Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Clean Technica author Steve Hanley seems to think White Evangelicals have traded their integrity for Big Oil Money.
Why White Evangelicals Don’t Care About Climate Change
The evangelical community has been coming in for a lot of criticism in recent months, much of it from religious leaders and conservatives. They seem to be unmoved by the president’s constant berating of Muslims, people of color, refugees, Jews, gays, and any others who are not typically associated with the evangelical community. Actually, make that the white evangelical community, more than 80% of whom voted for Donald Trump. Only about 20% of non-white evangelicals did so, according to the Pew Research Center.
Have Evangelicals Sold Their Souls?
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Scratch the evangelicals who are parading around the corridors of power in Washington, DC, these days and you will find many of them are backed by the Koch Brothers. No one knows if either one of those old crocks attends church on a regular basis, but they have latched on to the evangelical movement and embraced it in a cynical attempt to solidify their political power.
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Fossil Fuels And God
At this point, I am going to stop and suggest — no urge — you to read an article on this topic published last September by Splinter entitled How Fossil Fuel Money Made Climate Change Denial the Word of God. “Conservative groups, funded by fossil fuel magnates, spend approximately one billion dollars every year interfering with public understanding of what is actually happening to our world,” the article points out.
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What the Koch Brothers and their minions have done is to cynically insinuate themselves and their desire to continue profiting from fossil fuels into the core beliefs of the evangelical movement. Writing in the Washington Post last year, Lisa Vox said, “When scientists began sounding the alarm over climate change in the 1980s, conservative evangelicals, who had been somewhat accepting of environmentalism in the 1970s, became convinced that the Antichrist would use the fear of climate change to seize power.”
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Read more: https://cleantechnica.com/2018/04/05/why-white-evangelicals-dont-care-about-climate-change/
Why should we even look at this vile discharge of delusional anti-Trump alarmist fantasy?
An experienced political campaigner once told me that you have to challenge every lie. The bigger the lie, the greater the risk that some people will accept the lie. The implausibility of a lie can actually add to the lie’s credibility. People find it so difficult to imagine someone would make up a story so ridiculous, they seriously consider the possibility that the story is actually true.
This kind of extreme fantasy might be the climate movement’s last gasp, but they have not lost yet. Clean Technica is not the Wall Street Journal, but people read Clean Technica and are influenced by it.
I have read such claims before, though this is probably the most extreme manifestation I have seen so far.
Allowing festering conspiracy theories like the above stand unchallenged, regardless of how implausible they are, can allow the infection to spread.
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Explain, please, how the Koch brothers profit from petroleum.
They own refineries and chemical plants at the very least, and what’s wrong with that?
They also own Scott Pruitt, and what’s wrong with that?
Wow according to the troll, if anyone agrees with a rich conservative, that is proof that the rich conservative owns you.
Be a troll and never have to worry about thinking for yourself again.
Prove me wrong MarkW instead of using ad-hominem https://www.ucsusa.org/publications/got-science/2017/got-science-feb-2017
Remy – my friend Helen backed President Obama. My friend Helen owns President Obama.
‘Prove me wrong MarkW instead of using ad-hominem ‘
Yep. Prove a negative, while you support your ad-hominem with the standard hack-sheets. I note you don’t seem concerned over who owns THEM.
Next, you can come here and tell all us skeptics how our movement began and who’s funding us.
And by the way, ‘Remy’ – who owns YOU?
Curious George, there are many different ways to “own” someone without backing them. Take blackmail for example. Or signing NDA’s
Remy, your link was about backing. Do you remember?
Remy, you made the claim, you prove it.
All you have is the fact that the agree on a lot of things.
That and your hatred is all you need to create vast conspiracies.
Joel: nobody
By your logic, any body who agrees with you either owns your or is owned by you. So out with it. Who owns you.
Also from about 4000 miles of petroleum product pipelines, not that there’s anything wrong with that.
White and Christian, here! Voted for our President, Donald Trump. And would do so again, today. You think his sexual exploits bother me? Sure. JFK seemed to have the same problem. And Bill Clinton. Get over it. King David? Worse. He had an affair after having the husband put in a deadly situation. That worked.
We Christian know how the earth is destroyed. You don’t have to believe it. We do. Fossil fuels is a Godsend. Look at Texas. What a blessed state. We can have all kinds of energy produced.
We are used to the criticism. We’re no better than our Lord. He is criticized all the time.
My two cents.
David put the husband into the dangerous situation after the affair.
during
Good comment, Cliff. I think you speak for a lot of people.
“They seem to be unmoved by the president’s constant berating of Muslims, people of color, refugees, Jews, gays, and any others…”
—————————————————————
What president is he talking about???
“Conservative groups, funded by fossil fuel magnates, spend approximately one billion dollars every year interfering with public understanding of what is actually happening to our world,…”
It’s okay. I speak post-modern, neo-marxist double speak. Translation: We don’t give a s$!t about reality or the condition of the world. That’s completely subjective nonsense. We want power and control, because that is the only thing that matters. If you get in our way…we will demonize you in any and every way possible. People are too stupid to see what we are doing, which is proof they need to be enslaved by our rule. You jive-ass dudes ain’t got no brains anyhow!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrZlWw8Di10
I don’t know how to a “8-)” appear larger or I would.
Another Ad Hominem attack. Only too lazy to single out a person for their vile propaganda. Might as well smear an entire group. It saves time and it increases the target / lies ratio. An important ratio that editors use to determine if a story will run and how prominently it will be displayed. Gossip sells, and the further it is from actual thinking the more it taps into raw emotion.
When you can’t pound the facts, you pound the desk. The facts are not what was “prophesied through the holy computer models”. So time to start burning some witches. It is a good way to divide the opposition and get them fighting among themselves.
Fascinating how liberals define any criticism of a protected group as invalid “berating”.
I guess it’s easier than actually dealing with the issues, just declare that those who disagree with you are evil and can be ignored.
You forgot to mention “hate” and “(fill in blank)-phobic”.
Steve Hanley claims are 180 degrees wrong.
‘White evangelicals’ and a whole lot of other people are not ‘selling’ their souls.
They simply are not ‘buying’ the valueless catastrophic anthropogenic climate claptrap!
The rest of Steve Hanley’s screed is just political hate speech…..
Liberals believe in banning hate speech.
The problem is their definition of hate speech is any speech that they disagree with.
Anything that they say, by definition, can’t be hate.
Kind of a ‘I left my effing cigarettes at the bar’ sort of built-in hypocrisy.
Socialist democrats preach ‘tolerance’, while denouncing all who disagree with their narrow, myopic perspectives. How they reconcile the resulting cognitive dissonance baffles experts worldwide.
A woman in S Africa recently got 2 years for a gibsonesque “kaffar” rant.
2 years in jail for hate speech.
(she should have used the Sri Lanka defense … where the ethnic Kaffars are just fine with the name/word.
“Yes your honor, I truly believed they were dirty Portuguese Sri Lankan Kaffars … I meant no offense to the South Africans that don’t like the word”).
Suggest reading the comments to the article . You may remember a certain person who no longer posts here …insightful ?
Is this a code?
No, just a really obscure reference.
I don’t know why Jimbo quit commenting here.
Are you referring to Janice? Gale? Jimbo? Me (at times there is a gap in the frequency of my comments)? You?
(Though I do wish that Hayhoe or Gore would comment!)
Sweet Old Bob,
Who the “H” are you referring to and why is that “insightfu”l?
Deliciously, Lisa Vox of WaPo actually described the real Big Lie and fell for it precisely because it is so ‘implausible’ that a conspiracy of this size could operate. That’s exactly how it works Lisa. Oh, and it wasn’t your fictitious experienced campaigner who described how the Big Lie works, it was the Big Liar himself: Goebels.
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/joseph-goebbels-on-the-quot-big-lie-quot
Look at what Soros, Steyer and the rest of the Davos set have been up to. Read the quotes of the creator of the UN bureaucracies that run this show (Maurice Strong) and such as former UNFCC head Chistiane Figueres. The “Antitrust” is using climate fear to seize power. Your article even stupidly doubles down on the Deplorables gaff that sunk He’s election chances
Mods: The irony is too good and very much on topic – please let it go. The topic itself begs for this type of response.
“An experienced political campaigner once told me that you have to challenge every lie. The bigger the lie, the greater the risk that some people will accept the lie. The implausibility of a lie can actually add to the lie’s credibility. People find it so difficult to imagine someone would make up a story so ridiculous, they seriously consider the possibility that the story is actually true.”
Ignoring what people are doing is how the battle is lost.
The rampant paranoia and projections of the Steve Hanley’s of this world is really something quite special to behold. His side has almost the entire lame-steam media in their pocket; most ‘public’ institutions and politicians also pay obeisance to their global-warming-alarmism brand of communism/politics; they also get the benefit of political support from numerous billionaires, from social media giants at Google, Facebook, Twitter etc; they also outspent Trump by $1Billion in the last election. In fact, they appear to have every gust of the prevailing wind blowing behind their sails.
And yet, and yet…apparently two aged philanthropist brothers by the name of Koch are supposedly able to out-compete and out-scheme all the many other billionaires who are trying to do the same thing for their own political goals? And the Koch’s double-handedly also thwarted the best efforts of all those other big actors combined? And they supposedly accomplished this unbelievable feat together with the alleged collusion of a handful of Russian trolls (who can probably barely speak English) buying a few cheap adverts on Facebook?
No. No they didn’t. It’s just not logical, Captain.
These people are so desperate to find an enemy-within, someone to hate and someone to blame, someone to shame for their own failures, that they are able to suspend every last vestige of analytical common sense that they ever owned. Even if their enemies were as guilty as imagined, any sensible person would be asking how so few managed to achieve so much, and not be spending so much time and effort cursing the darkness of their own ignorance. I dunno, sometimes one’s political opponents seem so delusional that it only evokes pity and the desire to tell them where they are going so wrong. But not today. The irony is that they are the last people willing to listen to sensible advice, even from people like Roger Pielke Jr. who are, or were, on their side.
As an Evangelical let me state that real Christianity is about your personal walk with God. It has nothing to do with the world. We are to be in the world but not of it. There is much more, but suffice to say it does not include Climate Change, Social Justice, or any other made-up phrase from the Left. Those words are merely attempts to insert their Paganism into the Church. The first clue we Evangelicals get about such ideas is they are so vague they can be defined many different ways. There is nothing vague about God’s take on anything.
It is interesting that the Original Sin of Sex has been replaced by the sin of Profit, via the sin of Pollution.
Actually the Original Sin was pride that Adam and Eve could be like God. Sex was actually commanded by God prior to the fall. “Be fruitful and multiply”
I vote for eating the forbidden fruit as the original sin. Of course Adam and Eve could be like God; formed in his image, presumably immortal and their descendents were commanded “be ye therefore perfect” — what do you suppose happens then?
The serpent told Eve that the reason why God didn’t want them to eat from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, was because if she did, she would be like God.
Will somebody give that poor snowflake in the center a handful of tissue? LOL
Translation: We don’t give a s$!t about reality or the condition of the world. That’s completely subjective nonsense. We want power and control, because that is the only thing that matters.
===================
Old Time religion was all about controlling Sex. If we aren’t getting any, neither should you. The new religion is all about controlling free money (grants and handouts). If were aren’t getting any, neither should you.
Speak for yourself, here. I didn’t expect you were anti-Christian. Back when, controlling sex was a means to control disease and to see that children were cared for by both parents. There were plenty of sinners, of course. Today, STDs are rampant. I wonder why?
Did you have any particular old time religion in mind? There’s about 7,000 old time Christian denominations, several major Islamic denominations, quite a few flavors of Judaism; and we haven’t even started on *really* old time religions such as Buddhism, Shinto and so on.
According to Wikipedia, Buddhism arose during the 5 century BC. Older than Islam and Christianity, but a thousand years or more younger than Judiasm.
The only sex they tried to control was sex outside of marriage.
Most societies have tried to control that, not just Christian ones.
Please try to learn a little about real Christianity, not the cartoon versions that are popular with most atheists.
Ferdberple:
You have bought a modern idea – “religion was invented to control sex – duh, duh, duh, ” produced and sold by someone. Go investigate. This is one of the most retarded posts on the internet this week.
If I didn’t know any better, I’d think I had stumbled upon a blog about Jordan Peterson and post-modern new marxism.
All non-evangelicals should quit using fossil fuels. That should cure the co2 problem.
Awesome. Give us a religious exemption, and the rest of yall go solar.
It’s the UNDERSTANDING of science that’s at issue here — an issue, given the sad state of our schools, not likely to be resolved in our time. In the meantime it’s hugely important that we ‘deniers’ take measures to disallow the ‘collectivists’ from defining the Kochs — tough assignment given the current ‘pre-sets’ of today’s media.
Well, that was a hate filled screed of putrid fecal matter.
First of all, evangelicals as a whole have a multitude of different reasons for not voting for Hillary and the Democrat party, which by the way, is what the author is really angry about.
Democrats made it plain before the election how much they despised evangelicals. They made it plain that evangelicals were deplorable. They made it plain that evangelicals should be silenced and even jailed for their beliefs. They made it plain that they hate evangelicals.
I know of very few evangelicals that believe in AGW, but most of them cannot give a scientific reason as to why they feel that way. Instead, many feel that way because the very people who hate them also have a love affair with Gaia and AGW.
Then there are those evangelicals who do know the scientific principles and the historical record and reject AGW based on those things. I fall in that category.
Finally, there are the evangelicals who see it more through a political eye and reject AGW because they are well aware that the principles of socialism and central planning are inimical to the constitution, whose amendments allow them to practice their religion.
However, I don’t know, will never know, nor will I ever meet someone who knows the Koch brothers.
The Democrats, also known as the Social Progressives, need someone to hate. Hatred gives them power. Hatred gives them meaning. Hatred gives them purpose.
I’m an old white evangelical! I follow the “scientific method” and maintained my interest in physical geology since university in 1950. I wouldn’t know the Koch brothers if I fell over them, but I do know the difference between field work (outdoors) and sitting behind a computer monitor. My old geology prof would be having fits over modelers.
You’ve had a long life. A longer life too you! (Aside from the one He’s provided.)
Climate change causes race baiting…or maybe advocacy does.
Posting my little hymn for those who might not have seen:
An Ode to the Church
On Fighting Climate Change
Bureaucrats and Global Planners
Speak in agitated manners,
Predicating great disaster:
“Climate change we now must master!”
Human guilt and blame beseeching:
“Children, shame we should be teaching!
Man has sinned by overreaching
Fragile Gaia’s limit!”
Beware: this bold apostasy
Spins prophesy from vanity!
The firmaments will never be
Controlled by mortal hands!
So, use this world as best you can
To take care of your fellow man,
And leave Earth’s destiny to God’s great plan!
This Universe is God’s, alone
Commanding elements He owns.
Perplexes any man’s control,
Yet, still provides for every soul!
Or, may I put it this way…
Ode to Climate Activism
A Limerick
I long was a fan of Ecology,
‘Til it became ‘Gaia’s Theology’.
To question the memes
Is heretical it seems,
And errant exceeding apology!
Rather than Meteorology,
These pontiffs employ Ideology.
Political gain
Is their pleasure – our pain,
As they garner support by Psychology.
Yes, the science-of-climate’s esteem
Is built on ‘unprecedented extreme’.
It appears the mundane
Would be ill to their gain,
As it’s lucrative for them to scream.
So, it’s up to the people to learn,
And facts, from spin to discern.
Is the planet in harm,
Or just false alarm?
Which way will society turn?
The difference between “ideology” and “theology” is the “ideo” and the “theo” parts. Man’s ideas versus God’s ideas.
Now, I admit that there is way to much of Man’s ideas mixed in with “Religion”, Christian or otherwise, including the idea that Man “owes” something to the Earth or that putting the Earth First is what He had in mind. (Beginning to root out Man’s ideas and philosophies from Christianity, what God did in Christ, is what the Reformation was all about.)
As far as “White Evangelicals” goes,
KJV Acts 17:26a And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth …
Man has placed a difference between themselves based on “race”. God hasn’t. John 3:16 is His offer to all equally.
In other words, just because Al Gore, Hayhoe, (et al)’s egos and pocketbooks have been greased by the lure of fame, power and profit.
My skepticism has not been greased by Big Oil.
TYPO of omission?
“In other words, just because Al Gore, Hayhoe, (et al)’s egos and pocketbooks have been greased by the lure of fame, power and profit.
My skepticism has not been greased by Big Oil.”
Should be:
“In other words, just because Al Gore, Hayhoe, (et al)’s egos and pocketbooks have been greased by the lure of fame, power and profit, doesn’t mean that those who don’t agree with them have been “greased”.
My skepticism has not been greased by Big Oil.
What do progressives seek? The goal has been the same for thousands of years, since at least the time of Plato’s Republic. They seek a godless (secular) Utopia by which humanity is transformed and attains a higher consciousness. But this is just a deity-free religion, just as depicted by Marx and his “scientific socialism. But in reality, it is a religion because it seeks to allow humans to transcend their current bounds of body, mind and spirit. It is thus “transcendent” If anyone doubts, just look up “New Man”
New Man (utopian concept)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Man_(utopian_concept)
It should be plain by now that because all of this effort to change society, so as to change humanity is only for the good. So, anyone who disagrees with the effort and especially anyone to works against it, is delaying this Utopia, and therefore must be destroyed or at least silenced and neutralized.
In my guest-thread, Notes from Skull Island: Why Skeptics Aren’t Well-Funded and Well-Organized, at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/16/notes-from-skull-island-why-skeptics-arent-well-funded-and-well-organized/ , I listed 22 things that would be happening if contrarians were in fact well-organized and well-funded, but aren’t.