The Pope Asks People To Be More Human – CleanTechnica

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Why was CleanTechnica created? Why do we have cleantech? What is cleantech?

Cleantech is any technology that helps us to significantly reduce pollution, especially pollution leading to global heating and climate change. Air pollution and water pollution hurt people and kill people every day, countless people. They are major problems causing suffering and death to millions of people, billions eventually. Even more concerning, atmospheric pollution — greenhouse gases — are trapping more and more heat across the globe. This has been leading to the biggest, most deadly climate catastrophes we have ever experienced, and we ain’t seen nothing yet. Cleantech was developed and fast-tracked in order to help stop these problems for humanity.

Unfortunately, the trillions of dollars invested in continuing the fossil fuel era of recent centuries mean that many people want to be rich, or stay rich, from fossil fuels being taken out of the Earth and burned, humanity be damned. Much of the time, people who benefit from the fossil fuel system that dominates much of the world won’t even consider the science, won’t even let themselves understand the issue. They block out the facts and form an alternate reality (a false one, of course) in order to tell themselves they are right and good while continuing to profit off of the deadly and broadly harmful system. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it,” as Upton Sinclair said. How much of the misinformation and disinformation out there on climate, fossil fuels, and cleantech is people outright lying versus people pushing a narrative they want to believe because it makes them feel better and doesn’t challenge their bank accounts? Who knows? The latter is still lying anyway, it’s just lying to oneself.

That’s just the simple stuff, though.

There are other ways humans are being hurt and human activities are hurting other humans on a mass scale. There’s also downright inhumane behavior. Unfortunately, we seem to be facing a growing swarm of hate, aggression, and inhumane policies these days.

Pope Leo XIV tried to make a difference on this matter recently. He said: “Someone who says I’m against abortion but is in favor of the death penalty is not really pro-life. And someone who says I’m against abortion but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States, I don’t know if that’s pro-life.” Clearly, he’s trying to make the point that inhuman treatment of immigrants is not good, and that it’s much more of a problem than many people see. In fact, it’s such a major problem that it’s even against the concept of people being “pro-life” in general.

American citizens are being attacked, harassed, and jailed simply because of their heritage and the color of their skin. But it’s not just about being a citizen or not. Is it right to be kind to citizens but cruel to non-citizens? Human beings are being attacked, harassed, and jailed simply because of the color of their skin, the language they most naturally speak, and the hate that has been generated over these things. This is not good human behavior. It is not Christian, or Catholic, or religious behavior. It is hate. And there is no true justification for hate.

There are different ideas about where this comes from. One of the crutches many people lean on is the idea that these other people have come and taken your job, made your life harder, made the economy worse. In actuality, immigration is what continues to make the US more successful economically. We benefit from immigration. The immigration the US sees from Latin America boosts our economy in net. Billionaires and large corporations rigging the system more and more, stripping more and more of the winnings off of the middle and working classes for themselves, and directing people’s attention elsewhere are what hurt the American people, not the immigration that has long made the United States special and has long made it an economic powerhouse.

There is growing Nazi-like behavior toward people who are different in a certain way and unaccepted here. It is not just hyperbole. That is not to say we are at the peak of Nazi Germany. But there is extreme hate, violence, and inhumane treatment of — let’s call them what they actually are — other humans, and that is getting more and more common, more and more normalized, and more and more a part of the US domestic agenda.

This is not about economic policy or immigration policy. This is about cruel, illegal, inhuman treatment of other humans. And it has been stirred up by people who want to distract from real economic issues (growing wealth inequality) or who simply don’t understand them. But either way, we don’t have a right to be cruel and inhuman to others. This is not something that should be seen as normal or okay.

It’s very unfortunate and sad to see one person after another fall for the propaganda. And it’s not just an American problem. It’s a major problem in Europe as well, as intimated by that last video in the UK. Across the West, people are being fed anti-immigrant propaganda that is 1) false, and 2) stimulating hate, aggression, and inhuman treatment of other humans, immigrants. As Pope Leo XIV has indicated, this is not Catholic behavior, this is not Christian behavior — or it should not be. This is not in line with the teachings of Jesus Christ at all. Imagine Jesus Christ supporting these kinds of attacks on immigrants. Imagine Jesus Christ condoning the hate and joining in the racist chanting and fear mongering. That doesn’t make much sense, does it?

Pope Leo XIV noted that we should “have respect for one another.” Jesus Christ said “Love thy neighbor.” The teachings were never to only love people just like you. They were to love everyone, to even love the most other others. The teachings of Christ were to have understanding and compassion for people who had fallen to the lowest level. They were not to love the wealthy and successful, and treat them as gods. Time and time again, the teachings were to learn to love and have compassion for everyone, to try to help everyone, to show kindness and open your arms to everyone.

We have fallen deeply in recent years, fallen into horrible and widespread hate of immigrants. It’s ironic, economically, since immigration has been fueling the economies of Western nations like the US and UK for decades. Immigrants are a net positive for us economically. But it’s not even about economics at the core. We should not be hating others because they travelled from one part of the Earth, our shared home, to another. We should not be hating others because they went out in search of a better life, a safer life, just as the grandparents or great-grandparents of most of us did.

If we forget that we should treat other humans as we’d like to be treated, we’ve gone so far below the basic level of good behavior that it’s hard to even know how to respond, or how to proceed.

Protecting our air and our climate are critical, but we as a society are currently struggling with even simply treating other humans in a kind, understanding, compassionate way. These are the ABCs of cleantech, and it seems we are increasingly lacking them. It is important to remind each other that we should be loving, good humans who are nice to other human beings.

Featured photo by Catholic Church England and Wales (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license)