Pope faces tough crowd with climate plea

Pope Francis is expected to bring his climate change message Thursday to one of its toughest audiences: congressional Republicans.

Francis will appear before a Congress led by the Republican Party, which has been steadfast in its opposition to policies that cut greenhouse gas emissions, with some lawmakers questioning the evidence that it’s happening and is caused by humans.

And while environmentalists and liberals are hopeful that somebody with the moral authority and popularity of Francis could sway the GOP toward action on climate change, the odds are not in their favor.

“Everyone is going to ride the pope now. Isn’t that wonderful,” Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said at a recent conference hosted by the Heartland Institute. “The pope ought to stay with his job, and we’ll stay with ours.”

Inhofe, who famously threw a snowball on the Senate floor earlier this year to mock President Obama’s focus on climate, may be one of the most outspoken lawmakers doubting that human activity causes climate change, a position that 97 percent of scientists hold.

But his stance is not that far off from the rest of the GOP, which generally is highly respectful and deferential to the Catholic Church’s leader but have no plans to take his climate message to heart.

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) declined to get into the weeds on climate change but said he looks “forward to hearing the pope’s point of view on a number of matters.”

Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) took his adversarial view of Francis a step further, announcing on Friday that he would not attend the speech because of the expected talk about climate change.

“When the Pope chooses to act and talk like a leftist politician, then he can expect to be treated like one,” Gosar, a Catholic, wrote on Townhall.com.

He expects at least one other lawmaker to join him, but that lawmaker has not come forward, and Gosar’s colleagues have criticized his decision.

“I don’t understand why anyone would do that,” said Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.), who led 10 of GOP his colleagues last week in sponsoring a resolution saying that climate change is real and something should be done about it.

Apart from climate change, Francis is expected to at least touch on other hot-button issues in United States politics, such as immigration and income inequality.

It’s a historic occasion in many ways and comes at a pivotal moment, three months before world leaders come together in Paris under the United Nations to agree on an international pact to fight climate change.

Although top church leaders and experts predicted that Francis would avoid political discussions, he nonetheless spoke of some touchy issues, including climate change, at a Wednesday speech at the White House.

“Mr. President, I find it encouraging that you are proposing an initiative for reducing air pollution,” Francis said, referring to Obama’s Clean Power Plan, setting limits on carbon emissions from power plants.

“Accepting the urgency, it seems clear to me also that climate change is a problem which can no longer be left to our future generations.”

Francis’s main goal, his top advisers have said, is to move world leaders toward a strong international pact.

Earlier this year he published an encyclical urging all people of faith to come to the table and do their parts to protect the climate.

It comes at a time when the Republican Party is as skeptical as it’s ever been about climate change and most of the solutions that have been proposed.

“They’re all over the place, but the distribution leans to the right, still,” said Mike McKenna, a Republican consultant who works for energy companies. “From a historical perspective, it’s a lot stronger than it was, it’s a lot closer to the Inhofe point on the spectrum than it was.”

He sees little chance that Francis will change any minds in the GOP.

“The bottom line is that members of Congress tend to represent their constituencies pretty well. So the only way they’re going to change their minds is if their constituencies change their minds,” McKenna said. “He’s got a pretty tall order on his hands.”

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who gives weekly Senate floor speeches on climate change, said he had hope that Francis would give cover to some Republicans who want to take action to fight global warming but feel that they cannot.

“To them, this might be good news,” he said. “This might begin to show them a way to make their political escape from fossil fuel industry captivity and to where both their hearts and their politics tell them they should be.”

For others in the GOP, it could be “chance to take a second look at whether they should just follow the party line, or they should delve a little bit deeper into the science and into their hearts,” Whitehouse said.

But however the GOP responds, experts are expecting Francis to give a biting speech to them.

“He will probably have some characteristically succinct, terse and evocative words of critique for people who are deniers of contemporary science,” said Christiana Peppard, a Fordham University theology professor who studies the Catholic Church’s relationship to various environmental causes.

Peppard expects Francis to say that major nations such as the United States have a moral obligation to help poorer countries.

“That is going to be a really interesting message, and hard for people to hear,” she said.

Christopher Hale, executive director of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, reinforced that no matter how forceful Francis is, he is not a politician and will speak about climate change only from a place of religious authority.

“He’s not coming with a political message or policy proposals to Congress. He’s going to speak as a moral messenger, a religious messenger,” he said. “I think that changes things.”

Among other factors, the pope’s place in the Catholic church changes the calculus for speaking out against him, Hale said.

“If Pope Francis is upsetting you, it isn’t Francis who’s upsetting you, it’s Jesus.”