Seven years ago Indur Goklany, an economist formerly with the U.S. Department of the Interior and associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since its inception in 1988 as an author, expert reviewer, and U.S. delegate to the organization, concluded a thorough analysis of the effect of American biofuels policy on the world's poor with these words: ... the production of biofuels [in the U.S.] may have led to at least 192,000 additional deaths and 6.7 million additional lost … [Read more...]
The Theologization of Global Warming Among American Evangelicals: Who Says Religion and Science Can’t Mix?
[Note: This essay was written in the summer of 2010 at the request of Dr. Patrick Michaels, intended for a book he was editing. His publisher declined to include it in the book because of its religious content. It was never published elsewhere until now. We hope it remains a helpful survey of the history of the debate over global warming among evangelicals up to that time.—ECB, March 11, 2016] Introduction In the last half decade there has been a blossoming of public concern about global … [Read more...]
How Fossil Fuels Benefit People and the Planet
Indur Goklany is one of my favorite scholars on the interplay of people, resources, and our natural environment. Few are more thorough and careful to root their ideas in solid empirical research. And what his research reveals, again and again, is that people's creativity is making the world a better and better place to live, not just for people but also for plants and animals. In a day when Greens everywhere demonize people's use of fossil fuels as imperiling the planet, Goklany demonstrates, … [Read more...]
Oppressing the Poor In the Name of Fighting Global Warming
"No challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change." So said President Barack Obama in his State of the Union message last week. That he spent under 5% of the speech on the subject—about one-ninth as much as on the economy, one-fifth as much as on our need to overcome cynicism, and a little less even than on affordable college education—and tucked it away in a section about two-thirds of the way through suggests that the President doesn't really believe it … [Read more...]
