Ex-chancellor scorns papal climate change letter

Nigel Lawson, the former Conservative chancellor, has described the contents of Pope Francis’s encyclical letter on climate change as junk, claiming that its proposals would keep the world’s poor trapped in poverty.

Speaking at the Ideacity Conference in Toronto on 19 June, Lawson said that although he thought the Pope meant well, the encyclical was a “thoroughly reactionary document”. 

“A mixture of junk science, junk economics and junk ethics, what Pope Francis advocates would prevent the world’s poor from escaping from poverty—just as it would have prevented the industrial revolution, which enabled the western world to escape from poverty and squalor,” Lawson said.