President Trump (Public Domain, White House Portrait). Cardinal Peter Turkson. By Haiducul – Own work, CC BY 3.0, Link

Guest essay by Eric Worrall

Vatican climate spokesman Cardinal Peter Turkson has just warned President Trump that if he doesn’t reverse his position on Climate Change, the USA risks losing “climate leadership” to China.

Vatican says Trump risks losing climate change leadership to China

By Philip Pullella | ROME

The Vatican urged U.S. President Donald Trump to listen to “dissenting voices” and reconsider his position on climate change

Pope Francis has made defense of the environment a key plank of his papacy, strongly backing scientific opinion that global warming is caused mostly by human activity.

“This is a challenge for us,” said Cardinal Peter Turkson, the pope’s point man for the environmental, immigration and development, when asked about Trump’s executive order dismantling Obama-era climate change regulations and his immigration policies.

“Fortunately, in the United States, there are dissenting voices, people who are against Trump’s positions,” said Turkson, who is from Ghana and was one of the driving forces behind the pope’s 2015 encyclical letter on environmental protection.

“This, for us, is a sign that little by little, other positions and political voices will emerge and so we hope that Trump himself will reconsider some of his decisions,” Turkson told reporters at a breakfast meeting.

…

China, which had fought attempts by foreign governments to limit carbon emissions in the past, has become a strong proponent of efforts to halt global warming.

“While Trump is moving in the opposite direction, there is another great power in the world, China, which is showing different signs, as if America is creating a vacuum that China is filling,” Turkson said.

…

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Frankly it is obscene for the Vatican to promote China in this way. One of those “different signs” China has been showing lately is a renewal of its brutal crackdown on Chinese Christians. The crackdown has included the large scale demolition of Christian icons, and the arrest of at least one Vatican appointed priest, coadjutor bishop of Wenzhou, Msgr. Peter Shao Zhumin, while he was helping to prepare the funeral of his predecessor.

If Vatican climate spokesman Cardinal Peter Turkson is somehow not aware of these outrages, perhaps he has also not received the latest memo about Chinese climate leadership.

China has just insisted they don’t want “climate leadership”, presumably because the Chinese understand that “leadership” is greenspeak for “pay the bills”.