Climate Change Denial and Catholic Social Teaching

This episode is about the recent withdrawal of the United States from a variety of  efforts aimed at responding to global climate change, and what Catholic Social Teaching has to say about this related series of newsworthy actions. 

Here are references and additional resources.

1. EPA reverses climate change endangerment finding
2. The United States exits Paris Climate Agreement
3. What Trump’s US exit from UNFCCC and IPCC could mean for climate action
4. Greater than 99% consensus on human caused climate change
5. Planetary Health Check 2025 – Executive Summary
6. 1990 World Day of Peace Message from Pope St. John Paul II
7. Renewing the Earth - US Conference of Catholic Bishops 1991
8. 2010 World Day of Peace Message from Pope Benedict XVI
9. 2015 Encyclical Laudato Si’
10. 2023 Apostolic Exhortation Laudate Deum
11. World Must Come Together to Fight Climate Change, Pope Leo Says
12. Ways to Get Involved:  Catholic Climate Covenant and Laudato Si Movement
13. Podcast website with full transcripts for this episode and all other episodes

Transcript

Welcome to “Headline News and Catholic Social Teaching,” where we take a brief look at stories in the news, not from a left or right political perspective, but through the lens of Catholic Social Teaching.  I’m your host, Tom Mulhern, and my hope, as always, is that this podcast will help us grow in our love of God and love of our neighbors.  

This episode is about the recent withdrawal of the United States from a variety of  efforts aimed at responding to global climate change, and what Catholic Social Teaching has to say about this related series of moves taken by the current US administration.  As it turns out, Catholic teaching has quite a bit to say.

Before I get to the bigger news stories, I have a smaller but related news item with which I feel a kind of personal connection.  Last fall, in 2025, my wife and I visited Glacier National Park in Montana.  It’s a beautiful park and we had a great visit, but we wondered, “where are all the glaciers?”  Well, there were some educational materials and displays in the park that explained that human-caused climate change is contributing to the rapid disappearance of the remaining glaciers.  Then in January 2026, President Trump issued an executive order that, among other things, ordered the removal of those climate-related educational materials and displays from Glacier National Park.

OK, let’s move on to the bigger news stories.  On February 12, 2026, President Trump announced that the Environmental Protection Agency is revoking something called the endangerment finding, which had been in effect since 2009.  The endangerment finding put rules in place that were intended to limit the heat-trapping pollution that comes from vehicles, oil refineries and factories, based on the evidence that global warming caused by greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane endangers the health and welfare of current and future generations.

Dropping the EPA endangerment finding followed another move completed in January 2026, when the US officially withdrew from the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.  WIth the Paris Agreement, leaders from around the world had collectively agreed that climate change is driven by human behavior, that it’s a threat to the environment and all of humanity, and that global action is needed to stop it. It also created a framework for all countries to make emissions reduction commitments and strengthen those actions over time.

Withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement means the US now joins Iran, Libya and Yemen as the only countries in the world that are not part of the agreement.

And, in yet another related action, on January 7, 2026, President Trump issued a memo directing US withdrawal from a number of international bodies.  This included withdrawal from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which has framed global political cooperation on climate change since 1992,  and also withdrawal from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which provides a structure for global scientific cooperation on climate change.  So the US has withdrawn from global political and scientific cooperation on climate change.

 Now all of these actions by the current US administration reflect a denial that human activity, in particular the burning of fossil fuels, is contributing to climate change and global warming.  President Trump has, at various times, referred to climate change as a con job, a hoax, and a scam.

However, scientific research on climate change over the past several decades has come to an overwhelming consensus that human-caused climate change is real and happening now.  How overwhelming of a consensus are we talking about?  Well, a study published in 2021 looked at more than 88,000 climate-related papers published since 2012 and determined that the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change exceeds 99% in the peer reviewed scientific literature.  There’s a link in the notes to this study.

Now, a scientific consensus that exceeds 99% means that the current, accepted state of our scientific understanding on this subject is that human activity is indeed contributing to accelerated climate change.  Which suggests that actions like revoking the EPA endangerment finding and withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement are motivated by something other than peer-reviewed science.  I’m not going to speculate here what that motivation might be, I’m simply stating that denial of human-caused climate change is not based on science.

When we look at Catholic Social Teaching related to climate change, we find that the Church accepts the scientific consensus on climate change and builds on it, outlining the moral and spiritual dimensions of this issue.  Let me demonstrate with some quotes from the past 35 years.

In his 1990 World Day of Peace message, Pope St. John Paul the Second stated: “When the ecological crisis is set within the broader context of the search for peace within society, we can understand better the importance of giving attention to what the earth and its atmosphere are telling us: namely, that there is an order in the universe which must be respected, and that the human person, endowed with the capability of choosing freely, has a grave responsibility to preserve this order for the well-being of future generations. I wish to repeat that the ecological crisis is a moral issue.”

A year later, in 1991, the US Catholic Bishops issued a pastoral statement entitled “Renewing the Earth,” which identified care of creation and climate change as moral issues for all people of faith and goodwill.  The bishops also pointed out that the harm caused by environmental degradation falls heaviest on those living in poverty. 

Then Pope Benedict the 16th, in his World Day of Peace message in 2010, stated: 

“Can we remain indifferent before the problems associated with such realities as climate change … ? . . . Our present crises – be they economic, food-related, environmental or social – are ultimately also moral crises, and all of them are interrelated. They require us to rethink the path which we are traveling together.”

In 2015, Pope Francis issued Laudato Si, or Praise be to you, an entire 184-page encyclical on care for creation.  This landmark document addresses a range of interconnected environmental challenges, including climate change, and interprets these environmental and social challenges through Sacred Scripture, Christian theology, statements by many different bishops groups throughout the world, and the core principles of Catholic Social Teaching.

With respect specifically to climate change, in section 25 of Laudato Si, the Pope says “Climate change is a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods. It represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day. Its worst impact will probably be felt by developing countries in coming decades.”

Eight years later, in 2023, Pope Francis published an Apostolic Exhortation, Laudate Deum, or Praise God, which builds on his 2015 encyclical but focuses entirely on climate change. “We’re not reacting enough,” he says, “we’re close to breaking point.”  He has strong words for climate change deniers, saying that the human origin of global warming is now beyond doubt. And he describes how care for our common home flows from the Christian faith.

I’ll put links to both Laudato Si and Laudate Deum in the notes, because the brief quotes I’ve shared here don’t begin to describe the prophetic wisdom and call to ecological conversion contained in these documents.

Pope Leo the 14th has continued this teaching.  Speaking last October at a conference marking the 10th anniversary of Laudato Si, he posed a question:

"God will ask us if we have cultivated and cared for the world that he created for the benefit of all and for future generations, and if we have taken care of our brothers and sisters - what will be our answer, my dear friends?"

At the same time, Pope Leo expressed great concern that the question of climate change has become politically divisive, saying, as Francis had said before him,  "Some have chosen to deride the increasingly evident signs of climate change, to ridicule those who speak of global warming, and even to blame the poor for the very thing that affects them the most."

Clearly, there is a very stark contrast between what the Catholic Church teaches about climate change and our response to it, and what the current US administration is saying and doing.  Which raises a question that Father Joachim, one of my college professors, used to ask us when we needed help answering a question, “whom do you trust?”

And if, like me, you choose to try to accept and follow Church teaching on climate change, well then I suggest lighting some candles rather than just cursing the darkness of the current political moment.  There are many good things happening that we as Catholics can get involved with, from parish-level education and action groups that have sprung up since Laudato Si, all the way up to national and international faith-inspired movements.  I’ll put links in the notes.

Here’s a quote from Laudato Si that I’d like to end with: it says

“Living our vocation to be protectors of God’s handiwork is essential to a life of virtue; it is not an optional or a secondary aspect of our Christian experience.”

May each of us give that quote some thought and some prayer during this season of Lent.

OK, that’s all for this episode of “Headline News and Catholic Social Teaching.”  If you found it worthwhile, I invite you to share it with others.  If you want to learn more about me or the podcast, I encourage you to listen to Episode 1 Introduction or visit the podcast website.  If you’d like to make a comment or send me a message or a question, there’s a link in the notes that will enable you to send a text message.

And I do hope that, in some small way, this episode might help us live our lives guided by the Holy Spirit through the teachings of the Church.  

Thank you for listening.