Reporting on Texas floods, L’Osservatore Romano chides Trump administration’s climate policies

The Vatican newspaper devoted the most prominent front-page coverage in its July 5 edition to the central Texas floods that left over 20 dead at Camp Mystic, a Christian girls’ camp.

In “Tragica alluvione in Texas“ [Tragic flood in Texas], staff journalist Guglielmo Gallone reported on the tragic incident, as well as on the reactions of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and President Donald Trump. Gallone then wrote:

Yet, to date, the efforts of the central administration seem to focus less and less on the need to address such crises in a structural and preventive way, as confirmed by the withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on Climate or the recent decision not to dedicate even a dollar to climate research in the annual budget of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

This instead appears urgent because the United States is experiencing a wave of increasingly powerful environmental disasters: if in 2023 the historical record of 28 extreme climate events was recorded—including storms, hurricanes and floods—in 2024 27 extreme climate events were recorded with damages equal to $182.7 billion and at least 88 victims recorded between January and September … A sad record that must be remedied by finding the right balance between the climate crisis and the energy crisis, rejecting both simplistic solutions and denialist slogans.