Pope Francis and the Renewables Revolution

What's Missing in Laudate Deum

A shorter version of this essay appeared as part of a symposium by the Catholic Re-Visions group of the Political Theology Network.

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On October 4, the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, Pope Francis released the apostolic exhortation Laudate Deum, an assessment of the world’s progress in combatting climate change in the eight years since the release of his pioneering encyclical Laudato Si’. His assessment is dire. He points to rising carbon emissions, stalled efforts at crafting a global consensus to reduce emissions and develop renewable energy alternatives, and the increasingly visible, perhaps irreversible, effects of global warming, such as rising ocean temperatures, melting ice sheets, and the aridification of farmland.

Notably, however, in an exhortation some have even described as “despairing,” Francis overlooks one crucial sign of hope: the rapid decline in the price of solar energy, other forms of renewable energy, and battery storage over the past decade or so, and the increasingly widespread adoption of these technologies worldwide. Although global cooperation is still vitally necessary, successful emissions reductions will require difficult choices, and much could still go wrong, these technological developments, contrary to the dire tone of Laudate Deum, mean that we have a significantly greater chance of approaching the goal of limiting the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius agreed to at the Paris Climate Accords in 2015 than we did when Laudato Si’ was published.

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The Renewables Revolution

Since 2012, as technologies have improved and production methods become more efficient, the cost of onshore wind energy has decreased by 57 percent, offshore wind by 73 percent, and solar energy by a whopping 80 percent, according to BloombergNEF, although these costs temporarily increased in the past two years because of inflationary pressures. This means that wind energy is now cost competitive with fossil fuels and solar is among the cheapest sources of energy.

This dramatic decrease in cost has impacted the investment landscape. According to the International Energy Agency, this year over 60 percent of capital investments in the energy sector worldwide will go toward developing renewable sources of energy. In the United States, over half of the new electric-generating capacity added this year will be solar power, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. BloombergNEF estimates that wind and solar will represent over half of worldwide energy generation some time between 2030 and 2040, depending on how intensively governments invest in developing the necessary infrastructure.

What’s more, India and especially China are key drivers of the boom in solar energy. China and India are fossil fuel importers, and the declining price of renewable energy has enabled them to pursue greater energy independence by building up their renewable energy capacity. Other countries in the Global South are already using technologies developed in China to chart a more sustainable development path.

In Laudate Deum, Pope Francis notes that “Despite the many negotiations and agreements, global emissions continue to increase,” and “[T]he necessary transition towards clean energy sources such as wind and solar energy, and the abandonment of fossil fuels, is not progressing at the necessary speed” (55). Nevertheless, BloombergNEF estimates that global demand for fossil fuels has already peaked, and, despite a temporary prolonging of the plateau as a result of the war in Ukraine, will start declining by 2025. Global carbon emissions, particularly those associated with power generation and transportation, will in turn begin declining significantly.

These technological developments are not enough to curtail the worst effects of climate change. BloombergNEF assesses that current economic forces and technological developments may only be sufficient to limit warming to 2.6 degrees Celsius by 2050. Concerted government policy, including not only speeding the proliferation of renewable power generation and electrical vehicles, but also reducing emissions caused by industrial production, will be needed to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 and limit warming to about 1.77 degrees Celsius. Recent technological progress won’t solve the climate crisis, but it gives us a fighting chance. It is odd that Francis doesn’t mention these possibilities in Laudate Deum.

(Photo: American Public Power Association, Unsplash)

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The Technocratic Paradigm

In his new apostolic exhortation, Francis appeals to the notion of the “technocratic paradigm,” a concept he first put forward in Laudato Si’. The technocratic paradigm is a mindset that conceives of humankind’s relationship with the natural world primarily in terms of control, manipulation, “possession, mastery, and transformation” (106). Francis also links this paradigm with the notion of infinite economic growth (106) and the belief that technology can solve all of our problems, including technological problems (109).

As the journalist Edward Hadas notes in Counsels of Imperfection: Thinking Through Catholic Social Teaching, the criticism of a technocratic paradigm is not new in Catholic social teaching. For example, Pope Pius XII warned of the “serious spiritual danger” posed by the “technical spirit” in his 1953 Christmas message, and Pope Paul VI likewise criticized what he described as a “new positivism” that sees “universalized technology as the dominant form of activity, as the overwhelming pattern of existence” (Octogesima Adveniens, 1971, 29). Hadas suggests, however, that Francis’s account of technology in Laudato Si’ is unwarrantedly pessimistic, downplaying other aspects of the Catholic vision that suggest that, if guided by an integrally humanist framework, humankind can creatively draw on technology to help address serious problems, even problems of the magnitude of climate change. I think Francis’s neglect of the promise offered by the revolution in renewable energy technology in Laudate Deum confirms Hadas’s suspicions.

 In parts of Laudato Si’, Francis suggests that the problem is not with technology itself:

Technoscience, when well directed, can produce important means of improving the quality of human life, from useful domestic appliances to great transportation systems, bridges, buildings and public spaces. It can also produce art and enable men and women immersed in the material world to “leap” into the world of beauty. (103)

Nevertheless, technology has a certain moral ambiguity. Technology provides those who wield it power over other human beings and the natural world, and “nothing ensures that it will be used wisely” (104). Likewise, when technological solutions are provided in a one-sided way, we find that technology “sometimes solves one problem only to create others” (20).

In other places, however, particularly when he is drawing on the twentieth-century theologian Romano Guardini, this ambiguity disappears and Francis strikes a more one-sidedly pessimistic tone. He suggests that the technocratic paradigm is “omnipresent” (122), and it “has become so dominant that it would be difficult to do without its resources and even more difficult to utilize them without being dominated by their internal logic” (108). At times, he seems to conflate the technocratic paradigm with technology itself, stating, for example, that:

Technology tends to absorb everything into its ironclad logic, and those who are surrounded with technology “know full well that it moves forward in the final analysis neither for profit nor for the well-being of the human race”, that “in the most radical sense of the term power is its motive – a lordship over all”. (108, citations from Guardini’s The End of the Modern World)

Francis insists that “The idea of promoting a different cultural paradigm and employing technology as a mere instrument is nowadays inconceivable” (108). He may be exaggerating for rhetorical effect here; later, he suggests that a different paradigm is indeed possible:

We have the freedom needed to limit and direct technology; we can put it at the service of another type of progress, one which is healthier, more human, more social, more integral. . . . An authentic humanity, calling for a new synthesis, seems to dwell in the midst of our technological culture, almost unnoticed, like a mist seeping gently beneath a closed door. Will the promise last, in spite of everything, with all that is authentic rising up in stubborn resistance? (112)

Still, Francis’s focus here is on limiting and directing technology rather than creatively developing new technologies. He seems to be so concerned with the risk of seeking purely technological solutions without a deeper change in our relationship with the natural world (e.g., 60, 111) that he does not sufficiently explore the role of technological development in helping to promote the changes he wants to see. Francis also seems to suggest that it is only when there is a “global consensus” around a “common plan” that humankind will succeed in “developing renewable and less polluting forms of energy” (164). Although it’s certainly true, as I already mentioned, that global coordination will be needed to ramp up renewable energy production sufficiently to reach net zero emissions by 2050, the development of such technologies has gone on despite the absence of such coordination, the result of scientific discovery, economic incentives, and the conviction that our way of life must change.

This lacuna—driven by his general skepticism toward technology and market forces—seems to explain Francis’s emphasis in Laudate Deum on the upcoming, high-level negotiations at the COP28 meeting in the United Arab Emirates while downplaying the great progress that has already been made on the ground. Again, the point is not that his focus on international negotiations is misplaced. Rather, an added emphasis on the technological progress that has already been made would offer hope that efforts to reach a global consensus are worthwhile. Rather than focusing on how we can’t rely on technology alone for a solution (as true as that is), we should recognize how technology—seen from the integrated, ecological perspective Francis himself has proposed—can become the grounds for the possibility of a more comprehensive solution.

Hadas argues that Pope Francis is a bit like the prophet Jonas, eager to call Nineveh to repentance but unwilling to admit when it has turned over a new leaf. That may be going too far since, unlike Nineveh, we are yet to fully undergo an “ecological conversion” at the necessary scale. Still, there is a risk in downplaying the way technology can help goad us toward that conversion.