by William Trollinger

As Ken Ham proclaims again and again, the crisis facing Western civilization is the  “gender revolution” :

The West has increasingly abandoned God’s Word – and the truth that we’re created male and female that is abundantly clear in Scripture (Genesis 1:27) as well as biologically obvious – and the results are more chaos and an environment where evil can flourish.

We need to be alarmed – even frightened – by the “gender revolution.”

But when it comes to global warming, Answers in Genesis (AiG) has a message for us: it’s time to chill. There is no conclusive evidence that the Earth is warming; even if it is warming it is not because of us and it is not significant; but even if the Earth is warming significantly, that may very well be a good thing (given the possible bumper crops in northern Canada and – with the melting of the ice — the increased Arctic shipping).

So, if global warming is not happening or it is not happening much or it is really happening but that’s a good thing, why all the global warming alarmism?

That’s simple. It is the product of an anti-Christian, anti-Western, anti-capitalist political correctness promoted by folks (like Al Gore) who also want to make lots of money from the global warming scare.

But that is not the whole story. According to AiG, not only is global warming alarmism politically and economically driven, it also – and here’s argument #5 on behalf of denying that we should do anything about global warming – badly hurts the poor. Placing restrictions on energy corporations not only limits the freedom of corporations to do what they want to do, but it also means  “increased costs of producing food, powering vehicles, and heating and cooling homes”  such that “lower-income families, especially in less-developed countries, would be hit especially hard.” According to one AiG author, carbon regulation “could actually cause suffering in some nations where resources would be better spent feeding the poor.”

In making this argument that efforts to combat global warming actually hurts those at the bottom of the economic ladder, the folks at AiG draw upon Calvin Beisner. Beisner is the head of the Cornwall Alliance, an organization that spreads the message of global-warming denial among evangelicals. As quoted by AiG, Beisner (“a respected environmental expert”) has pronounced that “the policies that are being promoted to fight global warming not only will not make a difference . . . but also will have a great harmful impact on the world’s poor.”

For all of Beisner’s concern for the poor, he fails to mention that much of the funding for his Cornwall Alliance has come from the Donor’s Trust (an organization with close ties to the Koch brothers) as well as from the Exxon-Mobil corporation. Is Beisner more concerned with the poor, or his fossil fuel funders?

And what about AiG? What is its investment in denying global warming? And how does their global warming denial square with their theology? That’s the topic of the next post.

And thanks to Joe Arrendale, my graduate assistant and a doctoral student at the University of Dayton, for his work of gathering and summarizing the AiG climate change articles.