I’ve spent the past few weeks trying to figure out two things that have baffled me: “Why do so many people not believe in the Climate Emergency?” and “Why do so many people absolutely loathe Justin Trudeau?”
I’ve been doing a lot of research (or at least what passes for ‘a lot of research’ while suffering chronic pain from my shoulder problem). To that end, I’ve been looking at social media conversations, books, websites, blog posts, etc. I’m still not completely sure about what’s going on, but several things have been ‘coming together’. Consider what follows, therefore, a ‘dispatch from the field’ rather than a finished report.
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One of the books I’ve read is a 2019 book titled The Gospel of Climate Skepticism: Why Evangelical Christians Oppose Action on Climate Change
This is a serious book of sociological research (ie: in places quite tedious to read) published by the University of California Press. It suggests that there has been a very concerted move by the Republican Party of the US and various elements of big business to convince American evangelical Christians that it is ‘un-Christian’ to pursue any government policies aimed at limiting the effects of man-made climate change.
The way this is done is through control of the message being set out in an alternative media landscape that is specifically aimed at and consumed by evangelical Christians.
Today some 90 percent of evangelicals consume evangelical media each month, and one in five Americans—not just one in five evangelicals—consumes this type of media daily.⁸⁷ Although Christian Smith’s research was conducted in the mid- 1990s, its findings regarding evangelical mass media consumption are impressive. The average number of hours his evangelical respondents spent listening to Chris- tian radio programs per week was 6.9; the average number of hours spent watching Christian television programming per week was 2.6.⁸⁸ Another study, from the early 2000s, found that 63 percent of ministers surveyed listened regularly to religious radio, further demonstrating its influence.⁸⁹ (page 317, Gospel of Climate Skepticism)
And within this alternative media landscape, there are well-funded propaganda outlets aimed at influencing both rank-and-file evangelists directly and through the intermediaries of media outlets and the clergy who minister to specific local flocks of believers. The two key ones that Veldman identifies are the Cornwall Alliance and the Colson Center.
Just to give people some idea of what these groups are doing, I’ll show some of their propaganda and deconstruct it to show what is going on. First, something from the Colson Centre:
I’m not going to try to refute the statements made in the above slick presentation, just point out what is going on here. Climate change is an extremely complex subject that requires on a lot of detailed statistical scientific literacy to understand. That’s why it is so easy to bamboozle naive people about it and extremely difficult to explain to a non-professional where they are going wrong when they oppose the scientific consensus. It’s an classic example where it takes much, much, much more effort to debunk an untruth than to utter it in the first place. Or, as the old saying goes ‘a lie can be halfway around the world before the truth has put on its boots’.
Just to illustrate this point, consider that that pseudo graph that the above video puts in to compare various heating and cooling events in the past to our current rise in average global temperatures. This statement is fundamentally meaningless until someone comes in and does the enormously complex statistical research needed to scale each event so they can make a meaningful comparison. A drawing a cute graphic with sine waves is cartooning—not statistical analysis!
In contrast consider this graph of the last 2,000 years of global warming and cooling trends that I found in an article on the Phys.org website. I’m not going to say that this is an authorative article or even website, but I will say that the graph below actually conveys information that could be proved or disproved. (For example, it has a scale on the left side of the graph.) In contrast, the cartoon on the above animation is so bad it’s not even wrong!
Please note the difference between the two. Yes, it does show historical highs and lows—but nothing like what started happening during the industrial revolution in the latter half of the 19th century.
I’d also draw people’s attention to how this short video is presented. The series is titled What would you say? and opens with a group of people sitting around a table in a social setting. If you think about it, the whole point of this isn’t to educate the viewer so much as to prepare him or her with talking points that they can repeat to other people.
Because the talking points don’t come with the details that would actually make them useful parts of a discussion on an extremely complex subject, they really aren’t part of a constructive conversation—instead, they are specifically designed to derail and destroy honest conversations about the subject of climate change and reduce them to a battle between entrenched positions.
In effect, what these little videos are designed to do is create trolls who are armed with talking points that they can then use to prevent honest debate either on line or over the Christmas dinner. And this, in turn, delays the creation of a social consensus being created that would lead to systemic solutions to the Climate Emergency.
Here’s a trailer for a whole series being flogged by the Cornwall Alliance:
As you can see, it’s pretty obvious that the Cornwall Alliance is attempting to suggest that Christianity is against any sort of environmentalism that would involve taking serious, systemic action aimed at protecting the human race from the potentially worst effects of man-made climate change.
I’m told that it’s never a good idea to try to parse out a person or group’s motivations for doing something. As a close friend warned me the other day
We both agree on almost everything—yet I have no idea about how your mind operates and you don’t know how mine does either. That’s why we can agree on so much and still end up disagreeing so often.
I understand this point. But having said that, I do believe it’s important to at least try to figure out what is behind such a big, well-funded, professional campaign aimed at preventing real action on the biggest problem currently facing the human race.
To that end, I’d ask people to consider the following clip from the Colson Center:
I think it’s probably important for me to suggest that readers shouldn’t believe just about anything in the above.
To start with, I would suggest that it does a profound injustice to the depth of Adam Smith’s subtle reasoning.
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
I’m not suggesting that Smith didn’t believe in either a market economy or the so-called ‘invisible hand’, but he was aware of the way businesses quickly collude to fix prices and exploit both workers and customers if they aren’t reigned-in by government regulation.
The second thing to understand is that none of the examples that the video mentions are actually ‘capitalists’. Instead, they are all trades people or small shop owners. Both groups of people existed in the ancient world and medieval times—long before the emergency of capitalism in the 18th century.
If ‘capitalism’ isn’t about butchers, carpenters, and, groceries—just what is it?
As the name would suggest, ‘capitalism’ is about how a small group of individuals have developed ways of using piles of money, or ‘capital’. To a capitalist, money (or ‘capital’) isn’t an end in itself, but rather is a tool to be used to exert influence on society and make even more money. It’s like a hammer to a carpenter, a knife to a butcher, and, a weight scale to a grocer.
Adam Smith would suggest that this tool can be extremely useful—if it it’s used properly. People can use it to create new technologies, build housing, educate the citizenry, etc. The problem is, however, that in our present system capital is controlled by a class of people called ‘capitalists’. And, by definition, this is a class of individuals who are deeply concerned about amassing greater and greater amounts of capital. And what do we call people who want more and more money? GREEDY!
The other thing to remember is that this money that the capitalists move heaven and earth to accumulate and control comes from workers and customers—plus the environment. And what do we call people who take as much from others as they can get away with taking? SELFISH!
We live in a complex world with government regulations designed to help the entire economic and political system work smoothly. Ideally, the government should be crafting these policies in order to serve the public good. Unfortunately, however, politicians are faced with the need to raise huge amounts of money to fund election campaigns. And the decisions that governments make have huge impacts on the lives of both individual citizens and businesses. This means our political system has a great many very well-paid lobbyists who’s job it is to talk to politicians and convince/bribe them to change their policy ideas in order to protect the financial interests of the people who pay for the lobbyists. And what do we call a class of people who exert unfair control over our political system? ANTI-DEMOCRATIC!
Please note that in none of the above am I suggesting that any individual capitalist is ‘evil’. (Remember my friend’s point that quoted above—we really don’t know what is going in any particular person’s head). Instead, I’m simply trying to work through the implications of the system that governs our lives. Indeed, I suspect that there are lots of inherently good people who are involved in capitalism. The problem is the game is rigged by the bigger (and greedier) capitalists. The rules of capitalism inexorably push human behaviour towards greed, selfishness, and, authoritarian rule.
To understand this point, consider the case of a hypothetical lumber company that owns a forest. Their experts do some research and come to the conclusion that if they cut down 0.5% of the trees every year they will be able to sell timber indefinitely because the forest will be able to replace what’s cut over the same year.
An investor capitalist—ie, someone who uses a pool of money to create more money—looks at this situation and finds out that if he invests in a specific type of bond, he can get a rate of return of 3%. That means if he cuts down the entire forest all at once, he can take the money and put it into those bonds and receive six times as much than if the trees were harvested sustainably.
But what if the management at the forest company doesn’t want to clear cut their sustainable forest? There are two problems.
First, management can change, and once the forest is clear-cut it cannot be returned to the state it was in. In a situation that is on-going where one decision is always available, is attractive, and, can never be changed back once done, given enough time, it will almost always inevitably happen.
Second, if the company is publicly-traded, there will always be a significant difference between what the shares are worth while the forest is being managed sustainably versus what they would be worth if it was clear cut. Any person with access to enough capital who wants to clear cut will be able to offer more money to buy the shares than someone who wants to manage the forest sustainably.
And any company that isn’t making the most money it possibly can will not be able to survive in the long run either the change of ownership through inheritance (if privately owned by a family) or through a controlling interest of publicly-traded shares on the stock market. The result is an inexorable push in capitalist economies towards short-term profits over long-term sustainability.
The same process was at work when most of North America’s local newspapers disappeared. Most of these businesses were privately-owned by legacy families, had been around long enough to have inherited very expensive real estate holdings (ie: newspaper offices and printing factories in downtown cores), and, their reputation as good sources of local news. Capitalists like Ken Thomson and Conrad Black realized that if they bought these local companies and assembled them into chains they could pay off their investments and make a profit by selling-off the real estate holdings and laying off most their reporters—which would increase profits until readers cancelled their subscriptions. The result were newspapers that no one wanted to read, but by the time subscriptions dried-up, the investors (ie: the capitalists) had made their money back and added profits. This meant they could close the papers down and invest the gains made somewhere else.
So what does this mean for the Colson Center video I posted above?
I’d suggest it means that capitalism is very much about greed, and that no matter how ‘decent’ a person thinks they are, once they start to participate in this economic system they will either have to act like a greedy person—or they will be replaced by someone else who has no such qualms.
But this isn’t an article about capitalism, per se. It’s about evangelical Christianity. So the question needs to be raised: “What does Christianity say about capitalism?”
Consider these two quotes:
Jesus said to his disciples, “I swear to you, it’s difficult for the rich to enter Heaven’s domain. And again I tell you, it’s easier for a camel to squeeze through a needles’s eye than for a wealthy person to get into God’s domain.” (Matthew 19: 23-24. Scholar’s Version)
and
Jesus loved him at first sight and said to him, “You are missing one thing: make your move, sell whatever you have and give <the proceeds> to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. And then come, follow me!”
But stunned by this advice, he went away dejected, since he possessed a fortune.
After looking around, Jesus says to his disciples, “How difficult it is for those who have money to enter God’s domain!” (Mark 10: 21-23, Scholar’s Version)
There are two things I would draw reader’s attention towards in the above.
First, these two passages show Jesus as not being aware of/interested in a systems analysis of the situation. This is hardly surprising. There were no economists in the world he inhabited, no social science, and, the word ‘capitalist’ didn’t even exist. All he had to work with were the basic notions of ‘good’and ‘bad’, ‘rich’ and ‘poor’, and, ‘God’. This is a key problem with relying exclusively upon an ancient religious text to build a world-view—it’s sometimes sorely lacking in the conceptual sophistication that’s needed to understand the modern world.
For evangelical Christianity there really isn’t anything like a sociological way of looking at the world. Instead, all they have is the idea that individual people have a conscience and each of them has a choice to be ‘good’ or ‘bad’. The sort of analysis I did above to show how capitalism undermines sustainable logging and local newspapers simply cannot be undertaken by someone working within the conceptual framework of evangelical Christianity—it simply doesn’t compute!
Secondly, even according to the limited lens that the ancient world gave Jesus to understand the relationship between the rich and the poor—he was firmly against the rich. There have been lots of silly excuses raised by apologists that would suggest that these two parts of The Gospels don’t really mean what they say, but that’s just self-serving nonsense. It’s obvious that Jesus wouldn’t support modern capitalism. If he did, he would hardly have said that super wealthy individuals like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and, Warren Buffet had about as much chance of getting into heaven as a camel does going through the eye of a needle. Nor would he have told any of them to liquidate all their assets and give the results to the poor.
Jesus may not have been a Marxist—but he certainly didn’t support capitalism.
What I can only surmise, therefore, is that modern, American evangelical Christianity—as espoused by the Cornwall Alliance and the Colson Center—is a heresy created by wealthy interests in order to support the Republican party.
I’m not about to call in the Inquisition to torture people and then burn them at the stake. But I do think it’s important to draw people’s attention to this fact. I would suggest, however, that the very least a well-run democracy could do is remove the tax-exempt and charitable status for anything that organized religion does that isn’t directly aimed at helping the poor.
I’ll have more to say in a future post.
Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!