Ecumenical Patriarch blasts ‘disgraceful’ inaction on climate change, says ‘survival of God’s creation’ is at stake

Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, who holds a primacy of honor in Eastern Orthodoxy, has written a message to participants in COP22, the upcoming UN climate change conference in Morocco. Noting that such international meetings have been taking place for over two decades, the Ecumenical Patriarch wrote on November 3 that 22 years “is an unacceptably long period to respond to the environmental crisis, especially when we are conscious of its intimate and inseparable connections to global poverty, migration and unrest.” “Twenty-two years, moreover, is an unjustifiably interminable period to tackle the expansion of fossil fuels, when scientists inform us we have less than two decades not simply to reduce but in fact to replace them with renewable energy,” he continued. “Twenty-two years is, indeed, disgracefully belated for governments apathetically to pursue the same politics, for corporations dishonestly to ‘greenwash’ the same policies, and for individuals arrogantly to continue the same practices.”...more