By Cindy Wooden
CONSUMERS want products that are environmentally friendly, and businesses that are not on board are already starting to feel the pinch, the chief executive officer of the multinational Unilever said.
Paul Polman, CEO of the company that owns brands like Lipton, Rexona and Omo, told a Vatican-sponsored conference that “the cost of inaction (on climate change) is starting to exceed the cost of action”.
As a small example, he said, people in communities facing regular power outages could not keep his products in their freezers, and severe water shortages meant they did not take showers as often, so shampoo sales declined.
Prince Jaime de Bourbon de Parme, the Dutch ambassador to the Holy See and co-sponsor of the conference on May 20, described the meeting of business leaders, politicians and ambassadors as the last Vatican-sponsored conference on climate change before the release of Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment.
Although the encyclical has not been published yet, it has triggered pre-emptive criticism, much of it depicting the presumed text as the work of a naive pope who accepted the trendy notion that human activity was responsible for climate change.
What was more, some of the criticism expressed fear that the encyclical’s conclusions and call for action would be built upon his supposedly socialist leanings – especially his distrust of the free-market economy.
In reality, when discussing capitalism, Pope Francis has condemned attitudes of greed and idolatry that seemed to insist economic activity was somehow free from any moral or ethical obligations.
And while he has said he had met many communists who were good people, he adds a firm conviction that the communist ideology “is wrong”.
Like every pope since Pope Leo XIII, who initiated modern Catholic social teaching with his 1891 encyclical “Rerum Novarum”, Pope Francis insists that economic decisions are human decisions and, therefore, are not morally neutral.
He also insists that the centre of Catholic social teaching – respect for human dignity and promotion of the common good – are values at stake when making economic decisions.
The connection between economics and the environment are clear.
Cleaning up pollution and reducing carbon emissions are costly; so, too, is changing the way land is farmed, forests are managed and minerals are obtained.
Yet speakers at the “new climate economy” conference insisted the costs of not acting were higher – morally, financially and politically.
Vatican secretary of state Cardinal Pietro Parolin sent a message to conference participants that began by quoting retired Pope Benedict XVI – not Pope Francis – about how “the earth’s state of ecological health” required a re-evaluation of short-sighted economic policies and theories.
“When the future of the planet is at stake,” Cardinal Parolin wrote, “there are no political frontiers, barriers or walls behind which we can hide to protect ourselves from the effects of environmental and social degradation.
“There is no room for the globalisation of indifference, the economy of exclusion or the throwaway culture so often denounced by Pope Francis.”
Chairman of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate and former Mexican President Felipe Calderon told the conference the main obstacle to taking serious action on climate change had been the idea that “we need to choose either (economic) growth or mitigating climate change”.
However, a host of scientific and economic analyses had proven that notion wrong, Mr Calderon said, echoing the conclusion of an earlier Vatican conference on climate change and sustainable development.
United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon headlined that conference in April.
Mr Calderon said governments must give a clear signal at the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris at the end of the year that they were serious about reducing carbon emissions and promoting investments in the green economy.
“Innovation is the secret to economic growth,” he said, and “people with money are sitting on a bench”, not investing yet, but waiting to see if governments would support new, clean technologies.
Besides being an ethical issue, he said, “climate action is in our own economic interest; we can reduce poverty, increase employment and, at the same time, bring down the emissions responsible for global warming”.
Jeremy Oppenheim, who is a director at McKinsey & Co., a global management consulting firm, said growth obviously was important for companies and for countries, but “not all growth is equal”.
Successful business leaders were far-sighted, innovative and saw crises as opportunities, not as roadblocks, conference speakers said.
Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington told the conference that everything Pope Francis had said about ecology was “in total harmony with the teaching of his predecessors”, offering moral and ethical principles flowing from respect for human dignity and for the common good.
“If we are going to see a flourishing of the environment,” the cardinal said, “it is only going be through human ingenuity.”
“Protecting the environment need not compromise legitimate economic progress,” he said.
The Church did not condemn profit, but it did insist that “businesses must serve the common good”.
Cindy Wooden is a Rome correspondent for Catholic News Service. This article was published as a Vatican Letter.
