Global warming: Whom should we believe – Trump or Patriarch Bartholomew?

Patriarch Bartholomew and Donald Trump. Photo: Press Service of the Phanar

Speaking at a forum in the United States, Patriarch Bartholomew suddenly offered a new explanation as to why he granted the Tomos to the OCU. According to him, it was connected to the ecological agenda.

“The Ecumenical Patriarch's commitment to the environment is indivisibly linked with our commitment to the freedom and self-determination of the Ukrainian people and why we granted independence, autocaphaly status and self-rule to their Orthodox Church in 2019,” Patriarch Bartholomew declared.

In fact, he is in the U.S. precisely to receive the Templeton Prize for his work in defense of nature. So his words about “ecological” motives for granting the Tomos, while sounding provocative, are in a sense logical.

Yet when one looks at the situation from another angle, the Patriarch’s many years of “ecological” rhetoric cannot help but arouse astonishment. Certainly, there is nothing wrong with fighting for the environment. But is this the calling of a church hierarch – especially one who styles himself as “first without equals”? Have all the spiritual problems of humanity already been resolved? Have pagan peoples been converted to Orthodoxy? Has sin been conquered? Has unity been restored within Orthodoxy itself, or have schisms been eradicated? On the contrary – everything is precisely the reverse. And we know whose hand has played a decisive role in that “reverse.”

But that is not all. One of Patriarch Bartholomew’s main “ecological” theses is the fight against global warming. At the summit in the U.S., he stated that “our physical ecosystems remain in delicate interplay as temperatures on Earth rise and shift that balance in ways that are painfully destructive to life on every level.”

All would be well and good – except that on the very same day, September 23, President Donald Trump told the UN something entirely different. According to him, claims about global warming are "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the world,” while talk of the carbon footprint is “a scam invented by people with malicious intent.”

“You know, before, it was global cooling. In the 1920s and 1930s, they said global cooling would destroy the world. We needed to act. Then they said global warming would destroy the world. But then it got cooler. So now they just call it climate change, because that way they can’t miss. If you don’t abandon this green scam, your country will fail,” Trump said, also lashing out at “green” energy.

With all due respect to the Patriarch, he is neither a climatologist nor an economist. He is a hierarch. When a builder’s houses have leaking roofs and crumbling walls, and that same builder presumes to lecture composers on how to write symphonies, we say he is a bad builder and a worthless musician.

So too in other spheres.

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