Evangelical global-warming skeptics hire lobbyist

WASHINGTON (ABP) — As Congress debates clean-energy legislation, a conservative Christian group is ramping up lobbying efforts to raise questions about the science of climate change.

The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation Committee recently hired Shannon Royce, a 25-year veteran of conservative organizations including the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, as executive director.

“If you listen to the hype that you will hear in the media, you will hear that evangelicals really feel strongly about global warming, and the impression is that all evangelicals have bought into this global-warming bandwagon, and it simply is not true,” Royce said in an interview on a Christian radio station in Chicago.

She said cap-and-trade policies being debated in Congress are based on “pseudoscience” about human-induced global warming and would result in increased energy costs that wind up hurting the poor.

“The environmental extremists, and frankly unfortunately even some of our left-wing evangelical friends, see people predominantly as polluters and consumers,” she said. “Now what do you have to do if people are predominantly polluters and consumers? You need less people. It’s not necessarily that these groups are the same groups that would promote abortion abroad. They just won’t let us get food to those people, so they die naturally. It’s not the same as killing them directly, maybe, but it’s still really against the principles of what we believe as Christians.”

Royce’s new employer formed in 2005 to counter a rising chorus of evangelical voices calling Christians to action on climate change. Contrary to pro-environmental groups like the Evangelical Climate Initiative, the Cornwall Alliance supports “stewardship” of the earth but says many environmental concerns are overblown.

Calvin Beisner, the group’s national spokesman, recently testified before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and Environment. Beisner claimed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change  exaggerates the threat of catastrophic manmade global warming in part because its “work rests on the naturalist, atheistic world view” instead of a “biblical” world view that “sees Earth and its ecosystems as the effect of a wise God’s creation and providential preservation and therefore robust, resilient, and self-regulating.”

Royce, who formerly worked on Capitol Hill for the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm and was founding executive director of the Arlington Group, a coalition of “pro-family” organizations, said environmentalism began making inroads into evangelical Christianity a number of years ago “with some on the left deliberately courting and engaging some of our Christian friends and brothers on issues like this, and unfortunately I think at times co-opting them, with their concerns.”

“I don’t question the motives of those who have gotten engaged on that, but I think unfortunately the science just doesn’t support this,” she said.

Royce, who until recently worked as Washington director of TheVanguard.org, a conservative alternative to MoveOn.org. , said she is excited to be working with the Cornwall Alliance.

“Environmental stewardship and care for the poor are deeply biblical issues, but secular environmentalism has increasingly set its sights on limiting development and reducing human population,” she said in a press release. “Now, at a time when American families are struggling to make ends meet, Washington is considering a host of ill-advised measures that would make prices for energy, food and other essential needs skyrocket.”

“Climate change alarmists want to prevent economic growth here and around the world,” she said. “But the view that people are the problem — that they are polluters rather than producers — is unbiblical, and evangelicals aren’t buying it.”

–Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.