Hampering the efforts of governments and NGOs that promote family planning is one of the more objectionable things done by any religious organization.

This is just a fallacious string of thought. If population growth increases demand for food, which increases the price, which limits access, then population growth can be a cause of starvation even if it is still true to say the problem is with access rather than production.

The real problem, as usual, is capitalism.

That said, given the number of members in his church, it is likely that his statements have real consequences in how people live their lives and devote their efforts.

If we get 6°C or more of warming by 2100, it is quite legitimate to ask how much starvation it would cause. By providing the unjustified perspective that climate change won’t cause mass starvation, the Pope may well diminish how much action people take on the issue.

Monday, on the opening day of the World Summit on Food Security, Pope Benedict XVI tried to put the panic about global-warming-induced food crises to rest.

According to the UK’s Times Online, the Pope said that the Earth can produce enough for everyone despite the ravages climate change might inflict. It is greed, he said, that has driven up prices and increased hunger in the world.

His remarks emphasized that food should not be treated like any other commodity, especially because “there is no cause and effect relationship between population growth and hunger.” Nobel Prize-winning economic Amartya Sen has long commented that hunger is not a problem of production but one of access.

As for ascribing the hand of careful custodianship to theories of economics etc… even the Gaia theory is now being reinterpreted (by some) as resembling Medea more closely.

Particularly ironic when it is Republicans, normally all for taking the full consequences of actions at an individual level, effectively saying that the more severe the consequences of the choice, the less one has to worry about assuming responsibility and taking compensatory action.

As pointed out elsewhere here, free will (whether innate or God-granted) carries the duty for intelligent adults to bear the consequences of their actions, as the law usually recognises. Those denying abdicating responsibility for attempting to soften the impact of climate change on the planet and its populace are implicitly denying at least one of three assumptions behind this (that they are adult, intelligent, or that they possess free will).

Such questions are more easily answered when one accepts the likelihood that god(s) is/are fictional.

It’s easy to charge religious nutbags with this mistake – but I think you are right to point to those for whom this super-natural is the ” ‘laws’ of technology or economics”. The notion that a certain kind of human development is good for humans, that the invisible hand watches over us, is just the same kind of unargued assumption as to posit God’s being as all-powerful and all-good. Sure, we observe this hand, but we never observe it as entirely beneficial (without rose coloured glasses), or as ultimately powerful (there are no free markets anyway).

So, maybe the neo-cons are just as Abrhamic as the bible-thumpers, they just have a different name for God.