Elliott is a senior director at Laudato Si’ Movement and a fellow of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication with The Op-Ed Project.
Leaders have been gathering at the United Nations climate summit for the past few weeks, shaping crucial decisions for all humanity. The negotiators in past U.N. climate summits have lacked the courage of their convictions. But this year, Pope Francis, who planned to attend in person, sent an important message to participants. Negotiators should learn from faith leaders like him because they are making the hard choices to implement real climate solutions.
The talks, known as COP28, are the 28th time that countries will try to reduce greenhouse gas pollution while the problem grows – greenhouse gas pollution is now about 50 percent higher than it was 28 years ago.
This has been taking place eight years after the signing of the Paris Agreement, a climate accord that raised hopes for humanity’s ability to dream of a better future together. The signatures on that document represented a commitment to protecting the Earth, our common home, for the benefit of all.
With this in mind, it is a surprising fact that the phrase “fossil fuels” is not mentioned anywhere in the Paris Agreement. This seems like a puzzling oversight, given that there is no question that fossil fuels are a signficant factor in driving the climate crisis. Reducing the impact of fossil fuels is the only way to prevent the worst of the hunger, sickness, conflict and forced migration that climate change brings.
As countries try once again to turn the arc of greenhouse gas pollution downward, they should look to an unexpected source of inspiration. For many years now, leaders in the faith community have been speaking out about the climate crisis and making the difficult decisions needed to implement real solutions.
Pope Francis recently released a high-level statement on the climate crisis, saying “the necessary transition towards clean energy sources such as wind and solar energy, and the abandonment of fossil fuels, is not progressing at the necessary speed.”
Through the Vatican’s sustainability program, over 8,000 institutions and individuals have committed to creating comprehensive plans for action, including making the switch to clean energy. In response to both guidance from Rome and decades of Catholic teaching on climate change, more than 350 Catholic institutions have divested from fossil fuels, making the hard decision to align their financial practices with their values.
Ambitious action is being taken by Catholics in the United States. Dominican Sisters have invested $46 million in a Climate Solutions Fund to support projects in sustainability. A nationwide effort to install solar panels on Catholic facilities has resulted in clean energy powering parishes.
Beyond the Catholic faith, Muslims are embracing clean energy and have issued a prohibition against investments in fossil fuels. Synagogues are installing solar panels and Jewish leaders are developing climate action plans.
Each of these decisions involved months or even years, of deliberation, including challenging conversations with community members, financial advisors and facilities managers. Yet despite the challenges, faith leaders didn’t let the challenges stop them because they know that the urgent need to protect our brothers and sisters from the climate crisis is imperative.
National leaders face far more complex challenges but the science remains the same. Either we stop climate change, or climate change will stop us. Now is the time for action.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.