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This might be an enlightening article as any:

http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/issues/july-24th-2015/why-christian-leaders-are-really-going-green/

The key to understanding the environmental push is the Holy Father’s priority on the Church in mission. If the Church goes green, it is to improve the cultural climate for evangelisation. In this, Pope Francis’s pastoral strategy is to join an effort that has been underway for decades in both Orthodoxy and Anglicanism.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, as it became clear in both Constantinople and Canterbury that their respective communions were becoming increasingly marginal players in their own cultures, a conscious decision was taken to move environmental issues to the forefront of their public witness.

Indeed, the website of the Ecumenical Patriarchate describes Bartholomew as the “green patriarch”. The environmental evangelical strategy supposes that cultural elites who welcome the Church’s endorsement of their environmental policies will be more open to the heart of the Christian Gospel.

The day after Laudato Si’ was released, Bartholomew and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, jointly authored a column in The New York Times, promoting a recent climate change report in The Lancet, a medical journal, with the fervour Christian preachers once reserved from the Gospel itself.

That is indeed an enlightening perspective.

I had thought that Pope Francis was trying to make a misguided "missionary pitch" to the Left/seculars --- and that's part of it --- but now I see it is part of his pitch to the Orthodox and the Anglicans.

I am convinced this is strategically wrong, because nothing can be "strategically right" if it is dubious as per its practical judgments. In terms of papal diplomacy, this is disastrous, in my view --- especially if it succeeds --- because it will succeed in a destructive way, and for the wrong reasons.

I still credit the Pope with good intentions. I think he loves Our Lord. I fear he is (unintentionally, obliquely) helping the Left use God ---as if this were possible--- as an organizing tool.

God save Pope Francis.

God save the Church.