When Pope Francis becomes the first pontiff to address a joint session of Congress this week, much focus will be on how Republicans will respond to the pope’s position on the climate. If Francis presses his case that the world must take urgent action to combat climate change, you can expect cameras to find Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, whose office recently indicated it is doubling down on efforts to fight President Barack Obama’s new greenhouse-gas reductions.

But this domestic political drama, absorbing in its own right, may obscure a more important, even radical, shift in the global politics of climate change that Francis has helped to advance. In his June encyclical addressing the issue, he emphasized the fundamental environmental rights of the world’s impoverished, and suggested the rich who have benefited from fossil fuels have a moral obligation to help the poor who may suffer most from climate change. “The poor and the Earth are shouting,” the pope wrote.

This emphasis on the fate of the poor seems like an understandable moral position in keeping with Francis’ broader emphasis on poverty and inequality. But it also draws attention to one of the biggest practical hurdles currently standing in the way of the U.N. climate agreement being negotiated later this year in Paris.

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