Over the course of this year, Pope Francis will ramp up his foray into the politically charged debate for action on climate change. It begins unofficially with Tuesday’s Vatican summit, co-hosted by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. This summer, Francis will publish his widely anticipated encyclical, a Catholic document that will examine man’s moral relationship with nature.

Unlike the usual discussions of climate change as an economic and scientific issue, Francis conveys it as a moral cause. His past comments—that it “is man who has slapped nature in the face”—frame the issue in vivid and urgent terms. He's presented the fossil fuel industry with a challenge. Though they have a well-worn playbook for countering the economic, political, and scientific need for climate change action, industry is in relatively new territory with religion. How will they reply?

Here's a hint: Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank closely aligned with the fossil fuel industry and climate-change denial, will send its own “experts” to the Vatican to argue against the Pope's points in a side panel for reporters. These experts will no doubt parrot the usual Heartland line, distorting the scientific consensus of humans’ impact on the climate and its consequences. “The world’s poor will suffer horribly if reliable energy—the engine of prosperity and a better life—is made more expensive and less reliable by the decree of global planners,” Heartland Institute President Joe Bast wrote in a press release. The American Petroleum Institute (API), the oil industry’s lobby arm, reprised a similar theme, telling The Guardian, “fossil fuels are a vital tool for lifting people out of poverty around the world, which is something we’re committed to.”

In other words, an industry driven by profit above all is attempting to rebrand itself as a champion for the poor. If you take this logic a step further, like Alex Epstein, founder of Center for Industrial Progress (and fossil fuel consultant), did in his 2014 book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, it is the world that owes industry executives a debt of gratitude. “I believe that we owe the fossil fuel industry an apology,” he writes. “While the industry has been producing the energy to make our climate more livable, we have treated it as a villain. We owe it the kind of gratitude that we owe anyone who makes our lives much, much better.” Epstein is confident in fossil fuels' ability to make the world “wonderful for human life.”

These critics, except maybe for Epstein, do have a point: It is an immense challenge to transition the world to clean energy without heaping burden on the poor, and it would also be unfair to expect countries such as India to make the same drastic cuts to carbon pollution as the United States and Europe.