As is appropriate for the Catholic Church, Pope Francis recently held the conference “Energy Transition and Care for our Common Home”. The Vatican News stated that the conference was “dedicated to the need for a transition to clean energy”. Pope Francis said, “civilization requires energy but energy use must not destroy civilization.” The news article noted that senior representatives of the leading oil and natural gas companies attended. The news article summarizes the Pope’s belief as “the world needs to come up with an energy mix that combats pollution, eliminates poverty and promotes social justice.” The article went on to quote the Pope saying, “that avoid creating environmental imbalances resulting in deterioration and pollution gravely harmful to our human family, both now and in the future.” The Pope recognizes that the “massive movement of information, persons and things requires an immense supply of energy,” Emphasizing urgency, the Pope said, “There is no time to lose: We received the earth as a garden-home from the Creator; let us not pass it on to future generations as a wilderness”.
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Reasonable people should find nothing to argue with in these statements. While the news of this conference is being overshadowed in the United States by other events, the Vatican’s assertion of the need for an orderly worldwide transition to sustainable energy is a significant step forward in raising the importance of this issue on the world’s political stage—an opportunity entirely missed with the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.
What is important now is how will this message be received by the Trump Administration? Will it be ignored, criticized, or embraced as a wonderful opportunity for American leadership? Understanding that the President and his staff are under significant unwarranted political pressure, hopefully the Secretaries of State, Energy, EPA, and Defense as well as the National Security Council recognize the underlying importance of this conference and how America positively responds. President Trump’s withdraw from the Paris Agreement has opened the door for a true progressive engineering solution to the Pope’s challenge for an orderly transition to sustainable energy and an end to energy impoverishment.
More to come on this topic.
Mike Snead is a professional engineer and Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). He is president of the Spacefaring Institute™ (spacefaringinstitute.net) and writes this Spacefaring America blog. He has formed the LinkedIn group Space Solar Power to advocate for space-based sustainable energy and the coming American spacefaring industrial revolution. He can be reached through the contact form or through LinkedIn. His technical papers are available here.