Economic freedom, individual liberties must not be sacrificed at the altar of religious or secular dogma, that climate change is an immediate existential crisis that can only be solved by top-down dictates and controlled wealth redistribution
Pope Francis issued a lengthy encyclical last week calling for radical change in human behavior to confront climate change. He presented climate change as the moral issue of our time. "Humanity is called to recognize the need for changes of lifestyle, production and consumption, in order to combat this warming or at least the human causes which produce or aggravate it," the pope declared. "It is a mistake to rely on the 'myths' of a modernity grounded in a utilitarian mindset (individualism, unlimited progress, competition, consumerism, the unregulated market)," he added. While denying that anyone is suggesting a return to the Stone Age and conceding that "[T]echnoscience, when well directed, can produce important means of improving the quality of human life," Pope Francis refused to dismiss doomsday predictions if society continues along its present path.