Urgency, Climate Change, and the Holy See

I'll put aside doubts I might have about Eduardo's suggestion that, in his Nobel acceptance speech (or at any other time) Al Gore "showed how it's done."  Let's agree that Al Gore's career is, in many ways, instructive.

Eduardo writes, with respect to the news that the Holy See is sending a delegation to the climate-change conference in Bali:

Let’s hope this signals the beginning of a shift away from the Church’s neglect of this important moral and political issue.  One would hope that it could speak with at least half the urgency that it has endlessly heaped on such issues as gay marriage and contraception.

Why, exactly, should we hope this?  As it happens, I hear (much) more about environmental issues in my own Catholic community than I do about "gay marriage and contraception".  In any event, on these latter questions, which involve the morality of particular activities or the nature of marriage, it seems that the Church has (for better or worse, one might think) a fairly clear and discrete teaching to articulate.  What, exactly, would the analogous clear teaching be in the context of climate change? 

Yes, of course, we have a moral obligation to be good stewards of the environment, and an obligation -- in solidarity -- to attend to the consequences of human activity on that environment, particularly when those consequences impose disproportionate costs on the poor.  But what else?  My own hope is that the Church's representatives do not foolishly baptize one policy proposal or another without considering very, very carefully whether or not they (or anyone else) understand what the environmental costs and benefits -- upon and to the poor -- of the proposal really are.

One might go further, and ask whether, in fact, the failure of people like Al Gore to embrace the Church's on matters of sexual morality and fertility calls into question their own "Green" credentials.  As a friend of mine suggested to me in correspondence:

Who is more "Green"--the couple who recognizes the givenness of fertility, understands its times and seasons, and tries to build virtues of both activity and restraint in the exercise of the powers that they experience as given, or the couple that looks to a chemical or pharmaceutical company for a quick fix to a burdensome physical condition, namely, fertility?  Which attitude is more in line with the idea of stewardship of a given world that presumably is behind "being Green?"

Wouldn't it be great if the "shift" for which Eduardo hopes was, in an integrated and thorough way, distinctively Catholic, and involved talking about stewardship, solidarity, sustainable development, *and* the importance of valuing the truly human over chemically facilitated individualism?  Surely the Church has more to add than "me, too!"