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Here’s the full letter with the sections that were missing marked.
Dear ____________,
The Apostle Paul began most of his letters by first introducing himself (the standard form of letters in those days) and then writing a heartfelt greeting to his recipients, like “To all those in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” (Romans 1:7)
Or “To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Corinthians 1:2–3)
Or to an individual, “To Timothy, my true child in the faith: Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.” (1 Timothy 1:2)
I’m no apostle, but I feel toward you somewhat as Paul felt toward those to whom he wrote: a God-given love and a longing for you to experience, to the bottom of your soul, the grace and peace that come from God.
You are a great blessing to the Cornwall Alliance, through your generous gifts and your prayers for us. I thank God for you and pray that He will heap blessing upon blessing on you.
Ordinarily in these letters I spend most of my time telling you about the many developments in environmental science, economics, and politics that pose threats to liberty and prosperity. Then I tell you what we’ve done and plan to do to protect you and millions of others from those threats, and then I ask you for your support.
This time I’m going to do something different.
I’m going to devote most of this letter to telling you some things that really encourage me that our efforts are bearing fruit—and why. After that, yes, I will tell you some of the threats we face and how we hope to respond to them, and I will ask you to help us with a generous donation and fervent prayer.
But I want to begin by just sharing with you some hopeful news. So here goes:
This starts the section missing from the mailed letter.
Despite its leftward and somewhat liberal turn since 1980, many people viewChristianity Today as American evangelicals’ flagship magazine.
The front cover of its June issue bore an illustration of an oil spill and said, “God Gave Us Oil. Should We Keep Using It?” My heart fell. I was sure I’d find an article insisting that we must curtail and eventually end our use of oil (and other fossil fuels) to stop global warming.
I did.
Yet I’m encouraged. Why? Because this event reveals that we’re making progress in countering the climate alarmist message among evangelicals—and that with your continued help we can expand that progress!
Let me tell you a brief bit of history to help you see the article’s significance.
About a decade ago I attended the first conference of a new (and as it turned out fairly short-lived) evangelical creation-care organization.
It was launched by the Evangelical Environmental Network. EEN, funded by large grants from secular liberal foundations, had spearheaded a controversial and largely unsuccessful drive to bring evangelicals onto the global warming bandwagon. The new venture wouldn’t make that connection, or that goal, clear.
From a friend who had a friend on the inside, I received internal emails. Organizers explicitly planned to gain evangelicals’ confidence over uncontroversial environmental issues. Then, several years later, they would begin pushing the message of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW)—about which most evangelicals were skeptical.
In short, they’d hide their true colors until they had a foot in the door.
Over lunch during that conference I had extensive conversation with some leading lights among evangelicals who believed in CAGW. One was the editor of Christianity Today—an old acquaintance from my former days as editor of Discipleship Journal and member of the Evangelical Press Association.
Extended conversation revealed that he knew next to nothing of the scientific arguments pro and con about
- how much human activity contributes to climate change,
- what its consequences might be,
- or the economic and engineering arguments about how to reduce it.
But one thing was clear then and became clearer as time passed: Christianity Todaywould champion alarmism on climate change and ignore contrary voices. Since then, CT has toed that line. Rare references to dissenting voices—including ours—generally dismissed them as extremist, politically motivated, and driven by funding, not science or economics.
June’s 8-page cover article, “Petroleum Prodigals: How to Recover from Too Much of a Good Thing,” certainly stuck to the rule of affirming CAGW and the need to stop it. But it also did something CT hadn’t done previously.
This ends the section missing from the mailed letter.
It cited Cornwall Alliance in a non-dismissive way. After describing us as a “network of Christian scholars in diverse fields,” it said our “arguments are persuasive in many ways.”
That might not seem earth shaking. It wouldn’t be surprising in, for example, Worldmagazine, which has covered competing sides of the climate-change debate. But I can tell you, as someone who has followed Christianity Today’s coverage of global warming for fourteen years, it is remarkable.
Now, don’t jump to the conclusion that the article clearly and accurately represented either our scholars’ expertise in the relevant science and economics or our views and arguments. It didn’t.
It didn’t mention that our scholars include numerous outstanding environmental and climate scientists or energy and environmental economists as well as theologians and other religious scholars.
And despite its saying our “arguments are persuasive in many ways,” it offered none of our scientific arguments that human activity contributes little to global warming. Likewise, it mentioned none of our arguments from economics and engineering that a drastic shift from fossil fuels to wind and solar would do little to reduce global warming while harming the poor.
Instead it reported that our website says “one way of exercising godly dominion is by transforming raw materials into resources and using them to meet human needs,” so leaving them in the ground is as wrong as it was for the “unprofitable servant” in one of Christ’s parables to bury his master’s money rather than investing it profitably. Yes, we do say that, but it’s by no means among our main arguments about global warming and climate-and-energy policy.
It also said our “critique of carbon haters is that to suddenly change the rules of the energy game and deprive the rest of the world the quality of life that Americans enjoy is not especially loving.” Yes, we do argue that way, too. But that, too, is far from the kinds of arguments you know we offer, in our regular e-newsletters and all over our website, like these (and more):
- Computer climate models’ simulations of carbon dioxide’s contribution to global warming call for two, three, or more times as much warming as actually observed and therefore cannot truthfully represent how the climate system responds to added CO2.
- Empirical estimates of warming from CO2—data-driven rather than model-driven—have trended downward for decades. The most likely conclusion now is that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 would cause about 0.9 to 3.15 degrees Fahrenheit of warming—well below alarmists’ claims and certainly not dangerous.
- Historical studies reveal that humans—and other life on earth—have thrived better in warmer than in colder times.
- Even assuming that CO2 warms the earth as much as the alarmists claim, full implementation of the Paris climate treaty (or similar agreements) would reduce future temperature by an insignificant amount while costing the world many trillions of dollars. To be specific: $70 to $140 trillion for a 0.3 degree F reduction in global temperature at the end of this century—i.e., $23.3 to $46.6 trillion per tenth of a degree. And all that’s money that, if it weren’t wasted that way, could be spent wisely instead to provide food, clothing, shelter, clean drinking water, sewage sanitation, safe transportation, reliable electricity, health care, and many other things that would improve human life far more than a 0.3- degree reduction in global average temperature.
- Abundant, affordable, reliable, instant-on-demand electricity is absolutely indispensable to lifting and keeping whole societies out of poverty—and wind, solar, and other renewables cannot provide that, while fossil fuels (along with nuclear and hydro) can.
- So large-scale substitutions of wind, solar, and other renewables for fossil fuels would not improve our climate but would drive millions of people back into poverty, with its high rates of disease and premature death, and trap billions of others in it.
Nonetheless, that Christianity Today would say even what it did about us in that article is remarkably refreshing and encouraging.
And that’s not the only remarkable thing about that article. Yes, it toes the party line on climate change. It says that because of “carbon” (really carbon dioxide, but who cares about chemistry nowadays?) emissions we are headed “toward inevitable sea-level rise, droughts, and what Texas Tech climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe and others refer to as ‘weather on steroids’.” Yes, it says that “by pouring greenhouse gasses into [the] atmosphere, we have upset the balance, essentially defiling [God’s] gift.” (And you know that none of those claims is true, but most of CT’s readers probably don’t.)
But it also acknowledges that wind and solar bring their own environmental risks. Furthermore, they aren’t likely to be able to replace fossil fuels as sources of the abundant, affordable, reliable energy necessary to sustain prosperity. So, since the author is convinced that to avert dangerous warming we must, sooner than later, abandon fossil fuels, he refurbishes an old message of the evangelical left: “live simply.” That is, get used to living at a material level far below what you or even your grandparents were accustomed to—indeed, a level far below what’s needed to ensure a long, healthy life.
The message is a version of the old environmentalist saw Paul Ehrlich coined decades ago: I=PAT, i.e., environmental IMPACT is a function of POPULATION and AFFLUENCE and TECHNOLOGY. The more people there are, and the wealthier they are, and the higher their technological level, the more harm will come to the environment.
That’s false, of course—actually the opposite of the truth. A clean, healthful, beautiful environment is a costly good. Wealthier people can afford more of a costly good than can poorer people. Larger populations make for greater division of labor and trade and more innovations from those amazing minds God has given us. All of those things make for higher productivity, which makes people wealthier. And higher technology, the result of those innovations by those bearers of God’s image, also increases productivity, which makes people wealthier.
So the truth is that I=the inverse of PAT. The more people there are, and the wealthier they are, and the higher their technological achievements, the cleaner, healthier, and more beautiful their environment is likely to be. (So long as their governments don’t quash their creativity by squashing their liberty.)
So, in short, that CT cover article is grossly mistaken—not just in those ways but in many others, too. Indeed, unbeknownst to us, a retired professor of statistics and research methods sent CT’s editor in chief a lengthy letter detailing some of its failures, and copied us. It was a masterpiece!
Nonetheless,
- that the article spoke at least somewhat evenhandedly, not disparagingly, of the Cornwall Alliance,
- that it would admit that our arguments are persuasive,
- that it would acknowledge that there are more perspectives in the climate-change debate, held by responsible scholars, than just that represented by Katharine Hayhoe,
- and that it would acknowledge that renewable energy isn’t going to solve the problem—
all those things are surprising and welcome developments.
And that article is just one of many indicators that our message is getting increasing attention.
Not long ago geologist Gregory Wrightstone joined our network of scholars. His bookInconvenient Facts: The Science that Al Gore Doesn’t Want You to Know has been a best seller—and many of you have received it as our thanks for a donation, or bought it through our website.
Greg is getting lots of attention for his work.
The attention came partly because Apple tried to suppress it. Although Apple initially approved an iPhone app based on the book, it then rejected it, saying there wasn’t sufficient market for it (though downloads had been very high!)—but under intense public pressure changed its mind again and accepted it.
Amazingly, a public library refused to carry Greg’s book, despite its being a best-seller by an author who lived just blocks away and the library had no other books offering a skeptical view on global warming. That, too, generated public controversy.
When Greg recently testified as an expert witness in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, a columnist for PennLive, a prominent online publication in the state, published what can only be described as a “hit piece.” You know you must be rattling someone’s cage when that happens!
A Congressional committee discussing alleged rapid species extinctions driven by climate change cited Greg’s work prominently, and World magazine quoted him extensively in its report on the subject.
And in an article on five “most over-the-top climate warnings,” Fox News prominently quoted Greg, along with Cornwall Senior Fellow and board member Dr. Roy Spencer.
Fox also published Roy’s “Why So Many Tornadoes this Year? It’s Not what AOC, Bernie Sanders (or Maybe Even You) Think,” which demonstrated that the recent uptick in tornadoes comes not from global warming (despite claims to the contrary) but actually from cooler-than-normal temperatures.
And then there’s the growing reception Vijay Jayaraj, who writes frequently for us as our Contributor for Developing Countries, is getting for his articles. Vijay is an environmental and climate scientist who survived being trained at one of the world’s leading centers of climate alarmism, the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Center, and came out with his head on straight!
Express.co.uk, a British periodical, quoted at length from his article “Global Cooling: The Real Climate Threat,” which appeared in American Thinker. The blog Science Mattersreproduced much of his Cornwall blog piece “Will My Carbon Footprint Benefit or Harm the Environment?” The Science Times quoted him and the Cornwall Alliance in an article titled “Scientists Warn a Prolonged Solar Minimum Is Coming.”
In May alone, Vijay, had thirteen articles published in six different periodicals, and ten more on Cornwall’s blog. His scope of topics was amazing, from a refutation of the recent UN claim that global warming threatens a million species with extinction, to why coal is a lifeline, not a curse, to why the world doesn’t face a water shortage crisis, to why global cooling is more likely than global warming over the next few decades, to the importance of nuclear energy for the world’s future, to how prominent evangelical climate-alarmist scientist Katharine Hayhoe bullied him on Twitter (and then blocked him from responding)!
We’re especially glad that Vijay, who lives in India, is able to explain to wealthy Westerners the challenges people in developing countries face because they lack abundant, affordable, reliable electricity. He treated the subject after one of the almost daily blackouts he experiences (How would you like to live with that?) stretched to more than 12 hours (Or that?!), in a post on Cornwall’s blog. People who take cheap, reliable electricity for granted need to understand what life is like without it before they insist that developing nations skip fossil fuels and jump straight to wind and solar.
And then there’s my own contribution to Cornwall’s educational efforts. In addition to helping our other writers get published and spearheading Cornwall’s other efforts, I managed to find time for a little of my own writing lately, too.
The Washington Times published my “Some Tricks Climate Alarmists Play.” The Christian Post published my “What If Evangelical Students Heard More than One Side of the Climate Debate?” (It discusses the propagandizing of evangelical college students by climate alarmists like Katharine Hayhoe and her father—something I told you about in my last letter. I offered it to Christianity Today first. Predictably, it turned it down.) I wrote eleven articles for our blog, and edited and prepared for publication two new booklets.
The first, Frank Schnell’s Modus Operandi: How the EPA and the Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry Keep Your Fears Alive, goes into fairly new territory for Cornwall Alliance. We’ve long known that a great deal of regulation of chemicals and products rests on very poor science, but we’ve not dug deeply into that before.
Now this booklet, by a retired career toxicologist with the ATSDR, exposes, clearly and concisely, the frankly astonishing tricks by which those and other agencies twist facts to keep people afraid so they’ll support the agencies’ continuance and growth.
I’ve read few things that better demonstrate the truth of H.L. Mencken’s famous quote, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
Our second new booklet is my “Is Capitalism Bad for the Environment?” It first provides irrefutable historical evidence that centrally planned, socialistic or communistic governments’ environmental track record is far, far worse than anything you’ll find in any free-market, capitalist country. Then it refutes the five most common, and serious, charges environmentalists raise against capitalism, and shows why, far from being bad for the environment, the free market is its best protector.
And through all this time we’ve continued publishing our e-newsletter, posting articles to cornwallalliance.org and EarthRisingBlog.com, answering numerous questions about a wide variety of environmental and economic issues from people who email or call us, and—sigh—dealing with the simply mind-numbing hurdles federal and state governments put in the way of nonprofits struggling to survive and grow.
Do you mind if I share just a few of those with you? Chalk it up to hoping for a little sympathy if you will—but this is what we go through, and I hope it will stimulate you to pray for us as we try to jump these hurdles.
First, with the help of an organization whose sole business is preparing new nonprofits’ applications to the federal Internal Revenue Service for 501(c)3 nonprofit status, it took us over four months and cost us over $3,000 (not including the value of our own time) to complete that process—and now we wait for what could be six months to a year for the IRS’s response. (Definitely something you can pray for, please!)
Yes, although we’ve been around for over a decade, we had to do this when we separated from our former umbrella 501(c)3. And yes, your gifts to us are tax deductible even now, because we’re operating under a different umbrella 501(c)3 (which is charging us absolutely nothing!) in the interim—CFACT, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. (Its founders and I are friends stretching back to the early 1990s.)
Second, we’ve had to incorporate as a nonprofit in the State of Tennessee and get registered for all kinds of things, like paying sales and employment taxes.
Third, although we can (as I’m doing right now) solicit charitable donations nationwide as we operate under CFACT as our umbrella, once we go independent after receiving our own 501(c)3 status, we’ll have to be registered for charitable solicitation in all the states that require it (only 9 don’t)—a process that will cost us thousands of dollars and hundreds of staff hours in coming months.
There are more, but I’ll stop there.
Now let me share with you some needs we have if we’re to surmount those and other hurdles and carry on our mission to educate the public and policymakers about Biblical earth stewardship, economic development for the poor, and the gospel of Jesus Christ.
The first need is a really big one: expanded staff. Although we have nearly 70 scholars in our network (all of whom donate their work when we ask them), we have only two paid staff—Megan Kinard, our Director of Communications, and me.
We absolutely need more personnel.
Some could be volunteers. They might fill orders, which would require someone near enough to come in once or twice a week for three or four hours at a time. Or they might edit articles to submit to print and online publishers, which could be done remotely over the Internet.
But some must be paid staff. Such as? Well, in the reasonably short term—to start by the fall—two.
First and foremost, a director of development, to do what I’m doing now: communicating our mission to people (not just through letters like this but in many other ways) and explaining how they can and why they should help us with their financial support.
As Cornwall’s leader, I rightly bear the main responsibility for that, but a great deal of the work could be done—probably more quickly and fruitfully—by someone with training (which I don’t have) and experience.
A major part of that would be applying for grants from various foundations. That’s often a complicated and time-consuming process but, because it doesn’t depend so much on personal relationships, could be done well by someone other than me.
So we need at least a half-time (to start) director of development, who will need salary and benefits. (If you have such skills and would be interested in the job, by all means let me know! There’s no need to relocate—you can work from home!)
Second, a manager/accountant to help us plan, organize, perform, and complete all the different projects we take on. Projects like:
- writing and editing and publishing articles;
- speaking for churches, colleges, schools, and conferences;
- exhibiting at public policy conferences, home school curriculum fairs, and more;
- answering correspondence;
- receiving and issuing receipts for donations;
- filling orders for our products;
and more. Such a person would also handle all our bookkeeping, accounting, federal and state tax returns, and similar tasks for us. This person, too, could work from home, and the position could begin at half time.
To fill those two positions, we need our monthly revenues to rise by about 35 percent.
If you think you might be able to handle either of those positions and are interested, please email me at [email protected], and let’s talk.
And now, since I’m on the subject of staff, let me share with you something about Megan Kinard, our Director of Communications.
Megan loves the Cornwall Alliance and is committed to our mission. She’s poured herself into her work for five-and-a-half years. Her salary is less than half the average for her position in her city, and she hasn’t had a raise in over three years. Not only that, but she (like me) has no health or retirement benefits. Yet she’s absolutely crucial to our mission.
I’m asking our board to approve a sizable raise for Megan, and begin providing health insurance for her. But to do those two things alone, we need our monthly revenues to increase by nearly 25 percent. Combined with the need for the two new half-time positions, that brings the need for increase in monthly revenues to 60 percent.
We realize that we need to achieve some of that—perhaps half to two-thirds—by adding new donors and obtaining foundation grants, and we hope to do so. But we also would ask you to pray seriously about whether the Lord would have you increase your normal giving by 20 to 30 percent or—since not everyone will be able—more.
So:
- If in the past you’ve given $5,000 in response to these letters, would you pray about giving $6,000 to $6,500?
- If $1,000, would you pray about giving $1,200 to $1,300?
- If $500, would you pray about giving $600 to $650?
- If $100, would you pray about giving $120 to $130?
Whatever you’ve usually given, would you just multiply it by 1.2 to 1.3 this time? And would you, please, as the Lord prompts you through prayer, continue to give at those higher amounts in response to future letters?
Last Sunday I spoke to a wonderful congregation at a church in Brighton, Tennessee. The day after I finish writing this letter, I head for Atlanta, Georgia, to speak twice to hundreds of Christian educators gathered at the Association of Classical and Christian Schools’Repairing the Ruins conference. The following week, I speak twice to the staff of Answers in Genesis in Petersburg, Kentucky. Other such events are coming up. Please pray for me to speak the truth, and to speak it boldly and winsomely. And pray that through my speaking many more people will come to benefit from Cornwall’s work, and join you in supporting it.
Meanwhile, please keep praying for Megan and me, and for all our network scholars. And pray that God’s truth will shine out clearly, so that people will understand what it really means to exercise a godly dominion over the earth, how to overcome poverty, and how to be reconciled with God through faith in our Lord and only Savior, Jesus Christ.
In Christ’s Joyous Service,
E. Calvin Beisner
Founder and National Spokesman
P.S.: The slight shift in Christianity Today’s treatment of climate change (not to mention of Cornwall Alliance) is encouraging. But what we need now is to see that become a big shift. And we need to see the same sort of shift at many Christian publications and organizations. Our educational efforts are an important part of what could bring that shift about. Please, help us by praying for us often and by sending your generous donation today.