Anthropogenic climate change: the choice we must make and how religion can help

Abstract

Two ‘moments’ in 2015 re-cast the debate over the challenge of climate change: the first was Pope Francis’s encyclical letter Laudato Si’: On Care for our Common Home, the second the twenty-first session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change held in Paris. These two moments call upon individuals to decide afresh how they will respond to the challenge of anthropogenic climate change, and this article argues that the individual can do this through the concept of private property. The article contains three parts. Part II outlines Pope Francis’s exhortation to act as individuals. Part III briefly examines the standard liberal secular, conception of private property and how it allows humanity to produce the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that drive global climate change. Part IV selects, from the many possible religious positions available to us, the monotheistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and explores what they say about private property, focusing on the nature of the human person, the community and obligation. Each has something to say about the challenge and choice we face, and each has faced the need to adapt to its surrounding secular socio-political-economic-cultural circumstances in the past, and so it has the potential to do so again now, to assist us in responding to climate change. Part V offers concluding reflections on how we might respond to Pope Francis’s call for action and so draw upon our religious values in exercising our choice in response to climate change.