Pope Francis Takes Aim at Trump With Climate Change Message

Pope Francis had a not-so-subtle message for Donald Trump in a speech earlier this week.

"The 'distraction' or delay in implementing global agreements on the environment shows that politics has become submissive to a technology and economy which seek profit above all else,” said the Pope in an address Monday to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

“Never before has there been such a clear need for science to be at the service of a new global ecological equilibrium,” said the Pope, addressing scientists in attendance, which included Stephen Hawking.

Come January, Trump will be one of the only world leaders who doesn’t believe in climate change. Which makes the Pope’s message on the importance of science and mitigating climate change a warning specially directed toward the President-elect.

The US ratified the Paris agreement in September alongside China and 113 other countries. However, President-elect Trump has made it clear he doesn’t believe in climate change.

Aside from saying he wants to “cancel” the climate agreement, Trump has also proposed plans to boost US coal production and repeal the Environmental Protection Agency.

In 2012, he tweeted, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

And while he did say after the election he would keep “an open mind” and that there might be some connectivity between climate change and human activity, his chief of staff Reince Priebus said on Sunday that the Trump administration’s official stance on climate change will be to deny that it exists.

Trump is not the only one dragging feet on the Paris agreement either. The Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte has been reluctant to ratify the global environmental pact. Vladimir Putin has not ratified the agreement yet, either.

After the dig toward world leaders delaying the progress toward climate change, the Pope praised the work scientists are doing for the majority of his speech.

“Your commitment is all the more admirable in its orientation towards the full promotion of integral human development, peace, justice, dignity and human freedom,” said Pope Francis.

The Pope also spoke to scientists to remain untangled from political obstacles.

“I would say that it falls to scientists, who work free of political, economic or ideological interests, to develop a cultural model which can face the crisis of climatic change and its social consequences,” said the Pope, “so that the vast potential of productivity will not be reserved for only a few.”

Let’s hope all world leaders, and scientists take His Holiness’s words on climate change and praise for science to heart.