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Good Article in full...
CNSNews.com - Thursday, April 22, 2010
By Penny Starr, Senior Staff Writer
For E. Calvin Beisner and his colleagues at the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation (CASC), every day is Earth Day because Christians are called by God to be good stewards of the planet and its inhabitants.
Beisner believes that it is not carbon emissions but global warming activism and international climate treaties that are a threat to the nation’s future and the world’s poorest populations.
“Climate change is the totalitarian’s dream come true,” Beisner, founder of the CASC, said at a conference on Thursday at the Family Research Council in Washington. “It offers a rationale for government intrusion into every aspect of life for every person on Earth.”
Beisner, who is also the national spokesman for the CASC, is a teacher and author who frequently speaks on the connection between religion and environmentalism.
Beisner painted a chilling picture of what would happen if the United States signed on to the kind of international climate-change treaty proposed at a United Nations conference in Copenhagen last year.
“Global warming alarmists see each new human being in terms of his or her ‘carbon footprint,’ and already many are saying that the best way to fight global warming is for everyone to have just one child so that the population will shrink,” Beisner said.
The enforcement of a U.N.-style treaty would mean a global government’s intrusion into how people live their private lives – “everything from the temperature at which you keep your house to whether to drive a large, crash-worthy vehicle or a small car that conserves fuel but is a death trap in an accident,” Beisner said.
In his speech, Beisner said that Christians should be concerned about global warming policies because they affect myriad issues, such as the sanctity of human life, individual liberty, the survival of free enterprise and free markets in the United States, compassion for the poor around the world, and a sovereign America with the kind of limited government envisioned by the Founding Fathers.
Christians are commanded by God to care for the poor, which Beisner said would suffer the most from the kind of environmental controls and alternative energy plans proposed by both the United Nations and the U.S. Congress.
“The Bible requires us to care for the poor,” he said, detailing how the policies focused on cutting the use of fossil fuels, for example, will hurt the poorest people by increasing the cost of energy and limiting its availability in the world’s poorest places where access to abundant energy supplies can prevent disease and premature death.
“Global warming legislation is part of a concerted effort to push environmentalism to the fore in American politics and culture,” Beisner said. “And environmentalism is hardly limited to good stewardship of God-given natural resources.
“Secular environmentalism, in contrast to creation stewardship, is at heart a false religion,” Beisner said.
“It degrades human beings, the crown of God’s creation, deifies nature in its untouched state as the ideal – contrary to God’s mandate for man to fill, subdue, and rule the Earth – and disregards the poor, who often are harmed by environmental policies like banning DDT, a cheap and safe insecticide that could largely eliminate the malaria-bearing mosquitoes that cost millions of lives every year in the Third World,” he added.
Beisner also said the cap-and-trade legislation proposed by Democrats in Congress to limit carbon emissions and allow the trading of “carbon credits” will harm an already struggling economy by killing jobs and slowing or even reversing economic growth.
Beisner said his organization late last year released a comprehensive research project, “A Renewed Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Examination of the Theology, Science, and Economics of Global Warming.”
This project, he said, “provides solid Biblical, scientific, and economic basis for not only rejecting belief in dangerous manmade global warming, but also for rejecting policies meant to fight it.”
Beisner concluded by citing one of the founding principles of the CASC, which states that the Earth is not a fragile entity made randomly by chance but the creation of an almighty God, who sustains it.
“Raising the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration from 27 thousandths of one percent to 39 thousandths of one percent, or even to 108 thousandths of one percent, is not going to cause catastrophic global warming that will, as Al Gore puts it, threaten to destroy human civilization and wipe out 90 percent or more of all species,” Beisner said.
“Our God is a more intelligent designer than to make a system so fragile, and a better judge to call such a system ‘very good’ after he made it,” Beisner said.
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