Ideas Have Consequences

Climate & Energy: The Case for Realism with E. Calvin Beisner & David R. Legates

• Disciple Nations Alliance • Season 2 • Episode 35

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What should Christians really think about climate change? What does the Bible have to say about creation care? E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D. and Dr. David R. Legates, Ph.D. from the Cornwall Alliance have spent their lives trying to provide this perspective. Their new book, Climate and Energy,brings together numerous experts on climate science, physics, economics, environmental science, political science, ethics, and theology. It brings a clear understanding about the ideas of human-induced climate change and how Christians should respond. In today’s episode, you’ll learn the basics of climate change and how differing worldviews significantly affect a person’s response to the issue. You’ll also learn about renewable energy and its effects on the poor, along with the impact of postmodernism on the field of science. Finally, we offer some critiques of the Christian creation care movement that Megan Basham covered in her recent bestselling book, Shepherds for Sale. Be sure to tune in tomorrow to hear the in-house discussion and our personal takeaways from this eye-opening episode.

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David Legates:

They think that environmental degradation is caused because of three things Population, which means people are bad. Affluency, which means poverty is good. And technology, which means stay poor and stay technologically disadvantaged. And I think that is a key to destroying the planet and destroying the people on the planet.

Calvin Beisner:

People are not the cancer but the answer. We're not pollution but solution. We're not the bomb but we're the bloom, and if we look at history of the quality of the environment and the availability of various resources that we need, that history backs up the notion that people actually create more resources than we consume and we can make the world a cleaner, healthier place than we find it.

Luke Allen:

Hi friends, welcome to Ideas have Consequences. The podcast of the Disciple Nations Alliance. Here on this show we examine how our mission as Christians is to not only spread the gospel around the world, to all the nations, but our mission also includes to be the hands and feet of God, to transform the nations to increasingly reflect the truth, goodness and beauty of God's kingdom. Tragically, the church has largely neglected this second part of her mission and today most Christians have little influence on their surrounding cultures. Join us on this podcast as we rediscover what it means for each of us to disciple the nations and to create Christ-honoring cultures that reflect the character of the living God.

Scott Allen:

Well, welcome again everybody to another episode of Ideas have Consequences. This is the podcast of the Disciple Nations Alliance. I'm Scott Allen, I'm the president of the DNA and I'm joined today by my colleagues Luke Allen and Dwight Vogt, and today we are thrilled to have with us a couple of very special guests that I've known for years but we've never met and they didn't know about us, but I've known of them and their work, but we've never met and they didn't know about us, but I've known of them and their work. Calvin Beisner is with us and his colleague, david Legates, is also with us, and they are both members of a ministry, I think founders of a ministry called the Cornwall Alliance for the stewardship of creation, and that's going to be our topic today. They are authors, most recently, of this book right here, which I have in my hands, called Climate and Energy the Case for Realism, and we're actually doing this interview within 10 days or two weeks, of Megan Basham's book that was released as well, called Shepherds for Sale, and I'm just reading through that book. And Calvin and David, you guys show up very quickly in that book, which is now number three or four on the Amazon bestseller list, and so I'm really anxious to hear your thoughts because she talks about how evangelical pastors have been kind of towing the line of the dominant narrative on climate change, with a lot of funding from far-left donors behind that, and you guys are a part of the discussion in that chapter, so it'll be fun to hear your thoughts and reactions to that. But anyways, it's great to have you with us and let me just introduce, before we get into our discussion, a little bit for our listeners who are not familiar with Calvin and David.

Scott Allen:

Calvin is, as I mentioned, the president of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. He's a scholar who has studied philosophy, religion, economics and the history of political thought and environmental ethics. David is the director of education and research for the Cornwall Alliance. He's a professor emeritus at the University of Delaware and a scientist who works on climate, weather, hydrology and statistics. He also serves as the executive director for the United States Global Change Research Program and so just again, really thrilled to have you guys with us here today. I know, calvin, you're author of many books and maybe you could just briefly talk about some of the books that you've written, because I know they expand beyond just the subject of climate, climate change and things like that.

Calvin Beisner:

Yeah well, my first book was actually on the early history of the doctrine of the Trinity, called God in Three Persons. It started out, actually, as my senior thesis at the University of Southern California and, unbeknownst to me, the woman who became my wife took the manuscript of that and gave it to the acquisitions editor at Tyndale House and a few weeks later I got a letter in the mail saying may we publish your book, which was kind of an exciting thing for a fellow who wanted to be an author but wasn't yet. So that's nice. Author but wasn't yet. So that's nice. I've written that book, a book of essays, devotional expository essays on the Psalms, called Psalms of Promise, celebrating the majesty and faithfulness of God, grouping Psalms in sequence, from creation through to consummation, through salvation history, and focused on the theme of covenant, probably best known for my books Prosperity and Poverty, the Compassionate Use of Resources and Prospects for Growth, a Biblical View of Population Resources and the Future that were part of Crossway's Turning Point Christian Worldview series. That were part of Crossway's Turning Point Christian Worldview series.

Calvin Beisner:

Those are the first one, a general introduction to economics from a biblical worldview standpoint, and the second one specifically focusing on population resources, environmental quality and so on, and because I take a fairly contrarian view in that latter view to the sort of doom and gloom perspective that we're facing overpopulation and all kinds of environmental degradation.

Calvin Beisner:

Because of that that got me a reputation as something that was contrarian. And I'm actually happy to have that, because I find over and over again that contrarian thinking tends to be much better supported by solid evidence. It's very easy to just latch on to whatever is the majority point of view. If you're going to hold upon a contrarian view you better do your homework. Those led to a book, a small book called man, economy and Environment in Biblical Perspective, and then a book called when Garden Meets Wilderness Evangelical Entry into the Environmental Debate. It was a sort of a history of the first couple of decades of evangelical environmentalism combined with a constructive critique. But I've also written a book called Answers for Atheists, agnostics and Other Thoughtful Skeptics Basic Apologetics. I've written Social Justice versus Biblical Justice how Good Intentions Undermine Justice and Gospel.

Calvin Beisner:

I've edited quite a lot of different books for various publishing houses through the years a little over 30.

Calvin Beisner:

And I've edited quite a lot of different books for various publishing houses through the years a little over 30, and I've contributed to probably about 40 different books over the years. Policy especially related to environmental stewardship and economic development for the poor, partly because, unfortunately, a lot of the environmental movement holds policy positions that tend to slow, stop or even reverse the conquest of poverty in developing countries reverse the conquest of poverty in developing countries. And I stand with the Apostle Paul who, in Galatians 2.10, says that when he visited the apostles in Jerusalem, they had just one question for him, or one request rather that he remember the poor. He said that's exactly what I was already doing anyway, and so I'm very concerned about the impact, the negative impact, of a lot of environmental policy on the poor around the world. So I want to find ways both to be good stewards of God's creation and to promote the rise and remaining out of poverty for people around the world who are poor out of poverty for people around the world who are poor.

Scott Allen:

That's great Boy. We have so much in common. You know, when you were talking about the work that you've done and kind of the intersection of theology and worldview and as it intersects topics of poverty and development, I mean that's been our life as well, so I'm so happy again we could connect. David, tell us a little bit about your background as well. How long have you guys been working together? It sounds like you have more of a kind of academic university type of background, but please, yeah, just give us a little bit of a background on yourself as well.

David Legates:

Yeah, I've been affiliated with the Cornwall Alliance for well a number of years, I guess back to at least 10, 12 years ago when I think Cal sort of had the idea. I was at the University of Oklahoma, then at Louisiana State University and then back to my alma mater University of Delaware. So much of what I've done has been academic writings of articles and so forth. I have worked on two other books. One is Hot Talk, cold Science, which was Fred Singer's third edition of his book he died shortly thereafter but I helped get that out before he died and then also to what's called the Non-Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is a companion, if you will, to the IPCC, which essentially says that what you're reading in the IPCC may not be the whole story. Here's some articles that show things in a different light and sort of makes the case that maybe the end of the world is not near, that humans are not destroying the planet, that there is hope and that we don't need to forego fossil fuels to save the planet.

Scott Allen:

Well, david, you're leading right into my first question and you know you mentioned right there this kind of doomsday sentiment that surrounds this issue of climate, and I know for a lot of our younger listeners and people that we interact with, they really believe this and I've noticed that it's real Ideas have consequences and they do live with a sense of kind of fear, severe fear, I guess, and it affects the way they think about their lives, their families, their future. So I would like you, if you, david or Cal, if you could both of you guys just kind of briefly explain what is the dominant view in the culture around this subject of climate. I know it's hard to do that briefly, but then I think we all are somewhat familiar with it because it's very dominant. But how would you describe it, this view that is leading to such a strong sense of doom amongst so many people?

Luke Allen:

Dad, if you wouldn't mind me stepping in, I would love to just set the stage as simply as possible and then dive into some of the main views. I know for a lot of our listeners well, maybe not a lot, but some of our listeners you're already getting pretty skeptical, as I know I would have been about five years ago because you hear these, you know hot button issues, climate change. You hear people and you're already kind of getting okay, are these climate deniers? What am I hearing here? So I was wondering if we could just jump right into this with kind of a I don't know a Senate-style yes and no answer back and forth here, so we can get a couple of the very main points at least out in the discussion here. So, david, since you're a climate scientist, I'd love to just ask you a couple simple questions here. All right, you ready? Yeah, sure, go ahead. All right, here goes. First off is the climate changing.

David Legates:

Climate is changing because climate always has changed. It's one of the issues that we keep saying we've got to keep climate from changing. It's like saying I want to keep the sun from shining, I want to keep it from rising tomorrow. That's never going to happen. Climate has varied on timescales from years to decades, to centuries to you name it as far out as the planet goes and so climate has never remained constant. So that's one of the things we do agree is that when you ask the question is our climate changing? The answer is always yes. So there's no such thing as a climate change denier. Well, there might be some, but not in scientific circles, because climate changes. The real question is why is it changing?

Luke Allen:

Yes, and how much?

David Legates:

And how much?

Luke Allen:

Yes, let's say roughly speaking, in the last 100 years, how much has the climate changed in, let's say, degrees Fahrenheit?

David Legates:

About one degree Fahrenheit. It's gone up. The question is again why did it increase? And in part it increased because about 150 years ago we were in a period called the Little Ice Age. It's a misnomer. It wasn't an ice age, it was a little cold period that doesn't quite have the same cachet, but it was a much colder period over the last thousand years. And so we come out of that. Things warm, we have a more active sun. That's taken over. We have more sunspots now, which is an indicator of a more active sun. So we can relate that to decreases in solar output. So we sort of measure that at the end of a really cold period. So there's a rise in temperatures.

David Legates:

The other issue is that humans can and do change our climate, and one of the ways in which we do that is through what we call the urban heat island effect. I mean, if you look at any major city on a night, when there really is no weather happening, the warmest place is downtown and as you get out and away in the countryside it gets colder. That's because of the retained heat of the city. Part of the problem is that until the 1940s most of our weather stations were located downtown. Then we had these newfangled flying jinnies, airplanes, dirigibles. It made more sense to move them outside of town Cheaper land, they needed area to take off. It also made more sense to move the the weather stations out to these new airports, and so they were out away from the city.

David Legates:

All of a sudden there's a cooling that takes place in the record and then, as urban heat island, spreads as uh, you know, dulles, for example, at one point dulles airport was out in the middle of nowhere, and now if you look at it, it's surrounded by urban sprawl associated with Washington DC. All of that introduces a warming trend. So part of the problem with our surface thermometers is they're biased on where they're located and so they're measuring local temperatures, not necessarily global temperatures. So you can see a lot of this in the record, which has to be sort of divined out so we can try to figure out what's happening globally.

Luke Allen:

Fascinating. Yeah, I'm so glad we just got a couple of those things on the table already. One degree Fahrenheit increase in the last hundred years. Why doesn't anyone know that? You know, I just I'm continuing to be shocked by this and Dad yeah, why don't we get into your first question as well? Is In this whole broad debate, what is your guess?

Calvin Beisner:

Well, first, if I might interject just very quickly, go for it. All the climate scientists do know that, including the climate scientists who are very alarmist, catastrophist in their perspectives. They all know that the problem is that for their perceptions of what's coming in the future, they're really relying not nearly so much on data about the past, over which there's not an awful lot of controversy. There are some reasons to think that some of the data have been adjusted in ways that increase the perception of the amount of warming over the last 60 to 80 years or so. But what they do for the future is to depend on climate models computer climate models that, when they are set to hindcast, to work backward, grossly exaggerate the warming trend of the past, which means that they cannot be accurate representations of how the or representations of how the actual climate system works. But they use them anyway, and then those become the basis for fears about dangerous, perhaps catastrophic, maybe even existential threat global warming.

Scott Allen:

Yeah, if I could have you both just explain and I think, luke your questions. You know really got, you know already started into this, but just how would you describe the quote-unquote settled science and we'll talk about what settled science means here in a little bit but the dominant narrative on climate, how would you describe that?

Calvin Beisner:

briefly. I think David would be really good on that, especially because chapter two of our book is on the history of climate change, quote unquote. And a major point that he makes in that is it's not about the science and it never has been.

David Legates:

Yeah, the science is never settled. I mean, even our concept of gravity, for example, works for most areas, but, for example, when you start talking about interstellar galactic type of developments and subatomic particles, the model doesn't work. And so there's a lot of history that has gone on where we thought things were true. Semmelweis argued, for example, there were germs and we should wash hands between patients, and he was the settled. Science says that that doesn't make any sense and eventually we found out he was right. At some point the Earth was at the center of the universe and the sun and all the planets orbited the Earth. We know that's not right either. So there's been a lot of cases where science has gotten it wrong, and that's one of the issues is that we try to focus on.

David Legates:

As a Christian is to look for truth, but even as a scientist, the idea is is what we think the way the world works really the way it works? And that's one of the problems with climate models. You think we take all of the ingredients that we know about climate, we encode them into mathematics. We take the mathematics, we make code out of it, programming code, and we run the model and we see what happens and it says the end of the world is near. But that's not what happens. And we've known you know, insiders have known for an awful long time that the way this is set up is that the models have two major problems. On the grand scale I won't talk about you know things like convective adjustments and all the internal workings, but the idea is it's a tunable parameter that says how much the model will warm as a response of increasing carbon dioxide. We can estimate that independently. We've come up with estimates Now. It's somewhere between about 0.8 and 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit I'm sorry, 0.8 and 1.2 degrees Celsius. The models are running a sensitivity of about three to three and a half degrees Celsius, so they're way too sensitive to changes in carbon dioxide.

David Legates:

And then one of the problems we ran into in the development of what was going to be the next national climate assessment and since I was part of the executive director of the US Global Change Research Program, that was one of the things that I was overseeing is that historically, what climate scientists do is they take the worst scenario possible, and that's usually called what's it? Rcp 8.5, or now it's SSP 8.5. But simply put, it is the most extreme scenario you can get between how much carbon dioxide goes into the atmosphere between now and, say, 2100. So you take an extreme scenario on how much carbon dioxide is going to be there.

David Legates:

You take a model that overemphasizes the relationship between temperature and carbon dioxide and you get a model that says temperature rise between now and 75 years from now is going to be about 10 degrees Fahrenheit, and even climate scientists are starting to say that's not acceptable. I mean, one of the reasons they do that is that you hit the model with a hammer to get a big signal, and big signals are something you can write home about. It becomes statistically significant, significant and it becomes theoretically important. It doesn't necessarily make it so, but models are never designed to be hit with hammers like that. They're always designed to be pushed slightly to just see what happens, because you put them outside their range of expertise and who knows what they're going to get. So that's part of the problem with climate models is they always overstate. The case knows what they're going to get.

Scott Allen:

So that's part of the problem with climate models is they always overstate the case. So, if I could just summarize, the dominant narrative is that temperatures are going to rise over the course of the next 75 years by approximately 10 degrees, and that's being largely driven by increases in carbon dioxide human caused correct, solely caused by carbon dioxide and methane and nitrous oxide, but other greenhouse gases that are almost exclusively caused by human activity. Human activity cows, animals and these kinds of things as well.

Scott Allen:

So domestic farming and things like that. Now, I love nature shows. I listen to Sir Richard Attenborough and he tells me it's just absolutely conclusive that you know, as we look out across this beautiful creation of ours, that it's being destroyed, that islands are sinking, the reef, the Great Barrier Reef, is dying. I mean, it's just beyond discussion at this point. How do you respond to that?

David Legates:

No, no and no.

Calvin Beisner:

Essentially pretty briefly yeah.

David Legates:

The Great Barrier Reef is doing fine. Thank you, peter Ridd has done a lot of studies with that and gotten into fights in Australia. Part of the argument is with carbon dioxide is plant food. If you go into any commercial greenhouse, you'll see that the carbon dioxide concentration is higher inside the greenhouse than it is outside, and that's counterintuitive because the plants are using up carbon dioxide, so you'd assume that the carbon dioxide concentration would be lower. The reason it's higher is because there's usually a box somewhere in the corner that's producing carbon dioxide. Because the more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, plants grow better. In fact, not only do they grow better, they also grow more efficiently with respect to water use. So if you're running a greenhouse, you want to have as much carbon dioxide in there as possible to allow the plants to get carbon dioxide without having to open the stomates as wide. Now, by the same token, if carbon dioxide is increasing globally, shouldn't we be seeing the planet greening? Dioxide is increasing globally. Shouldn't we be seeing the planet greening? And the answer is yes, we are. If you look at the planet, except in areas where there's obvious deforestation, there's obvious places where there's urbanization taking place, most of the planet is becoming greener due to enhanced carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and there was a recent study just this past year that tried to determine why that is. Is it carbon dioxide? Is it change in temperature? Is it something else? And they concluded that more than 85% of the planet is greening because of the additional carbon dioxide that plants are getting. So the planet is doing very fine and doing much better under carbon dioxide.

David Legates:

What about humans? Generally speaking, we find that human civilization develops better under warmer conditions. Under colder conditions, they're fighting to find food, they're fighting to stay warm, there's other things going on, so they don't really develop. Civilization doesn't really develop as well, but under warmer conditions there's more food available, there's more availability of time, for example, to develop civilization, to develop technology, to bring yourself out of poverty. Those are, I would assume, all good things. But, as we saw with the early cauldron equation, it's actually not. Because they think that environmental degradation is caused because of three things Population, which means people are bad. Affluency, which means poverty is good. And technology, which means stay poor and stay technologically disadvantaged. And I think that is a key to destroying the planet and destroying the people on the planet.

Scott Allen:

Well, so again, that leads to the question, the obvious question why would they want that? Who wants a world where there's a greater poverty. You know what's behind. What's behind? Maybe I'm asking a question of kind of basic assumptions, worldview assumptions, but what's behind this dominant narrative that, it seems to me, as I listen to it, a lot of scientists are on board with, and, because of that, a lot of Christians are as well?

Calvin Beisner:

You really are asking a question with worldview implications. We as Christians, we walk into these conversations with the assumption human beings are wonderful things. I mean, yes, we're fallen into sin, but nonetheless we're made in God's image and every new human being born into this world is a cause for celebration. And we read Psalm 127, for instance children are a gift from the Lord, not his punishment. The fruit of the womb is his reward, not his curse, like arrows in the hand of a mighty man. So are children in the days of one's youth. Happy is the man whose quiver is full of them. We read that and we all just resonate with that.

Calvin Beisner:

Because we start out with this assumption about human beings made in God's image, most of the environmentalist movement starts out with a very different assumption. We are, the current product ways, quantitatively different from amoebas and frogs and primates, but we're not qualitatively different in any way. And because we have become so adept at changing the world around us to our own advantage, we are therefore a threat to everything else. And so if you start out with that kind of a worldview, instead it leads inexorably to a sort of a biological egalitarianism Human beings and apes and porpoises and frogs and whatnot are all of equal value, even if we're not of equal material capacity. And if that's the case, then it becomes very easy to think that humans' impact on the rest of creation is going to be negative. David was referring to the formula. It's not really a formula, but it's presented as if it were a formula that Paul Ehrlich devised. I impact environmental impact, which is always assumed to be negative, equals P for population, times A for affluence, times T for technology. So the more people you have, the more affluent they are, and the higher their level of technology, the more negative impact they're going to have on the environment. Now, the fact is, historically, that that's just flat out not true. And this is because, although they assume that human beings are basically consumers and polluters, we're using up the earth's resources and we're poisoning the planet while we're at it.

Calvin Beisner:

The Bible teaches that because we're made in God's image, we can be producers and stewards, as he is, and so we can actually improve the world around us. And again we go back to biblical revelation here In Genesis 128, god, having made Adam and Eve after his own image, male and female, blessed them and said to them be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and everything that moves on the face of the earth. We come into this discussion as Christians with this basic assumption that God has told us that we are actually supposed to change the world around us, that it is not best untouched by human hands, as one environmentalist in the 1960s put it in. It was Barry Commoner in his book the Four Laws of Ecology. Instead, we see that nature can be best transformed by human hands, particularly as we learn to think God's thoughts after him, which is why, in all of my work and in the work of the Cornwall Alliance, we've always linked together concern about environmental stewardship and concern about economic development for the poor and concern about the propagation of the gospel and the teaching of biblical worldview, theology and ethics, because we fallen sinners right are not going to think God's thoughts after him very well and we're not going to use his creation the way he wants us to use it as long as we remain overwhelmingly in rebellion against him.

Calvin Beisner:

So, the Great Commission, to make disciples of all nations, which is what is so much at the heart of your work, the Great Commission, to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey all.

Calvin Beisner:

Jesus said that I have commanded you, and of course we remember that Jesus is the one who is the word, who spoke the word of the Old Testament.

Calvin Beisner:

This means teaching full obedience to everything in Scripture.

Calvin Beisner:

Full obedience to everything in Scripture.

Calvin Beisner:

If we do that, then we can exercise dominion in a way that reflects God's own, who started with nothing, made everything started with darkness, made light, started with chaos, made order, started with non-life, made life, started with empty seas and lands and skies and then populated them with all kinds of varieties of life. So that as we pursue this dominion mandate, we should be pursuing what I would call godly dominion, meaning men and women working together lovingly to enhance the fruitfulness and the beauty and the safety of the earth to the glory of God and the benefit of our neighbors, so that we're addressing the two great commandments to love God and to love neighbor. And you know I can't find anybody, including among environmentalists, who thinks that I think it's a bad idea to enhance the fruitfulness, the beauty and the safety of the earth. That's great, and if we can get that across, then I think we can begin building bridges and drawing people to understand that the Christian faith really does give us the way to understand how we need to be using God's wonderful creation.

Scott Allen:

Well, you've said a whole lot there, calvin. Let me just go back, though, because I agree with you. I think that so much of the divergence between this dominant narrative and the counter-narrative that you put forth really does involve this basic assumption, this basic principle of what does it mean to be a human being? And on one side, as you have well said, you know, human beings are highly evolved animals. Have well said, you know, human beings are highly evolved animals, and when we look at the animal realm, we see consumers of resources and this principle of survival of the fittest, you know, and that's led, you know, over hundreds of years, to all sorts of very deadly philosophies.

Scott Allen:

Again ideas have consequences. The Malthusian philosophy it's basically the same idea that we see today that people are the problem. People are destroyers of the planet, consumers of scarce resources. So people need to be eliminated. And when you come to that conclusion, philosophically or theologically I take people at their word they're going to figure out some way of doing that kind of really deadly thing.

Scott Allen:

On the other side, you've got the Bible, which says that no, human beings are not fundamentally animals. We're image bearers of God, even though we are creatures like animals, because God created us both. Only humans are made in God's image and only we have this capacity, this unique capacity, to have dominion and to actually create, to create resources. We're not just consumers of resources, but we're creators of resources. So we have the capacity, this really powerful capacity, to leave the world better than we found it. And you're right, we're fallen and so we often destroy, you know, god's beautiful creation. Right, we're fallen and so we often destroy God's beautiful creation. But the story of redemption is also a story of us recovering our ability to do what God wanted us to do. I know I'm just repeating what you said. I just think it's really important because these first assumptions are so…. Would they go in such dramatically different directions? They do, they do On this, yeah.

Calvin Beisner:

You know, back in 1962, a spokesman for the Rockefeller Foundation said the world has cancer and that cancer is man. We've been called people pollution, the population bomb. You know what do bombs do? They explode. They blow things to smithereens. That's not a very positive image of mankind. I say instead people are not the cancer but the answer. We're not pollution but solution. We're not the bomb but we're the bloom. Right, a basic history of the quality of the environment and the availability of various resources that we need. That history backs up the notion that people actually create more resources than we consume and we can make the world a cleaner, healthier place than we find it. So you look, for example, at the inflation adjusted and, most importantly, the wage adjusted prices of all the materials that we extract from the earth, whether they're mineral, plant or animal. The long term price trend on all of those is very sharply downward. From, say, 1800 to the present. It's downward on average for all of these extracted resources by more than 99%.

Scott Allen:

If you held the Darwinian assumption, that's not what you would see, because these are non-renewable resources and if we're strictly consumers of scarce resources, they're going to become more scarce. That means the price is going to go up. So explain why we see the opposite of that.

Calvin Beisner:

Kelvin the reason we see the opposite of that, first of all, is that resources are not natural. Raw materials are natural, but resources are only raw materials transformed by human activity, either relocated or refined by human activity, either relocated or refined, combined with other raw materials, into things that serve us well. You know, before somebody figured out how to refine petroleum into useful energy sources like gasoline and diesel and so on, before that petroleum was a nuisance. Wherever it happened to bubble out of the ground, it could mess up farms. It was just a sticky, nasty mess. That's the case with all things that we find in nature. They aren't necessarily best suited to serving human needs until we have transformed them one way or another. That's even the case with the vast majority of the foods that we eat, the various grains. Wheat a thousand years ago, two thousand years ago, was a very different thing from wheat today, and it is much more edible, much more nutritious now than it was then. Tomatoes you couldn't eat safely a couple thousand years ago. Corn a thousand years ago was so hard that you couldn't chew it. It was not possible for humans to eat it. So we have developed new varieties of these things that are very serviceable to human use. So the same goes across the board for all sorts of other things. And here's one basicable to human use. So the same goes across the board for all sorts of other things. And here's one basic way to put it.

Calvin Beisner:

A clean, healthful, beautiful environment is a costly good and, like any other costly good, wealthier people can afford more of it than poorer people can. Generating electricity, building vehicles for transportation, building homes all of these activities have potential pollution emissions associated with them. The technologies that we use to reduce those pollution emissions are expensive, and yet the tradeoff is good. The money that we spend doing that results in less pollution. But it's only as we build enough wealth to afford those technologies that we can use them. So it's as we become wealthier that we're able to make a cleaner, healthier, more beautiful environment.

Calvin Beisner:

And hey, you know, you visit a city you've never been in before and you want to find out what's the wealthiest part of the city, what's the poorest part of the city? Well, for the wealthiest part, do you look for the dirtiest or for the cleanest? Obviously, you look for the cleanest. Why? Because poor people don't care about filth. No, poor people do care about filth, but they can't afford to prevent it. And so this is why it's so important that we see all people rising and staying out of poverty the dominant model.

Scott Allen:

the solutions that they put forward actually, like you said, lead to greater poverty, especially for the most vulnerable in the world, and I'd like to talk a little bit about the solutions that they put forward, because we're living with those right now in some dramatic ways and I'd like you to explain that. But I'd like to circle back, David, just quickly to the dominant narrative, because there's one thing that I continue to hear, and I know you probably have numbers for this, but the ice caps are melting, seas are rising. I had a very close Christian friend who lives in Norfolk, Virginia, and he's very concerned. He says you know, we're going to be underwater here shortly, and he's a very smart guy. What do you say to somebody like that?

David Legates:

Sea levels have been rising since the demise of the last ice age. I mean, the argument is we had lots of ice over North America, over Eurasia, and as the temperature started to rise, as we came out of that ice age, the ice sheets started to melt, the water went off into the oceans and the oceans started to rise, and they've been rising ever since. Effectively, they're going to continue to rise until either we go into another cold period which starts to form them again, or until we run out of ice on the surface. So sea level has been rising. The question is is it accelerating due to carbon dioxide?

David Legates:

And that question is almost exclusively no, it is not. There are various countries. You know Tuvalu is saying they're going to go underwater and all that. But when you start to compare how well they are from 20 years ago, they're no more underwater now than they were then.

Scott Allen:

Where's Tuvalu?

David Legates:

It's an island in the Pacific, South Pacific yeah, right, okay.

Scott Allen:

So you're saying okay, yes, you know right, there is a rise in sea level, but nothing as dramatic as you know as being predicted, that you know we're literally going to lose a lot of our shorelands or islands are going to be underwater. You think that's just alarmist?

David Legates:

But see a lot of it has other things to do with it. I mean, for example, here in Delaware. I mean, delaware is a small state, we are the lowest state in the union. The argument is that if the first state disappears, it will be the first state, delaware. And so?

David Legates:

But if you think about Delaware, okay, two things are happening. One, the sea level is rising. But two, our coastline is changing for two reasons. One, it's a barrier island. Barrier islands reshape, so from time time to time you get maneuvering. If we had a geography I could tell you about how it works. But essentially the coastline has been eroding over time. Has nothing to do with sea level rise. It's the natural construct of a barrier island. But the second thing is we are subsiding. If you think back into the, when we had ice on the surface, ice was pushing down up in New England and accordingly the mid-Atlantic states rose, and now that that weight has been removed, we are slowly subsiding. So we are seeing a slight, minor sea level rise, but we're also seeing coastal subsidence due to the changing conditions. We're also seeing changes on the beaches associated with Delaware. Without going into detail, none of the second part of that has anything to do with carbon dioxide. None of that has anything to do with human beings.

Scott Allen:

So the land surface changes. There's various reasons that you're seeing these changes.

David Legates:

Right land surface changes, not just because of carbon dioxide but a lot of other things, and so sea level rise is a complicated issue.

Scott Allen:

And, if I might, simplified, oversimplified.

Calvin Beisner:

Yeah, go ahead. I just want to point out, David recently did a marvelous paper on coastal inundation and sea level rise. He actually did that one for the Heritage Foundation, but we have it available on our website, on our online store. People just go to cornwallallianceorg slash shop. They will find that paper and we'd be glad to send that to them.

Scott Allen:

Cornwallallianceorg is it.

Calvin Beisner:

Yes.

Scott Allen:

And let me also, while we're just on this, the book is called Climate and Energy the Case for Realism. And, david, a lot of what you're sharing here I assume can be. I haven't read this book yet. I've got it, but are we going to find a lot of the details that you're speaking about in the book?

David Legates:

Most surely yes, and it explains why carbon dioxide is not the greenhouse gas that's going to destroy the planet, and there's all sorts of things in there as to why what you've generally been told is not really true.

Calvin Beisner:

And for your particular concern, scott, about the poor around the world. The very last chapter is by Vijay Jayaraj is an Indian climate scientist and energy management expert, and he explains, from a developing world perspective, exactly why the climate and energy policies embraced by Western elites are essentially climate colonialism. They are oppressing and trapping the world's poor in their poverty and that, frankly, is the main motivation for why I got involved in all of this in the first place.

Scott Allen:

I mean, whether the world— Good, I'm glad you're going there, calvin. Yeah, I want you to talk about that. What is being done today to fight so-called climate change, based on this dominant narrative? Because it seems to me a lot and it's pretty dramatic and it does have a lot of impact on people in very vulnerable places. Yeah, so explain what very vulnerable places. Yeah, so to explain what's being done.

Luke Allen:

Yeah, oh, go ahead, Luke. Just for some clarification. We keep saying they and them are, you know, passing these policies? Who are the they and them we're talking about here?

Calvin Beisner:

Right. So we would be looking, for example, at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is the governing body under which first the Kyoto Protocol back in 1998 was developed, and then the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015. And we've got other agreements in process coming up. Under that, various different national governments, of course, and even state or provincial governments and even city governments, are adopting various policies. For instance, california banning the use of natural gas stoves and demanding that everything be electrified. The federal policy led by California to try to replace all vehicles internal combustion vehicles with electric vehicles. Policies like this.

Scott Allen:

And also, if I could add, isn't this? You see a lot about the World Economic Forum and the purchasing of farmlands, you know, in places like Holland, because they want to get rid of cattle or what's going on there Explain that because they want to get rid of cattle.

Calvin Beisner:

Or what's going on there? Explain that. Well, I was about to say that up till about 10 years ago or so, the main target of the climate alarmist movement was fossil fuels, because when we burn them we release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But increasingly, over the last decade, and especially about the last five years, that target is being not abandoned by any means, but shifted to the side a little bit, while we are instead targeting or they are the climate alarmists they're targeting farming, not just the raising of cattle, which, by belching and flatulence, put methane into the atmosphere, which is a greenhouse gas, but also all farming that depends on the use of nitrogenous fertilizers, which are made from natural gas. The result is what we're seeing from both policies, both the anti-fossil fuel policy and the anti-farming policy is an increase in the prices of everything, but especially of food, which means you're going to make it more and more difficult for poor people around the world to survive.

Calvin Beisner:

Energy is defined in science as the capacity to do work. Well, you have to do work to make food, clothing, shelter, transportation, communication, medical care, education. Everything. Everything that human beings depend on for our physical well-being requires work, which means energy. The more energy you can apply. The more work you can do, the more of all those things you can wind up with. Similarly, bodily energy. Our bodies require energy and we get that by eating foods. If you make it more expensive to get energy in the form of electricity or fuel for our vehicles etc. And more expensive to get food, you're going to deprive people of the energy that they need to rise and stay out of poverty.

Calvin Beisner:

That is a lot of the agenda and frankly, I believe that much of it at the upper echelons not necessarily the grassroots of this. I think most of the grassroots people have no idea what the underlying philosophy is. But in the upper echelons, the top leaders of the world's largest environmental organizations tend to agree that optimal human population for the world would be about 300 to 500 million people. World would be about 300 to 500 million people and that it would be best for nature if those people would live at a subsistence agriculture level or perhaps even a hunting and gathering level. At that level, human life expectancy at birth tends to run about 27 or 28 years instead of the roughly 70 worldwide that we see now going on 80 in highly developed countries. If that's the goal is to reduce human population that way, then the path to that is to deprive us of the most abundant, affordable, reliable energy sources we have, which are nuclear, coal, oil and natural gas, and then to deprive us of the food that we need, and that's what's happening with the attack on farming.

Scott Allen:

That's just, it's crazy. I mean it's yeah, I can't imagine that. That's the kind of world that they want to live for. And you know, talk about a culture of death. How do you decrease a population that? What is it approaching?

Calvin Beisner:

10 billion or something like that Well it's just a bit over 8 billion right now 8 billion yeah down.

Scott Allen:

To.

Calvin Beisner:

Assuming that most of the claims of population in developing countries are true. A lot of those actually are exaggerated for a variety of political and economic reasons, but that's okay, it doesn't too much matter. But they really do want to reduce us to 300 to 500 million, which means getting rid of about 95 to 97% of us.

Scott Allen:

Yeah, it's really, it's really something.

David Legates:

The other point too is that we always assume that renewable energy wind and solar, for example are clean and green, that renewable energy wind and solar, for example are clean and green, that they produce energy and there's no problem whatsoever.

David Legates:

What most people don't understand is that to get the materials, the rare earth minerals, requires strip mining in various areas. Where you literally go in, you just take all of the land up and you go through it. But not only do you go through it, you've got to use toxic materials to get these materials out of solution, and so it creates massive toxic waste dumps. And in some places of the country, places of the world, for example, in Southeast Asia, people are using slavery to do this, and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo it's child labor. So if you're interested in social justice issues, these have got fundamental social justice problems, and if you're really thinking they're clean and green, they're not clean, they're not green. They produce an awful lot of pollution. It's just nimby not in my backyard so we don't see them when it's produced but these other third world countries are suffering from the production of these toxic dumps, from the destruction of the landscape.

Scott Allen:

Yeah, david, you're saying that. So in California, for example, there's now policy that's been put forward that's going to eliminate gas-powered vehicles. I forget what the deadline is.

David Legates:

It's here in Delaware, too. Vehicles I forget what the deadline is. It's here in Delaware too. We got to be halfway to net zero by 2035, and all the way to net zero by 2050.

Scott Allen:

So it's coming. We're going to have all electric cars, but what you're telling me is that these electric cars battery operated cars are actually not better, for they're not cleaner. Is that what I'm hearing?

David Legates:

you say yes the production of the batteries, the production of the turbines and the solar panels all require these minerals that have to be extracted from the ground, which involve an awful lot of pollution to produce them and an awful lot of human interaction as well.

Scott Allen:

So how do they justify that? Or are they just not interested? They're just interested in feeling good about themselves, or what's behind that?

David Legates:

It's out of sight, out of mind For most people. They don't see that issue. It looks for the world to be clean and green. I mean, we've got an issue here in Delaware where they're pushing to convert all of our farmland to solar panels, the idea being we can generate energy. Well, how are we going to generate food? Well, that doesn't seem to be an issue, because without the food, without the ruminants on the landscape, we would be cutting down on carbon emissions. We're producing clean and green energy and that's going to take us towards net zero, but the problem is it's going to leave people starving. And again, that fits in right, nice, with our narrative of getting the population down to a significantly small number.

Calvin Beisner:

I have one question before we wrap up, Curtis.

David Legates:

I'd like to go ahead.

Calvin Beisner:

Dwight, yeah, I know.

David Legates:

Dwight's got to have lots of questions here and the one thing that stuck out was post-normal science.

Calvin Beisner:

I went whoa, that's an eye-opener. Could you give us three minutes on post-normal science?

David Legates:

I went whoa, that's an eye-opener. Could you give us three minutes on post-normal science? Yeah, I will try. Normal science is essentially when you take data and you attempt to evaluate it. So the idea is you come up with a theory on how you think the world works. You then go out and collect data and you say does the data fit the theory? If it does, then we proceed forward, if not, we fix the theory and move it up.

Scott Allen:

All the data wherever it leads. Yes, right.

David Legates:

So that has been the method that we've always used. Now we're getting into something called post-normal science. The idea is this takes an awful long time. It takes lots of data. Science the idea is this takes an awful long time, it takes lots of data. Data can be dirty. We don't really know what the answer is going to be. Sometimes it's not clear cut and we need an answer right now.

David Legates:

The problem is big. The problem has to be addressed. We don't have enough data to figure it out. So what we do is we bring in expertise that says this is what we should do.

David Legates:

There's no background now as to why there's any reason for doing it, just because it sounds good. And that's how you transfer essentially from previous science, which is data-driven, to science now, which is sort of what they'll call expert-driven. You use the experts that are associated with the field, whether they're really experts or not, and they come up with a decision on what to do. This is how we've gotten ourselves, for example, into net zero. The idea if we don't produce any carbon dioxide at all, we don't produce any methane, we don't produce any nitrous oxides, none of these gases that are greenhouse gases produced by human actions into the atmosphere. Then the temperature will stop rising, the seas will stop rising, everything will be great, and there's no data to indicate that any of that's likely to happen. But we can't wait for the answer. That's why we're proceeding with net zero now, and it's just throwing science on its head.

Scott Allen:

I'd like to. Dwight, do you want to have a follow-up to that?

David Legates:

No, no, that was it.

Scott Allen:

Yeah, I just think it's so important for Christians to realize that science itself, the scientific method, it's the fruit of a whole lot of biblical assumptions, it's the search for truth and it's a beautiful thing. Assumptions, it's the search for truth and it's a beautiful thing. But as we've moved from modern to postmodern, it's affected science as well, and so there is, as you were saying earlier, no settled science. We have to be very careful about that. There's a lot of false assumptions and agendas, and now science has put in the service of furthering those agendas, and so we have to be very careful about kind of settled science. And this is where I want to go, because we you know Megan Basham's book. Have you guys read her book?

David Legates:

Absolutely, I have it.

Luke Allen:

Yeah, Shepard's.

Scott Allen:

Perseid yeah, you guys are—her first chapter is how this dominant narrative on climate has come into the evangelical church through groups like—I'm looking here it's called the Evangelical Environment Network through the National—sponsored by the National Association of Evangelicals Lots of different groups and work. And then she specifically highlights Gavin Ortland, who created some videos encouraging Christians to basically jump on board with this dominant narrative, calling it settled science that come from that that we're talking about in terms of you know the net zero, moving to electric cars, you know carbon what do you call it when you buy back carbon buybacks, these kinds of things? And then what I thought was so fascinating was that in the book she goes on and she says now here are these two gentlemen, calvin Weisner, david Legates. They have this other view, this counter-narrative that's based on really good science. And yet Gavin doesn't mention you guys at all in the videos that he's producing as he encourages evangelicals to follow the dominant narrative.

Scott Allen:

I was just curious from you guys' perspective, are you getting invitations where churches are saying we want to understand what's going on with this? This climate thing is huge right now. Yes, we know the dominant narrative, but we want to hear other points of view as well. Are you guys getting invitations like that or are you being largely kind of ignored within the church? I should say yeah, we are getting some invitations, and that's great.

Calvin Beisner:

We're always glad to respond to those and provide speakers. We can also, by the way, provide expert witnesses to testify in front of legislative committees at both the federal and state level. I just finished last week speaking for a big Bible conference up in Northwest Iowa on these subjects, and so, yeah, we do that Great. Now I would distinguish somebody like Gavin Ortland, and I've seen his video on climate change. I actually viewed it probably about five or six times shortly after it first came out times shortly after it first came out and, to tell you the truth, I feel sorry for him because, frankly, it's really hard work to learn about the contrarian view on this stuff, because it is so excluded from the mainstream media, so excluded by the mainstream politicians and so on.

Calvin Beisner:

You have to really dig, and so it's very understandable why somebody who is not really specializing research in this area would just think well, of course, here it is, here's the mainstream. You know, 97% of all scientists agree that global warming is real, it's driven by man, it's catastrophic, and we must spend trillions of dollars trying to slow, stop or reverse it. That's very understandable, but as I listened to and watched his videos, I thought to myself. You know he shows absolutely zero awareness of the reasons why some people challenge that perspective, of the reasons why some people challenge that perspective and, frankly, if we're going to be scholarly about anything, we need to be able to explain the basic reasons behind all significant sides of a question, which is not apparent in what he's done.

Calvin Beisner:

Now. I would distinguish between Gavin Ortlund, who's just going with the best he can do, I think, versus the Evangelical Environmental Network, where we have a very clear money trail history. The EEN was founded as a part of the National Religious Partnership, partnership on the Environment back in 1993-94, which was itself founded by secularists and very, very liberal Christians to have a Jewish and a Roman Catholic and a mainline Protestant and an evangelical branch. All of this was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Tides Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, all of these.

Scott Allen:

If you're not familiar with those foundations, they're so far left. They're really Marxist in many ways.

Calvin Beisner:

Very far left, big supporters of abortion, of population control, etc. Right, they started the EEN, the Evangelical Environmental Network. They started the EEN, the Evangelical Environmental Network. In fact, in 2015, george Soros' New America Foundation released a major study by two academic sociologists trying to answer the question why, after we've spent hundreds of millions of dollars over a period of about 20 years trying to get evangelicals on the global warming bandwagon, do they remain the most skeptical demographic in America? On the question, and the answer that they came to was basically the Cornwall Alliance.

Calvin Beisner:

The Cornwall Alliance had persuaded other evangelical leaders and the evangelical mainstream grassroots that this was just not true, and in a press conference releasing that paper, one of the authors said the problem was we did an approach that appealed to the top names in the evangelical population rather than to the grassroots, and we followed the pattern that we had used on some defense-related issues.

Calvin Beisner:

We used to call it rent-a-general You'd get some retired general to express the view of the left on, say, iran or Iraq or whatever like that, and you would do that by paying them off. Well, they actually said you know, we tried Renton Evangelical and they made reference directly to the Evangelical Environmental Network and other evangelical creation, care organizations, so some of those. There's a clear matter of either direct money payments millions of dollars, especially in the case of the EEN, over a period of a couple of decades or just simply growing influence and respect. Public respect you oh well, you're going to get quoted positively in the New York Times or the Washington Post and so on. That's a very different thing. And Megan Basham in her book Shepherds for Sale, distinguishes between those and she's critical of Gavin Ortlund's approach on this. But not by saying he was bought off. She's saying no, he just was part of the victims, actually of this kind of an approach.

Scott Allen:

He was kind of downstream on the influence, but he was certainly influenced to the point that he felt like he could make these videos and encourage those that he has influence over, to jump on board this dominant narrative and all that it means, right?

Scott Allen:

Well, listen, I just want to, on that point, just really encourage our listeners to avail yourself of these two wonderful brothers in Christ, calvin Beisner, david Legates, and their work on this issue. We all care about environmental stewardship. I mean this is something that we're commanded to care for. We love this magnificent creation of God's, but to go along with the dominant narrative on this is actually to move in a direction that's destructive, whereas what you guys are putting forward and I'm so thankful is not only it's good for the environment, it's good for human life and human development and it's biblical, it's starting with biblical first assumptions, as opposed to all of these neo-Darwinian, marxist first assumptions that it seems like the dominant narrative is underpinned by. Listen, we're out of time. I am so sad because this has been such a rich conversation. I'm so grateful for you, gentlemen, and I'd like to just invite Luke or Dwight. Do you have any final questions or thoughts on this subject before we wrap up?

Luke Allen:

David do you have a final comment.

David Legates:

No, no, I was just going to add something to what we were just discussing.

Calvin Beisner:

Yeah, go ahead, it'll be fine.

Scott Allen:

It's let go.

David Legates:

No, I was just going to answer your question regarding have we been invited? And I just learned. This week, in fact, I was on a church summit for what's called a youth summit. I work with a pastor that's involved with trying to keep kids out of jail, and so I was asked to be on the summit, and then I was told this week I had been disinvited because several members of the board had found out that I was a climate denier, a climate denier.

David Legates:

The summit had nothing to do with climate change, but because apparently I have denied climate, whatever that means, then you can't appear on a youth summit at our church.

Scott Allen:

So I've been disinvited. Oh, that's horrible. Okay, don't do that right? Maybe you disagree with David, but bring him in and let him make his case and see if what he's saying is true. Yeah, go ahead, colin.

Calvin Beisner:

I might point out that for over a dozen years, repeatedly, the Cornwall Alliance has made public challenges of debate to the Evangelical Environmental Network, particularly to Dr Catherine Hayhoe, who is a climate scientist who's on the other side on this issue. We've repeatedly said we'll debate you anywhere. Anytime you get a theologian, a climate scientist, an economist on your perspective, we'll get the same on our perspective. We'll pay the cost for the doggone thing. And they're not even responding, let from hearing the other side on this. And any time that's happening, you have to figure that's because they're not prepared to defend their view and that's just not the biblical way.

Scott Allen:

The biblical way is to be truth seekers and we want to listen to all sides. I think of the Apostle Paul when he talked about the Perhaps 1 Thessalonians 5.21, test all things hold fast.

Calvin Beisner:

what is good? I think that's the real root of scientific method, or the Bereans in.

Scott Allen:

Acts 17,. The people, the Bereans who tested, the Bereans, yeah, the Bereans, right yeah test right test to see if what they're saying is true and that's the biblical spirit test to see what they're saying is true. Be truth seekers. And you don't get that by trying to censor or silence. You get that by listening and studying and seeing what's true. You get that by listening and studying and seeing what's true and what aligns with ultimate truth. These principles from the scripture about who people are and what our relationship to creation is, what our resources.

Calvin Beisner:

So anyway, I'm just so grateful for you guys. We're supposed to be iron sharpening iron with each other, but iron only sharpens iron if there's some friction. So we have to overcome our fear of friction. We have to overcome our desire to always keep the water smooth and realize if we really want to sharpen each other, we have to be willing to come into direct friction with each other, and then we can improve our thinking there you go?

Scott Allen:

Yeah, absolutely. I would say to all Christians listening that care about this issue. Understand the dominant narrative. Understand it as well as you can. What are they saying, what are their assumptions, what are their solutions? But don't stop there. Understand the counter-argument as well. We have to. On this important issue, lives are at stake. This is not some small fringe issue. This is so central to the world that we live in today, and whole nations are being kind of wrecked right now based on policies our own included in many ways and so this is not some fringe issue. Luke, any final words from you or thoughts as we wrap up today?

Luke Allen:

My final thought is I would love to reschedule another interview at some point with you guys. Yeah, if we could find the time, maybe next year.

Scott Allen:

I mean David and Calvin. We, luke and I, live in Oregon and Oregon's been a lead state in the modern environmental movement. There's a lot of positives to be said about that, but there's a lot of you know. It would be great to have you come out here, where we're at, and at some point speak in some of our churches here, and so, anyways, it's a hot issue here, all right, well, listen, thank you, gentlemen, for your time today and for your graciousness and for all of your deep scholarship. The book again is called Climate and Energy the Case for Realism, and the organization is the Cornwall Alliance Help book again is called Climate and Energy the Case for Realism, and the organization is the.

Calvin Beisner:

Cornwall Alliance. Help me out again, calvin, and give that web address if you don't mind. Well, that's Cornwall Alliance cornwallallianceorg. We have a newsletter that goes out. People can subscribe to that. We have a big store online. We have a blog with hundreds of articles. We're also on X formerly Twitter and on Facebook, and we also have a YouTube channel on Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship Creation.

Scott Allen:

Lots of resources.

Calvin Beisner:

Yeah.

Scott Allen:

Well, great. We highly recommend the work that you guys are doing and look forward to working with you in the future. Thank you all for listening again, our audience. We love and appreciate each one of you and that you are truth seekers as well here, looking out for what is true on this important issue. Thank you for listening to yet another episode of Ideas have Consequences. This is the podcast of the Disciple Nations Alliance.

Luke Allen:

Thank you for joining us for this discussion with Calvin Beisner and David Legates. If you'd like to hear the discussion continue, dwight, my dad and I recorded a post-show bonus episode that will be available tomorrow, where we recapped some of our takeaways and further explored how we think Christians can and should respond to this hot topic from a biblical worldview perspective. If you are coming away from today's episode feeling like you had just as many questions answered as new questions raised, I can totally relate. This is a tough topic and there is a real clash of worldviews when it comes to climate. But not to worry, we intend to continue to delve into this topic in further episodes here on Ideas have Consequences. In fact, David Legates and I have already rescheduled another interview in the future. In the meantime, I would highly encourage you to go and do your homework.

Luke Allen:

If you are skeptical about anything that our Thank you and see if they have any resources on those topics. I'm guessing that they will, as always. For more information about our guests here on the podcast, or to find any of the resources that we mentioned during the episode and more, please visit the episode page, which is linked in the show notes and is also available right on the homepage of our website, which is disciplenationsorg. If this is your first time listening to the show Ideas have Consequences, it is brought to you by the Disciple Nations Alliance, which is a ministry that has worked around the world for the last 27 years, training over a million people in over 90 nations with the transformative power of a biblical worldview. If you would like to learn more about our ministry, you can find us on most social media platforms and on our website, which again is disciplenationsorg. Thanks again for joining us today here on another episode of Ideas have Consequences.