Full disclosure, I have owned a Tesla car for a few years as well as Tesla stock for about 7 years.
Pope Francis when he was Pope, was pushing, in my opinion, for the most part, a climate agenda that was hard to follow except for the middle- and upper-class citizens. I say for the most part because, people can of course avoid littering, recycle, walk when they can and take a bus when possible and these things cost little to nothing, but less fortunate people, at least in the United States, already do this.
Installing solar, though eventually gives you return on investment (ROI), I have heard takes at least 20 years and who can raise approximately $30K and, even with incentives, not recover it for 20 years?
To insure you store power instead of just putting it back into the grid, to get a 3 module Tesla powerwall, with incentives, will run you about $27K.
The case for Electric Vehicles (EVs) was similar. A high initial cost (With a base price of $42,490 for the Model 3 rear-Wheel Drive, arguably the cheapest Tesla) would take about 3-5 years, to reach a break-even point, considering fuel and maintenance. After that, charging at home, is advantageous, cost, especially if you have solar panels. Now you may say you can buy a second hand vehicle but that still rums about $24K.
Now Tesla cars have a lot of pluses to include no cost for oil changes or oil (which internal combustion engine or ICE cars can have with maintenance for life), an app which tracks the cost of your power usage (great for if you own a business and only use the car for business), notifies you on the app on your watch when your car is finished charging, an automatic app on your vehicle which automatically plots the path you need to follow to be able to get chargers along the way to at least everywhere I’ve needed to travel in the US from Sierra Vista Arizona the furthest I have traveled being Kansas City/Omaha Nebraska to visit my son. You simply put in the address or the name of the destination (like Safeway or Xerocraft and of course of the options offered pick the correct location/address) and if you need to recharge to get there it plots out the superchargers, the route and the amount of time needed to recharge at each supercharger stop.
Now if you buy the Tesla X plaid, you have to deal with tires which wear out fast but the only maintenance I have had to deal with is a replacement of a malfunctioning computer for, if I remember correctly, about $2.8K and I have driven it about 130K miles. Never an oil change, or if you take advantage of the car re-absorbing energy if you take your foot off the accelerator, far enough away, when ready to stop, never a brake pad replacement up to at least 130k miles. The range is about 310 miles on a full charge after about 130K miles. This may sound like a Tesla ad but I give these specs for comparison if you do buy an EV. It should have this stuff as a minimum. Someone I know has a model 3 he uses to commute to work, as a government employee, about 10 miles away, in Tucson, and though I have not had any in-depth discussions he has never complained about its performance or maintenance. The encyclical by pope Francis pushing these types of things was Laudato Si. Now this is not to demonize him and say he was the only one pushing this agenda. Pope John Paul II in Centesimus Annus touched on it when stressing a culture of peace needs to promote development and provide the poor with realistic opportunities (#52). This task may necessitate changes in lifestyle that reduce the waste of resource. Pope Benedict XIV also touched on it in his encyclical Caritas in Veritate.
Traditional Thomistic Catholic 