David Brooks: Fracking an example of how pope is off base

Pope Francis is one of the world’s most inspiring figures. There are passages in his new encyclical on the environment that beautifully place human beings within the seamless garment of life. And yet overall the encyclical is surprisingly disappointing.

Legitimate warnings about the perils of global warming morph into 1970s-style doom-mongering about technological civilization. There are too many overdrawn statements, such as: “The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.”

Hardest to accept, though, is the moral premise implied throughout the encyclical: that the only legitimate human relationships are based on compassion, harmony and love, and that arrangements based on self-interest and competition are inherently destructive.

Moral realists, including Catholic ones, should be able to worship and emulate a God of perfect love and still appreciate systems, like democracy and capitalism, that harness self-interest. But Francis doesn’t seem to have practical strategies for a fallen world. He neglects the obvious truth that the qualities that do harm can often, when carefully directed, do enormous good. For example, within a regulated market, greed can lead to entrepreneurship and economic innovation.

You would never know from the encyclical that we are living through the greatest reduction in poverty in human history. A raw, rugged capitalism in Asia has led, ironically, to a great expansion of the middle class and great gains in human dignity.

You would never know that in many parts of the world, like the United States, the rivers and skies are getting cleaner. The race for riches, ironically, produces the wealth that can be used to clean the environment.

A few years ago, a team of researchers led by Daniel Esty of Yale University looked at the environmental health of 150 countries. The nations with higher income per capita had better environmental ratings.

You would never suspect, from this encyclical, that over the past decade one of the most castigated industries has produced some of the most important economic and environmental gains. I’m talking about fracking.

A recent Environmental Protection Agency study found that there was no evidence that fracking was causing widespread harm to the nation’s water supply, as many environmentalists claimed. On the contrary, there’s some evidence that fracking is a net environmental plus.

That’s because cheap natural gas from fracking displaces coal. And because natural gas has just half as much global warming potential as coal, energy-related carbon emissions have declined more in the United States than in any other country over that time.

Fracking has also been an enormous boon to the nation’s wealth and the well-being of its people. A new report called “America’s Unconventional Energy Opportunity” concluded that gas and oil resources extracted through fracking have already added more than $430 billion to annual gross domestic product and supported more than 2.7 million jobs that pay, on average, twice the median U.S. salary.

Pope Francis is a wonderful example of how to be a truly good person. But if we had followed his line of analysis, neither the Asian economic miracle nor the technology-based American energy revolution would have happened.

The innocence of the dove has to be accompanied by the wisdom of the serpent – the awareness that programs based on the purity of the heart backfire; the irony that the best social programs harvest the low but steady motivations of people as they actually are.

This story was originally published June 24, 2015 at 7:01 PM with the headline "David Brooks: Fracking an example of how pope is off base."