Metropolitan John, 84 years old, is the Patriarchate of
Constantinople’s leading figure in ecumenical discussions and has long
been close to the Catholic ecumenical establishment. However this is the
first time that an Orthodox metropolitan would be officially
co-presenting a papal Encyclical. There are reports
that the Encyclical will draw upon the teaching of Patriarch
Bartholomew (whose interest in environmental issues is well known) and
that there was even a proposal — which proved to be “not possible” —
that the Encyclical be jointly promulgated by both the Pope and the
Patriarch.
Perhaps of far greater interest to most of our readership would
be the presence of Prof. Schellnhuber on the panel. The father of the “two-degree target” to stave off global warming,
he is the founding director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact
Research in Germany (which is funded by the German government), Chair
of the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU), and a member of
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He was one of the experts
(alongside Jeffrey Sachs) tapped by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences
and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences to write their joint
statement on climate change published in April of this year, titled
“Climate change and the common good: a statement of the problem and the
demand for transformative solutions”. A description of the final document’s call for a “zero-carbon world” can be found here; the
final published version seems to have been removed from the official
website Pontifical Academy of Sciences, but to our knowledge has never
been retracted.
In the words of the New York Times, Schellnhuber is “known for his aggressive stance on climate policy” and famously declared in 2009 that the “carrying capacity” of the Earth is less than one billion people...
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