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A Top Pope Aide Is Taking on the Pontiff's Climate Change Critics in the US

The Heartland Institute says the Vatican's position on climate change is 'profoundly anti-poor and anti-life' — Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga says they're behaving 'like people in the trenches.'
Photo by Gregorio Borgia/AP

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With Pope Francis expected to weigh in on climate change in a big way, a top adviser is taking on the pontiff's US critics.

Opponents of efforts to rein in carbon emissions are wrong to argue that the pope has no business jumping into efforts to limit global warming, which is expected to hurt the world's poor the most, Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga told Bloomberg.

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"We cannot ignore that there is not only a climate change, there is an injustice toward the environment," said Maradiaga, the archbishop of Tegucigalpa and the pope's point man for overhauling the Vatican bureaucracy.

Francis is expected to issue a papal encyclical — one of the most authoritative statements of Roman Catholic teaching — on climate change this summer, and he's called on world leaders to reach a deal that would limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) by this century's end. He's already been outspoken on the issue, saying mankind "has slapped nature in the face" and calling the environment "a moral issue which affects all of us."

Related: As carbon pollution hits record level, Senator James Inhofe says climate change is greening the planet

That's emboldened supporters of limiting the fossil-fuel emissions that scientists say are driving an increase in global temperatures — but it's upset many American conservatives who continue to argue that climate change isn't happening, or that it's not caused by humans, or that it's good for plants anyway.

The industry-backed Heartland Institute, one of the most prominent voices against cutting emissions, said in April that cutting fossil fuel use would be "profoundly anti-poor and anti-life." Among the ranks of potential presidential contenders are several Catholic Republicans who are outspokenly dismissive of the scientific consensus on climate change, which the church has endorsed.

Maradiaga said critics are attacking the upcoming encyclical "without even reading it."

They are "like people in the trenches," he told Bloomberg. "Whatever will come out will be attacked."

Related: Pope Francis is holding a climate change conference at the Vatican