the Trump administration’s lead. Texas G.O.P. legislators are pressing new standards that could hamstring wind and solar energy development. In Washington, Lee Zeldin, appointed head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in March, said the agency’s new mission is to “lower the cost of buying a car, heating a home and running a business,” ignoring the agency’s historic responsibilities to protect public health and the environment.
He quickly repealed scores of significant federal environmental regulations, including limits on industrial and tailpipe pollution and containment of greenhouse gases that are heating the planet, gleefully declaring, “[W]e are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.”
But “it’s not a religion,” Mr. Misleh says, “it’s science.” And it is also big business.
The administration’s proposals will thwart innovation on sustainable energy, battery production and electric vehicles, sacrificing America’s global leadership on these emerging technologies and potentially vast commercial opportunities for U.S. businesses and working people. Other nations will surely step in to fill the void that the administration is creating.
China, the world’s largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, has over the last half-decade surged ahead on clean energy. It is turning to renewables as it contends with catastrophic air, land and water pollution caused by its historic reliance on coal.
According to a report from the Yale School of the Environment: “Fossil fuels now make up less than half of China’s total installed generation capacity,” and China is on track to reach significant clean energy goals years ahead of schedule.
The United States made similar clean energy pledges during the Biden administration. That appears to be a matter of indifference to Mr. Trump.
“We could be the leaders in this technology globally and make a handy profit on it too,” Mr. Misleh says. Instead, “we’ll be less safe and less secure because other countries will step into this void.”
Countering a revival of denialism
U.S. Catholics concerned about climate change will have to be on their best game in this era of White House denialism.
“Certainly our first order of business is to always pray about this and to try to simplify our lives,” Mr. Misleh says. But “in terms of advocacy, we’re turning our attention to the states.”
“It’s all [playing] defense at the federal level, but at the state level, we’re going to push for more renewable energy portfolio standards and tighter pollution controls.”
That does not mean surrendering the field in Washington. “We need to be loud about the wrong-headedness of this dramatic scaling back of environmental protections,” Mr. Misleh says. “It’s going to impact our children. It’s going to impact low-income people especially.”
In that effort, Mr. Misleh is confident that he can count on the backing not just of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington but of Francis’ successor in Rome. Pope Leo XIV has “already said a number of things about the environment, linking it to questions of poverty and equity,” Mr. Misled says. “I see him very much following in the footsteps of Pope Francis.
“But all of this teaching goes back not just to Francis,” he quickly adds. “It goes back to Benedict and John Paul II and Paul VI, for that matter. This teaching has become a core part of who we are as Catholics, and I don’t see Pope Leo backtracking on that in the least.”
More from America
- Interview: the Jesuit building Brazil’s premier Laudato Si’ university
- Strong climate commitments from the U.S. at COP29 may mean little in a second Trump administration
- Earth Day 2024: It’s time for the Catholic Church to give up fossil fuels for good
- When Pope Francis issued ‘Laudato Si’,’ everyone paid attention. What about now?
- ‘Laudato Si’’ to ‘Laudate Deum’: What has changed in Pope Francis’ climate teaching?
A deeper dive
- Earth is likely to cross a key climate threshold in two years
- How States Like Texas Are Driving the Clean Energy Boom in the Trump Era
- “Laudato Si’”
- Climate Policies with Real-World Results
- Renewable Energy Is Booming in Texas. Republicans Want to Change That.
- Trump Is Freezing Money for Clean Energy. Red States Have the Most to Lose.
- WMO Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update 2025-2029
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