Don’t Turn Environmental Stewardship Into Climate Theater

This October marked the first anniversary of an event that baffles me to this day. On October 1, 2025, Pope Leo XIV stood beside a block of glacier ice at Castel Gandolfo and prayed over it. Artist Olafur Eliasson had brought the 20,000-year-old fragment from Greenland's Nuup Kangerlua fjord to the "Raising Hope for Climate Justice" conference.

Some commentators dismissed the scene as a “weird pagan Earth-worshipping hippie ritual,” and a traditionalist priest called it “a disgrace.” My take: the ice blessing and the Vatican's message to the UN climate summit in Brazil later last year misled believers by using bad data dressed in the language of faith.

First, let us weigh the hypocrisy. Nuuk lies nearly 5,000 km from Rome, and the organizers never disclosed how the block travelled or what the trip emitted. We do know what Eliasson's earlier ice projects cost. For his 2015 Ice Watch installation in Paris, moving 12 Greenland blocks by refrigerated container and truck released about 28 tonnes of carbon dioxide by the project's own accounting. If carbon dioxide endangers the planet as these activists insist, why burn tonnes of it to stage a prayer?

Moving past the hypocrisy that we’ve gotten used to these days, let’s look at the data that undercuts the alarm the ice was meant to sound. Alarmists have announced the death of polar ice for decades. In 2009, Al Gore told the Copenhagen summit that scientists saw a 75 percent chance the entire polar ice cap would vanish in summer within five to seven years. In September 2025, Arctic sea ice still covered 4.6 million square kilometers at its lowest point.

Al Gore’s false fearmongering stands low before other taller claims. In 1989, a senior UN environment official warned that entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth if warming were not reversed by 2000 due to rising sea levels. He said governments had a "10-year window." Thirty-seven years later, the islands of the Maldives still welcome tourists and build new airport runways. Every deadline passed without the promised catastrophe.

The prophecies failed. The fear behind them now shapes papal speeches.

In the 2025 Papal address, the Pope rebuked those who "deride the increasingly evident signs of climate change" and urged activists to press governments for "more rigorous regulations, procedures and controls." Regulation is a policy question, and policy questions belong to prudence, not dogma.

In fact, the Vatican has been treading this dangerous pseudo-scientific path for far too long. On November 7, 2025, the Vatican's message to COP30, delivered by Cardinal Pietro Parolin, urged nations to "courageously accelerate" their work on the Paris Agreement. It spoke of "the poorest and those most vulnerable." It did not mention energy even once.

That omission tells you everything. About 750 million people still live without electricity, more than 80 percent in Africa. More than 2 billion cook without clean fuel. Smoke from wood and dung fires killed an estimated 2.9 million people in 2021. Accelerating the Paris Agreement means choking off finance for the coal, gas, and oil that would reduce those numbers.

History shows what affordable energy does. China lifted close to 800 million people out of extreme poverty in four decades, and fossil fuels still generate nearly 60 percent of its electricity. No nation has escaped poverty on wind turbines and good intentions. Even the COP30 host nation understands this. Less than a month before COP30 opened in Belém, Brazil's environmental regulator licensed Petrobras to drill off the mouth of the Amazon.

Earlier popes understood what development requires. In 1967, Paul VI called industrialization "necessary for economic growth and human progress." A Catholic who sides with Paul VI over the climate lobby derides no one. He simply refuses to treat a contested forecast as an article of faith.

Pope Francis’ Laudato Si' itself concedes that on many concrete matters "the Church has no reason to offer a definitive opinion" and that "honest debate must be encouraged among experts." Catholic theologian Matthew Ramage makes the same point: papal statements on climate science are prudential judgments, not infallible definitions.

So, a faithful Catholic can honor the Pope's spiritual office and still reject his climate policy. He can study the Greenland data, count what regulation costs a poor family, and conclude that more fossil fuel, not less, serves the common good.

The measure of Christian environmental responsibility is not how loudly the Church repeats climate warnings. It is whether its counsel protects God's creation while defending human dignity and material flourishing. Which does God value more, a block of ancient ice or a child spared from the smoke of a cooking fire? A church that hesitates has confused nature with the Creator, and the poor will pay for that confusion.

Stewardship puts the earth to work for people. You drill, mine, farm, and build so that families eat and hospitals run. Worshipping nature reverses that order. It turns a chunk of frozen water into a relic and treats human use of the earth as sin.

Vijay Jayaraj is Research Associate for Developing Countries with the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, a Science and Research Associate at the CO₂ Coalition, and a Visiting Fellow at the U.S. National Center for Energy Analytics. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, postgraduate degree in Energy management from Robert Gordon University and has served as a research assistant at the University of British Columbia’s Fisheries Center in Canada.

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