A group of Catholic bishops from every continent released a statement during the UN climate negotiations in Lima, calling for a fossil fuel phaseout and identifying climate change as a threat to the world’s poor.
“We express an answer to what is considered God’s appeal to take action on the urgent and damaging situation of global climate warming,” the bishops wrote. “Central to this is to put an end to the fossil fuel era, phasing out fossil fuel emissions and phasing in 100% renewables with sustainable energy access for all.”
The bishops stated that global temperature rise must be kept to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels —“a considerably more ambitious goal than the 2°C ceiling that’s generally agreed on as the threshold beyond which climate change becomes truly dangerous,” Spross notes. They added that “the main responsibility for this situation lies with the dominant global economic system, which is a human creation.”
