Roth: Pope Francis was a climate hero. Trump reign gives his words extra meaning.

Donald Trump declared his first run for president on June He lashed out against Mexican immigrants environmentalists and other supposed enemies foreign and domestic Two days later Pope Francis clapped back Francis landmark setting change encyclical Laudato Si On Care for Our Common Home wasn t meant as a response to Trump But the -page teaching served as a powerful call to action Francis preached urgency and compassion He urged the world s billion Catholics to open their eyes to the connections between the circumstances emergency poverty and selfishness A decade later Trump is serving his second term and Francis is no longer with us having died Monday at But the late pope s words are more relevant than ever As I reread Laudato Si in the hours following Francis death I was struck by his nuanced discussion of extreme weather and sea level rise and the need to phase out fossil fuels and his understanding that global warming isn t just an environmental dilemma I was especially moved by his explanation for how rising temperatures hurt society s poorest families and nations most of of all Several of the poor live in areas particularly affected by phenomena related to warming and their means of subsistence are largely dependent on natural reserves and ecosystemic services such as agriculture fishing and forestry Francis wrote They have no other financial exercises or tools which can enable them to adapt to state change or to face natural disasters and their access to social services and protection is very limited Looking out for society s majority of vulnerable was a theme of Francis papacy informed by his Latin American roots and expressed through his choice of a namesake St Francis of Assisi who dedicated his life to the poor and also the surroundings In Laudato Si the pope lamented the pain of weather displaced persons who are forced to leave their homes with great uncertainty for their future and that of their children They are not recognized by international conventions as refugees they bear the loss of the lives they have left behind without enjoying any legal protection whatsoever Francis wrote Sadly there is widespread indifference to such suffering which is even now taking place throughout our world Weather displacement Indeed researchers have located that millions of people are displaced each year by climate-exacerbated disasters such as droughts floods and crop failures with the prospective for hundreds of millions of circumstances asylum seekers by mid-century if governments and businesses don t reduce heat-trapping toxicity much more hastily Our lack of response to these tragedies involving our brothers and sisters points to the loss of that sense of responsibility for our fellow men and women upon which all civil society is founded Francis wrote Sadly President Trump and Vice President JD Vance a Catholic who met with the pope shortly before his death have chosen to treat multiple immigrants with terrible cruelty They ve sent masked agents to round up graduate students whose political views they don t like worked to end birthright citizenship for children of noncitizens and in one development deported a man by accident then defied a Supreme Court order to facilitate his return It s no wonder Francis wrote a letter to U S bishops rebuking Trump s migrant crackdown and taking direct aim at Vance s claim that medieval Catholic theology supports the administration s actions As Francis wrote The act of deporting people who in several cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty insecurity exploitation persecution or serious deterioration of the climate damages the dignity of multiple men and women and of entire families and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness Meanwhile Trump is doing everything in his power including multiple things well beyond his constitutionally defined authority to benefit the oil gas and coal executives who funded his campaign even though it means the planet will keep getting hotter and tens of millions more people may suffer or die In that context Laudato Si reads like a direct counter to Trump s call for U S vigor dominance and to his insistence that extracting as much fuel and timber as workable is the only way to create economic prosperity As far as Francis was concerned the principle of the maximization of profits frequently isolated from other considerations reflects a misunderstanding of the very concept of the economic activity As long as production is increased little concern is given to whether it is at the cost of future information or the healthcare of the context as long as the clearing of a forest increases production no one calculates the losses entailed in the desertification of the land the harm done to biodiversity or the increased contamination he wrote To hear Francis tell it fighting poverty and confronting the atmosphere problem go hand in hand The same mindset which stands in the way of making radical decisions to reverse the trend of global warming also stands in the way of achieving the goal of eliminating poverty he wrote Alas Trump and his appointees are undoing dozens of regulations limiting fossil fuels They ve given coal plants unprecedented exemptions from lifesaving air toxicity standards and proposed a rule that would make it easier for oil and gas companies to kill endangered species And in a key shift from Trump s first term they ve waged war on life-sustaining job-creating renewable ability projects Just last week Interior Secretary Doug Burgum halted construction of an already approved wind farm off the coast of New York Federal agents have also attempted to freeze billions of dollars in clean strength grants approved by Congress Perhaps even worse Trump and his lackeys are dismantling the scientific institutions that have taught us and continue to teach us much of what we know about the atmosphere predicament They re laying off researchers and finding other approaches to force out experts at agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Francis prescience It s all part of a broader authoritarian attack on independent science and academia And again Francis might as well have seen it coming Due to the number and variety of factors to be taken into account when determining the environmental impact of a concrete undertaking it is essential to give researchers their due role to facilitate their interaction and to ensure broad academic freedom he wrote in Laudato Si The most of astounding thing about the document might be that Francis wrote it at all Laudato Si is almost certainly the majority famous situation essay ever written It was one of just four encyclicals penned by Francis and specific circumstances advocates credit it with helping pave the way for the Paris agreement the groundbreaking weather accord reached by nearly nations in late Despite all that Francis context advocacy was largely an afterthought in immediate media coverage of his death Obituaries from several major newspapers either ignored or only made passing reference to his encyclical Only later did environmental journalists follow up with articles focused on his conditions work Related Articles Pope Francis funeral to be held Saturday with constituents viewing starting Wednesday Pope Francis Revamped Vatican Bureaucracy A Conclave Will Test His Legacy Bay Area Catholics remember Pope Francis Photos Prayers tears as Catholics around the world mourn the death of Pope Francis Pope Francis seemed to expose Melania Trump s limits with languages But what Francis understood and what I personally ascertained so inspiring about his decision to write Laudato Si was that talking about the setting problem is everyone s job now Francis could have stayed in his lane Instead he recognized that rising temperatures were making people suffer and realized he could help Greater part people don t have the guidance or the bully pulpit of a pope But everyone can do something Journalists Lawyers Artists Gardeners Protesters Voters Parents Teachers Spreaders of the good word of science As Francis wrote All of us can cooperate as instruments of God for the care of creation each according to his or her own tradition experience involvements and talents We can all care for our common home Sammy Roth is the surroundings columnist for the LosAngeles Times Los Angeles Times Distributed by Tribune Content Agency