The Catholic Church’s New Governing Board
At the National Post Fr. Raymond J. d’ Souza tracks the evolution and power of worldwide global warming apostle and now Vatican guide, UN’s Jeffrey Sachs.
Jeffrey Sachs, it is true, is just one man. But the UN’s chief development man is near-ubiquitous, laying out the future of the global economy. If you want to know what the conferenciers of global summitry discuss, read Sachs.
Here in Poland, his name is most associated with the “shock therapy” of early 1990s. After the defeat of communism and return to democratic politics, Poland had to decide how to dismantle the state-controlled economic policies that had kept Poland poor for four decades. Sachs was the principal international advisor advocating a rapid removal of price regulations and state subsidies. There would be sharp short term pain for, it was hoped, economic freedom, stability and growth in a short few years.
Poland opted for shock therapy and within three years the economy was growing, hyperinflation had been killed and the Polish entrepreneurial class, everywhere evident today, had emerged. Compared to more sluggish transitions elsewhere in the former Soviet empire, Polish shock therapy was judged a success.
The Sachs of the 1990s, flitting hither and yon to advocate rapid adoption of free-market policies was considered a man of the right. Yet for 20 years now he has been flitting ever-farther afield in the service of poverty alleviation and sustainable development. Special advisor to the UN for the millennium development goals, he is now leading the UN charge toward a global climate change treaty. In terms of impact on global policy priorities, there are as few as influential as Jeffrey Sachs.
“Leading the UN charge toward a global climate change treaty.”
On balance, his poverty work has been rooted in confidence that human capital — unleashing the creative productivity of the poor through education, access to capital and economic freedom — is the foundation for economic growth. That’s to his credit, even if he also keeps faith with the global poverty and aid industry that has long believed that the quickest way to reduce poverty is to get rid of poor people, whether by contraception and sterilization campaigns, eugenics, expanded abortion licences and, in the case of China, systematic human rights violations in enforcing the one-child policy.
Sachs bears watching, and I assign his work in my own economics course, for he is always leading the trends. In the Nineties it was post-communist transition. In the Aughts it was poverty. Now it is global warming and sustainable development. Last week, he was in Quito for the “International Conference on Sustainable Development.” I first thought he might be on hand to greet Pope Francis, but it turned out he left Quito before the pope arrived. Sachs does not need to ambush the Holy Father abroad. Francis invited him to the Vatican in April to headline the Church’s own seminar on climate change.
Nevertheless, Sachs was in tiny Ecuador while Francis was also there. Now he’s back in the Vatican next week.
It’s getting hard to keep up with all the speeches, seminars and summits. While the “International Conference on Sustainable Development” in Ecuador was wrapping up, there was a contemporaneous “World Summit on Climate and Territories” in Lyon, both of which preceded last week’s “Climate Summit of the Americas” in Toronto. All of which is gearing up for the climate change summit in Paris this December.
“Kathleen Wynne has this week been hosting a climate summit with California’s governor Jerry Brown and Al Gore, both high cardinals in the zealous Church of Global Warming (Mr. Gore used to be Pope of that church, but the real Pope is now its Pope too), bringing a wonderful touch of pure Americana into Ontario politics,” wrote Rex Murphy on Saturday in our pages.
The Pope is now the Pope of Global Warming. No more need for Al.
But it is not just America, nor just Ontario. It is almost everywhere, like Sachs himself. China recently moved toward a climate alliance with the United States, and the G7 declared that in about a hundred years they would no longer use fossil fuels. Indeed, one of the few places where climate enthusiasm is muted is the former Soviet empire; memories here of state-directed economic goals are relatively fresh and not favourable.
Though continuously associated with lawless communism, Putin’s Russia is one of the few places in the modern world that seems to reject it today. They embrace Christianity without trying to crush or neuter it.
Father has the trends down. As Sachs moved from Right to Left so did the world around him.
Sachs’ views prevailed in Poland 25 years ago. With the next round of the UN “sustainable development goals” — the updating of the millennium development goals — and the Paris summit, Sachs is prevailing the world over.
I rather doubt that Pope Francis would think it a step up to go from being the successor of St. Peter to the successor of Al Gore, but much of the world sure thinks it fabulous. After all, St. Peter never got the Nobel Peace Prize. And today while few of the global policy elite read the epistles of Peter, many fervently follow the gospel of Sachs.
Seeing Jeffrey Sachs so active and embraced in the Vatican today, one gets the sense that there is a plan afoot that has nothing to do with the Church’s mission or the papal office, yet demands the full compliance and surrender of both.