I happened across a remarkable bit of mischief today. The site realclearenergy.com (a news headline aggregation site) had a link to an article "Climate Change: The Anti-Industrial Agenda" on a site called MasterResource. This site calls itself a "free-market energy blog," and the article turned out to be written by one E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D. He believes that the present warming is just a natural cycle, and he claims that global warming has "become the mother of all excuses for spending trillions of dollars, killing millions of jobs, trapping billions of people in poor countries in poverty, expanding government's control over our lives, and creating distant, unaccountable, global government." Now this sort of hyperbolic language is not unusual, but where it began to get more interesting is when Beisner introduces a group called the Cornwall Alliance as "the leading voice for evangelicals who reject climate alarmism and strive to protect the world's poor from harmful, and futile, efforts to fight global warming." Beisner's real target in the article is a collection of well-funded evangelical groups on the other side of the global warming battle. Curiosity prompted me to follow the link to the Cornwall Alliance. It turns out that the Beisner and the Cornwall Alliance believe that global warming is not possible because:
We believe Earth and its ecosystems—created by God's intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence—robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth's climate system is no exception. Recent global warming is one of many natural cycles of warming and cooling in geologic history.
That is, God won't let global warming happen because he is in control of nature.(This is in their statement "An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming.") Elsewhere on the same site, they have an article calling environmentalism the established religion of western society, having a holy day (Earth Day), food taboos (vegetarianism), sacred structures (recycle bins) and sacrifice rituals (recycling various substances). Another article ("Putting Together the Pieces in the Spiritual World War," July 18, 2012) traces environmentalism from Malthus to Darwin to eugenics and to the sexual revolution and global governance. It's rather hard to take this seriously, but the website (www.cornwallalliance.org) is professionally designed with attractive multimedia. This made me suspicious---who is behind the site? A bit of searching let me to rightwingwatch.org, which has several articles archived about Beisner, one of which describes him as follows:
According to a report by Think Progress , the Cornwall Alliance is a front group for the shadowy James Partnership. Both the James Partnership and the Cornwall Alliance are closely linked to the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), an anti-environmental group that is ü¾³¤¼funded by at least $542,000 from ExxonMobil, $60,500 from Chevron, and $1,280,000 from Scaife family foundations, which are rooted in wealth from Gulf Oil and steel interests.ü¾¤¼ CFACT is also part of a climate change denialist network funded by the ExxonMobil-financed Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Beisner is a CFACT board member and an "adjunct fellow" of the Acton Institute , which is primarily funded by groups like ExxonMobil, the Scaife foundations and the Koch brothers. Beisner is also an adviser to the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, which is financed by the oil-backed Earthart Foundation , the Koch brothers, and ExxonMobil.
In fact, Beisner is not a scientist and has no scientific credentials. Despite claiming to be an authority on energy and environmental issues, he received his Ph.D. in Scottish History.
(This is from The 'Green Dragon' Slayers: How the Religious Right and the Corporate Right are Joining Forces to Fight Environmental Protection, which is on the People For the American Way site; PFAW runs Right Wing Watch.)
Thus the mischief: A well-funded effort by the fossil fuel industry to use religion to convince evangelicals that efforts to fight global warming are morally wrong. This might be entirely sincere on Beisner's part or on the part of the large group of evangelical leaders who are associated with the Cornwall Alliance. But it is incredible that the energy industry is willing and able to go to th.
One more comment: This afternoon, I saw the article Global Warming's Terrifying New Math, by Bill McKibben (in Rolling Stone magazine) detailing the magnitude of the threat of global warming, and the efforts of the fossil fuel industry to fight efforts to stop global warming. The resources and persistence of that industry is underscored by the following comment by McKibben:
Left to our own devices, citizens might decide to regulate carbon and stop short of the brink; according to a recent poll, nearly two-thirds of Americans would back an international agreement that cut carbon emissions 90 percent by 2050. But we aren't left to our own devices. The Koch brothers, for instance, have a combined wealth of $50 billion, meaning they trail only Bill Gates on the list of richest Americans. They've made most of their money in hydrocarbons, they know any system to regulate carbon would cut those profits, and they reportedly plan to lavish as much as $200 million on this year's elections. In 2009, for the first time, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce surpassed both the Republican and Democratic National Committees on political spending; the following year, more than 90 percent of the Chamber's cash went to GOP candidates, many of whom deny the existence of global warming.