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How should Christians care for the earth and respond to climate change initiatives? Over the past decade, there has been a lot of talk about climate change, but are all of the agendas being pushed on the American public truly for the greater good? How can we honor God in the way we steward the earth and care for our fellow man?

Climate scientist, E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D. joins us to answer these questions and explain the long-term implications of climate change and reducing carbon emissions – and how some of these initiatives could lead to widespread poverty if taken too far.

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode.

Marlin Detweiler:
Hello again and welcome to another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today we have with us E. Calvin Beisner. I call him Cal. Is that what you like to be called, though?

Absolutely wonderful. It is so good to have you here. In our conversation ahead of this, I learned so much about you. I think this was our first time really interacting. And so I'm excited tonight to talk about your role in the environmental conversation. But before we do that, tell us a little about yourself, your family, your education, and your career.

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
All right. Well, it could be a very long story, but I'll try to keep it as short as I can. Excuse me. I was born to non-Christian parents. I would call them, you know, God fearing Gentiles. We encounter those in the Book of Acts and elsewhere. And very early in my life, we moved to Calcutta, India, where my father worked with the U.S. State Department.

Marlin Detweiler:
And you had me there when you said they weren't Christians. And you—I knew you lived in Calcutta. I didn't know you were born there, I assumed missionaries. That's interesting.

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
Oh, no. No, it was U.S. State Department business. He had all sorts of different duties. One of them was trying to ensure that grain shipments from the US to India to help with the famines of the mid to late 1950s actually got to the people. Many didn't because the Indian government was so corrupt and officials would basically steal the grain and resell it to Russia and other places.

But while we were there, my mother became seriously ill and was actually paralyzed for about a six month period. And over that period, every day my nurse Ida would take me to the home of an Indian family where I would spend the day. And along the way, I have vivid memories, picture memories in my mind of two things.

One was a beautiful, beautiful tree in the courtyard of the apartment complex where we lived. And the other set of picture memories—and there are many of them—was of the bodies of the people over whom we stepped all along the way, who had died overnight of starvation and disease. Now, of course, I was very young. I didn't really understand these things, but the pictures stayed with me. When later I was converted to Christ at the Billy Graham Crusade in 1969,

Anaheim, California. And then started being discipled by staff from Campus Crusade for Christ, taught how to witness to people, I began little by little to understand what the scriptures had to say about poverty and about the beauties of God's creation. For years the main emphasis in my life had been one-on-one personal evangelism and then apologetics to serve that. I had the privilege of working for and studying under the late Dr. Walter R. Martin, an expert on the cults, and then studying in undergraduate school at the University of Southern California under the marvelous Christian philosopher Dallas Willard, who's pretty well known to

a lot of evangelicals all over now. And shortly after college, I was really challenged to start looking at what the scriptures say about our responsibility toward the poor. And I did, and I found that among evangelicals, there was a fairly strong movement, much associated with the late Ron Sider, Ronald Sider, to approach things basically in a sort of a socialist manner.

We need to divvy up the pie more equally among people. And there was this notion that one person's having a bigger piece of the pie required another person to have a smaller piece. And I thought, you know, clearly the Bible tells us we need to care for the poor. But I had read Sider's book Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, and though I didn't know economics, I knew biblical exegesis and I knew logic, and I thought he'd done a lot of mistaken use of both of those.

So I decided I should study economics. So I went and bought a stack of textbooks on economics. This was my typical way of doing things. By the time I finished college, I had a library of little over 3,000 books. And as I studied economics, I decided no, he really hasn't done any better on the economics. And if a lot of people take his advice, we'll have a lot of harm done with the very best of intentions.

So meanwhile, I was friends with the theologian who started first the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy and then the Coalition on Revival. And the Coalition on Revival intended to take the work of the ICBI, establishing that we had an inerrant Bible and that we had certain principles of hermeneutics for understanding it, and that we had some basic essentials of a Christian worldview, and then apply all of that to the various different aspects of life, different spheres of life.

And that theologian asked me then to chair the economics committee in that. It was through that that I met Marvin Olasky, who became the editor of Crossway's Turning Point Christian Worldview series.

Marlin Detweiler:
And for those of you that are listening, you should know that Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning, the book that really ignited us in classical Christian education, was part of that series.

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
Right? Right. So Marvin asked me to do the volume on economics for that series. And eventually I agreed. And then one chapter that was supposed to be on the relationship of population and resources and pollution and environmental quality, all that sort of thing. And I told Marvin at the time, hey, you know what? That can't be done in a chapter.

It's just much too big. So he said, all right, we'll write a second book just on that. So that became my book Prospects for Growth: A Biblical View of Population, Resources and the Environment. Those two books came out in '88 and '90. And because of that, it moved my career in the direction of a lot of work

in economics, the environment, the application of economic principles to environmental stewardship. Meanwhile, I taught at Covenant College for eight years and then at Knox Theological Seminary for eight years. And then in 2005, encouraged by a variety of friends who were working in the field, I started what became the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.

We took as our founding document the Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship, which had come out in March of 2000 after a meeting of a variety of different scholars in a retreat center in West Cornwall, Connecticut. So that's where we get our name—from West Cornwall, Connecticut. Yeah. So, I mean, that's kind of a quickie, and it might have been even longer than you wanted.

Marlin Detweiler:
Well, you helped me with something. And so let me give our listeners a little bit of a window into what we're planning tonight. We're going to talk about your involvement in the environmental conversation. But we were also planning on doing another episode on a biblical view of poverty and the world in which we live, and how we address the poor.

But that's not tonight. So we'll table that for now and talk a little bit about environmental—and I'm not even sure what terms to use because I don't know if you would use the term environmentalism. Would you?

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
Well, I tend to try to stay away from that because historically, that has a lot of baggage.

Marlin Detweiler:
That's why I was hesitant with that.

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
The conservationist movement around the start of the 20th century, I think, had a pretty solid basis in biblical worldview. In terms of Genesis 1:28 that says, you know, God blesses Adam and Eve and he tells them to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over it.

And you know, that dominion should be something that reflects God's own dominion, since we're made in his image, and his dominion we learn about in the very first 25 verses of Genesis. Yeah, he starts with nothing and then he makes everything. He starts with darkness and makes light, starts with chaos and makes order, starts with no life and makes life and great variety of life.

And he tells all the different varieties of life to be fruitful and multiply and fill their niches in the created order. And so our job should be to mimic God by working to subdue and rule the earth in a way that enhances its fruitfulness and its beauty and its safety to the glory of God and the benefit of our neighbors.

Which means really, we're addressing the two great commandments: to love God and to love neighbor. Now, that was sort of the basic thinking behind the conservationist movement. That sort of took a turn in the 1940s and 50s toward what was thought of as preservationism, that basically said, you know, nature is best untouched by human hands.

And so the task of mankind is to keep nature the way he finds it. That's definitely not the same thing as subduing and ruling it. Then environmentalism went a step further in the 1960s and 1970s. And actually the term environmentalism wasn't coined until the 1970s. The environmental movement took a turn toward really seeing humanity as a threat to the natural order.

And that was tied to the fears of overpopulation and therefore the demands for population control, which had their own roots in the eugenics movement, which had its roots in Darwinism and basically sees humanity now as, unfortunately, the most powerful species on the planet and the most destructive. And so, because it sees human beings without taking into consideration the image of God, it sees them as basically consumers and polluters.

We use up the Earth's resources and we've poisoned the planet while we're at it. Now, biblically, because we're made in God's image, we should be producers and stewards as he is.

Marlin Detweiler:

Right.

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
And we should be able to make more resources than we consume. We don't make anything out of nothing, but the better and better we get at making more and more out of less and less, the better we reflect God's image in that respect. And we should be about the task of cleaning things up, of restoring the created order more and more toward what it was before the fall into sin and the curse on the ground.

Because of that fall, we're not going to make it perfect this side of the eschaton. But we are called to subdue it, to rule over it and to—as I put it in my book Where Garden Meets Wilderness: Evangelical Entry into the Environmental Debate—our task is to spread out from the Garden of Eden into the wilderness and to transform more and more of wilderness into garden so that at the same time, we enhance the living of humankind.

So we start in the Bible in a garden. We have the fall into sin and the curse on the earth. That garden is surrounded by wilderness, but we're still called to go out from the garden and to transform that wilderness into garden. And then we end in the Bible, in the garden city of the New Jerusalem. And so our task is to be working toward that, even though we know that it will not be perfected before the return of Jesus Christ, when he brings in the new heavens and the new earth and makes all things new as he does in each one of us individually, when we are made anew, we are new creatures in Christ Jesus, through and through, the gospel and the gift of faith.

Marlin Detweiler:
Well, there are so many different directions we can go with this and so many different things of concern. But let me just note for our listeners a couple things that, in my brief research, I learned that you are known as:

1. You're known as the leading evangelical climate change skeptic

2. You're known as the most influential evangelical anti-environmentalist in the U.S.

Well, those are—by some—they would take those as pejorative descriptions of you. I can't tell you, I was so encouraged to talk to you when I read those. I wanted to hear more about what that means. What do they mean by that? What do you want them to mean by that?

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
Well, first of all, I would confirm that I think most of those who describe me in those two ways do intend it to be pejorative. No. Let me first say that while I may be the best known evangelical of either of those sorts, I am not the best thinking evangelical of either of those sorts. There are evangelical scientists and economists and others who know their specific fields at a far greater depth than I have.

Now, I'll qualify that by saying this. I did a PhD in Scottish history at the University of St. Andrews. I have done more reading in the technical literature of the science of climate change—I've done probably at least 20 times more reading in that than I ever did for my PhD. So I do know the field quite well.

But there are people like Doctor Roy Spencer, who's principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in climate science, NASA award-winning climate scientist. He's on my board. He's a senior fellow at the Cornwall Alliance, and he just does some of the best work in the world. There's also Doctor David Carlagate, who is a recently retired professor of climatology at the University of Delaware.

If I remember correctly, he's either the first or the second man in the world to earn the degree of PhD in climatology. And he is our director of research and education. But there are many others. All right, so let's get back to this—you know, the best known evangelical climate change skeptic. I guess I don't mind that, but I prefer the term realist.

And that's because the term climate change skeptic or climate skeptic is easily understood as meaning that you think that climate doesn't change, or you think that human activity has absolutely zero to do with it. I don't think either of those things. And by the way, I'm very much friends with scores and scores of climate scientists who challenge the notion of catastrophic manmade climate change.

There are hundreds. There are indeed thousands. As a matter of fact, I'm personal friends with many scores of them, and not a single one of them would say that climate doesn't change, and not a single one of them would say human activity has nothing to do with it. Instead, our view is what we would call climate change

realism. And that says, yes, climate is changing. Probably global average temperature has risen by about 1 to 1.2 degrees Celsius since about 1850. Most of that increase has probably been natural until perhaps the last 50 or 60 years. Over that period, human activity has been a significant contributor. Has it been the majority?

We don't know. Is it a tiny minority? We don't know. There's just too much about the climate system, which is probably the most complex natural system we've ever studied, with the exception of DNA and the human mind. There's too much about it that we just do not know and cannot measure.

Marlin Detweiler:
It has an effect—but it is difficult to establish.

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
Right. So, you know, we have no problem with saying, yeah, the basic physics tells us that if you add carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases—the gases that absorb heat reflecting from the surface of the Earth out toward space and send some of it back toward the surface—basic physics tells us that that's going to make the Earth warmer than it otherwise would be.

But the climate system is very complicated. The complex basic physics also tells us that if you drop a rock and a feather at the same moment from the same altitude, they'll hit the ground at the same moment unless they're in air, in which case the rock plummets and the feather kind of wafts back and forth and little by little reaches the ground.

Or maybe it blows up into a tree and never comes down. So basic physics just doesn't tell us very much about this. But we do think that human activity surely has contributed to the warming over the last 60 years, possibly more than that. We also think that the warming is not only not catastrophic yet, but that there's no good reason to think that it's going to become catastrophic.

And there are a variety of different reasons to say that. One of them is that in the Medieval Warm Period, which was actually at least as warm as and probably a bit warmer than the present, life thrived on Earth much better than it has in the period of the Little Ice Age that followed that from about 1350 to 1850.

Another is that, frankly, the Holocene Climate Optimum of about, oh, perhaps 6,000 years ago or so was clearly much warmer than the present, and all kinds of life thrived much better in it. Human history tells us that warmer periods are better for human thriving than colder periods.

Marlin Detweiler:
So I'm hearing that some of what we're calling climate change is climate cycles.

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
Yes, definitely. That is the case. And what we know from history is that life thrives better in warmer than in colder climates. Now, we also know from the understanding of greenhouse warming that it happens mostly toward the poles, mostly in the winter and mostly at night. Not toward the equator in the summer, in the daytime, which means that it raises very low temperatures significantly and does practically nothing to high temperatures.

The result of that is multifold. First, you get an expansion of arable land closer and closer to the poles, which means more farming can be done and more food is available for everybody. Second, you get an expansion of the growing regions for all sorts of different plants, not only because they tend to grow better in warmer weather, but also because with more CO2 in the atmosphere, they do photosynthesis better.

So it's like fertilizer for them, and they can grow better in warmer and cooler temperatures and in wetter and drier soils, and make better use of soil nutrients. So they expand their range, which, by the way, also means if you're worried about our being in the midst of the so-called sixth great extinction period—which, by the way, we're not—that's another myth. But if you're worried about that, you should welcome a little global warming driven by CO2, because it means plants grow better everywhere, which means all the animals that survive better.

So, you know, our attitude is that, in fact, life after climate change will almost certainly be much better than life before climate change. And the demand that we try to slow, stop, or reverse it by slowing our emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, by reducing our use of hydrocarbon fuels—that would be coal, oil, and natural gas, what many people refer to as fossil fuels—

That demand is economic suicide. Because current fossil fuels provide roughly 84% of all energy used in the world today, and energy is indispensable to everything that we do, whether it's making food, clothing, shelter, transportation, medical care, communication—everything depends on energy. And the more expensive energy is, the less you're going to use of it. The cheaper it is, the more you can use, and therefore the more you can get done.

And what we've seen is that it is much cheaper to generate electricity and to move vehicles along the road and planes through the air using oil and natural gas and coal, than using wind power or sun power—solar power. And there are technical reasons behind that as well in terms of the energy density of the source. Natural gas, for instance, is about 1100 times as dense as wind and about 500 times as dense as solar.

And the main cost in converting any natural energy source to useful energy is making the difference between the natural density and the useful density. So when we're told we have to somehow reach net zero carbon dioxide emissions, that's suicidal. One way to put it is this: roughly half the world's population depends entirely on food grown using nitrogenous fertilizers.

But you make nitrogenous fertilizers out of natural gas. Stop bringing natural gas up out of the ground and converting it to energy and using the byproducts for nitrogenous fertilizer, and you starve half the world's population. Well, in addition, about another half of the remaining population depends thoroughly for life on all of the fuels and on concrete and metals and other things that are made using fossil fuels.

Take those away, and in another ten years or so, you starve another quarter of the population. So, you know, our attitude is that kind of demand is quite contrary to human welfare and contrary to the welfare of the natural world. Because we do far less harm to the natural environment by mining or pumping coal and oil and natural gas than we do by mining the huge amounts of earths necessary to get the rare earths, metals, and the like that go into the making of wind turbines and solar panels.

Marlin Detweiler:
Well, these are things that we have kind of been bombarded with for decades—to question things that we don't know enough about to be able to fight. And what you've done, I assume, with the Cornwall Alliance, is to try and bring a breath of fresh air to the truth of how God's creation really works in light of a lot of propaganda. Is that a fair way to assess or to describe Cornwall Alliance?

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
Yeah, I think that's very fair. We have just under 70 scholars in our network. Wow. About a third of them are natural scientists, of whom a pretty fair number are climate scientists, that being sort of the 850-pound gorilla on the environmental scene nowadays. And about a third are economists. And of those, most specialize in either the economics of development—

What are the economic conditions that are necessary for whole societies to rise and stay out of poverty—or the economics of environmental stewardship. How do we apply the basic lessons of economics to our efforts to be good stewards of the natural world? And what we have found is that, particularly in terms of the needs of the poor around the world—

No society has ever risen or has stayed out of poverty that has not embraced what we call the five basic principles of economics: private property rights, entrepreneurship, free trade, limited government, and the rule of law. All of those make up what's generally called market economics or free market economics—sometimes called capitalism, though that term was made up by its critic, Karl Marx, so it carries baggage. And we recognize that if we want the world's poor to rise and stay out of poverty, we need to see those social institutions plus access to abundant, affordable, reliable energy spread all over the world. And what just grieves me is to see so many Western environmentalists demanding that developing countries turn down the opportunity to use coal and natural gas to generate electricity, and to use oil for their transportation, and instead depend on wind and solar, which are much more expensive and far less reliable, which will slow, stop, or even reverse their climb out of poverty.

I referred early on to the fact that as a little child in India, I viewed the bodies of people who died overnight of starvation, of disease every day. That stuck with me, and that's part of what motivates me. I see what extreme poverty is really about, and I rejoice that from 1990 to today, the rate of extreme poverty—that is, people living on the equivalent of $2 per person per day—the rate of extreme poverty around the world has fallen from about 50% in 1990 to under 9% today.

And wow, that just warms my heart. Yeah, but if we're going to fight global warming by depriving people of the use of fossil fuels, we will see that rate go back up.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. This is fascinating to me. There is no possible way for you and I in a few short segments to cover these things. Hardly even adequately. I hope we have teased our audience. We're dealing with people interested in classical Christian education. And I think that those people coming out of classical Christian education that will be best prepared to take the kinds of things that you've done and really apply the—

Now, what's really fascinating to me is to think in terms of a connection between how we view the climate, the resources that God has given us, and the idea of eliminating or minimizing poverty in third-world countries and beyond. That’s, to me, that's fascinating to think about.

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
It is. And let me just throw you another little bit of data here to back that up. Excuse me. Poverty is a far greater threat to human health and longevity than anything related to climate and weather. If you have income equivalent to the bottom 20th of Americans, you can thrive in any climate—from the Arctic Circle to the Sahara Desert to the Brazilian rainforest.

If you're trying to get by on the equivalent of $2 a day, you can't thrive in the best tropical paradise. Part of how we know this is if we look at the rate of human deaths caused by weather extremes—extreme weather events—over the past hundred years, that's, you know, how many deaths per 100,000 of a population, right?

That rate has fallen by over 98%. That's fabulous. It's a tremendous reason to celebrate, but it hasn't fallen because the extreme weather events have become fewer or less severe. They haven't. They also, by the way, have not become more frequent or more severe, despite the predictions that climate change would make them worse — the mortality rate due to extreme weather events has fallen because people have risen out of poverty and can build structures that protect them better. The meteorological weather warning systems that give them advance notice, and they can hide themselves or move away and so on. This is tremendous.

By the way, you know, you mentioned it's hard to even scratch the surface here, and that's definitely so. We offer all kinds of educational materials at CornwallAlliance.org. That's CornwallAlliance.org. And just today, Marlin, as you and I are talking, we premiered—went live for the first time—our first online course on the basics of climate science, taught by Dr. David Arlen Gates, retired professor of climatology at the University of Delaware.

So if people go to CornwallAlliance.org and look for the information about our online course, Basic Climate Science, they can take that. It's geared for college students and high-level high school students. And frankly, with the curriculum that goes with it, it's something that people ought to be able to use. I would hope that plenty of classical Christian schools would offer students credit for going through that.

Marlin Detweiler:
It sounds wonderful, but I encourage our listeners to go there. Thank you so much. And just, what a great set up also for us to talk again. And I hope we'll be able to record that sometime soon to talk about some strategic approaches to minimizing poverty. Because I know that you have some great thoughts on that. Look forward to talking about that as well. Thank you so much, Dr. Beisner.

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
You're welcome. That is the very thing that pushed me into all of this. That was the main motivation for me. Wonderful. Thank you very much. This has been a lot of fun and I look forward to future conversations.

Marlin Detweiler:
Very good. And, folks, thank you for joining us on another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. We look forward to seeing you next time.