"Dynamists and Catastrophists"

"This is a document aligned with the scientific consensus on climate that excoriates the modern scientific mind-set as, in effect, a 500-year mistake. It's a document calling for global action, even a 'new world political authority,' that's drenched in frank contempt for the existing global leadership class. It's a document that urges a rapid move away from fossil fuels while explicitly criticizing the leading avenue for doing so—a cap and trade regime—as too 'quick and easy,' too compromised by greed and self-interest, to 'allow for the radical change which present circumstances require.'
 

And while it includes hopeful passages, the encyclical's most pungent lines are apocalyptic: 'Doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain. We may well be leaving to coming generations debris, desolation and filth.'"

Ross Douthat in The New York Times reads Pope Francis's "Laudato Si'."