Welcome to Inspire

Official insincerity eventually strays into gaslighting. The climate crisis is perhaps the most notorious example: big words about environmental policy on the global stage seem not so much contradictory as incongruous to real life, as if the wrong audio was playing over the film. Even leaders sincerely invested in action seem to treat it as an arithmetical question, something to negotiate tortuously at Cop summits before returning with a sense of satisfaction to a scarcely-altered day to day. 

Donald Trump’s victory in the US election may have scuppered the premise of Cop: if he withdraws from the 2015 Paris Agreement again, the arithmetic won’t add up. It would be a disgrace if the West failed to pay its ecological debt to those countries now suffering the worst effects of its historic industrialisation. But it was always a delusion that paying enough into a Loss and Damage Fund (necessary though that is) could – with some convenient technological innovation – get us off the hook. This was a magic formula to sustain unsustainable lifestyles. 

Without fostering change in individual and community lives, climate diplomacy will remain an expensive parlour game. The need for meaningful policy to interact with an integral, human understanding of our environment has been Pope Francis’ theme since Laudato Si’. The likes of Uganda’s Laudato Youth Initiative, serenaded by its mentor Br Adolf Mugume in our cover story, are in their joyful way a much more serious response than besuited United Nations delegations, lived out at the same level as the consequences of the crisis. 

Only the Church can match the UN for stony-faced, Olympian deliberation. Even the most inspiring edicts on families, or youth, or synodality betray the same arithmetical internal economy. The important change goes on in those places – in the parish halls, the chaplaincies, dare we say on social media? – that the important haven’t time to visit. 

COP29 has ‘fallen completely flat’ says Cafod

Stewards of the future