Climate Change Scepticism by Greg Garrard;Axel Goodbody;George B. Handley;Stephanie Posthumus;

Author:Greg Garrard;Axel Goodbody;George B. Handley;Stephanie Posthumus;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

An ideo-theology of American climate scepticism

A number of prominent Christians, including Pat Robertson, Sarah Palin and Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, are known for claiming that climate change isn’t real simply because it is a theological impossibility. There is perhaps no critic of anthropogenic climate change more brazen and proud of his minority status than Inhofe, repeatedly self-identified as a ‘one man truth squad’ (‘Inhofe Speaks’). A highly influential climate sceptic, Inhofe has served as the chairman for the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. In his 2012 book, The Global Warming Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, and often in interviews, he cites the Bible to justify his scepticism: ‘In the end, through all the hysteria, all the fear and all the phony science, what global warming alarmists have often forgotten is that God is still up there and as Genesis 8:22 reminds us, “As long as the earth remains,/there will be springtime and harvest,/cold and heat, winter and summer,/day and night”’ (175). The British author Philip Foster, discussed in Chapter 2, uses this same verse from the King James translation as his title, While the Earth Endures, similarly signalling a confidence that the earth’s destiny is underwritten by God and that climate change is therefore a cosmological impossibility. Elsewhere Inhofe adds some colour to this claim by saying, ‘The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous’ (qtd. in Johnson).

Inhofe shows how political ideology extends and colours a dominionist theology to such a degree as to make them indistinguishable and thus helps to solidify the moral urgency of climate scepticism. Inhofe entered politics because of a seemingly senseless regulation that prohibited him from moving a fire escape on a home he purchased in Oklahoma, a story of bureaucratic stupidity with which anyone can identify. If there is a distinction between such a senseless and freedom-restricting regulation and one that might be necessary to protect the freedom of those affected by environmental degradation, Inhofe does not say. Of course, the roots of such scepticism have a deep history in the United States. As Jacqueline Vaughn Switzer argues, American anti-environmentalism, particularly as it emerged as a form of resistance to the protection of public lands in the American West, has most often been about resistance to regulations that are perceived as threats to jobs and economic opportunities (6). Switzer notes that there are many and sometimes competing interests among environmental sceptics, including ‘extractive resource industries like timber and mining, property rights activists (developers and individual landowners), recreationists, western ranchers and corporate farmers, businesspeople, and militia members and conspiracy theorists’ (13). Inhofe’s book was primarily motivated by the rising interest in cap and trade policies that he believed threatened ‘hundreds of thousands of jobs, and [would] significantly raise energy prices for families, businesses, and farmers – basically anyone who drives a car, operates heavy machinery, or flips a switch’ (ix). He

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