The Daily Signal - 'UNCONSCIONABLE': Christian Leader Condemns the 'Climate Colonialism' That Would Doom the Global South to Grinding Poverty

Episode Date: November 29, 2025

Climate alarmists don't just get the science wrong but also demonize the engine of wealth that has brought billions out of grinding poverty; and this "climate colonialism" is "morally unconscionable," a Christian leader says. "What I believe we're seeing in the demand from wealthy Western nations that we fight climate change by reducing our use of fossil fuels is that they are demanding that the poorest nations of the world forego the use of the most abundant, affordable, reliable energy sources that can lift them out of poverty and keep them out of poverty," E. Calvin Beisner, president of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, told The Daily Signal. Keep Up With The Daily Signal Sign up for our email newsletters:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.dailysignal.com/email⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠     Subscribe to our other shows: Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words:  https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL9753340027 The Tony Kinnett Cast: https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL2284199939 The Signal Sitdown: https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL2026390376   Problematic Women:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL7765680741     Follow The Daily Signal:    X:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://x.com/intent/user?screen_name=DailySignal Instagram:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/thedailysignal/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Facebook:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.facebook.com/TheDailySignalNews/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Truth Social:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://truthsocial.com/@DailySignal⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  YouTube:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/dailysignal?sub_confirmation=1    Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and never miss an episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Get no frills delivered. Shop the same in-store prices online and enjoy unlimited delivery with PC Express Pass. Get your first year for $2.50 a month. Learn more at pceexpress.ca. This is Tyler O'Neill, senior editor at The Daily Signal. I'm honored to be joined by E. Calvin Beisner, who is the president, founder, and national spokesman for the Cornwall Alliance. Calvin, it's so great to have you with us today. Thank you very much. It's an honor.

So I want to delve into, you know, you at the Cornwall Alliance are a key voice against climate alarmism and for the real way that we can make people's lives better while stewarding creation from a biblical standpoint. So I just want to hear, you know, 10,000-foot view, what are the problems with climate? climate alarmism, and why does the Cornwall Alliance exist? Well, I think perhaps the easiest way to point out the trouble with climate alarmism is to say that even if it's right in terms of the science of how much warming we get from adding carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, what the climate alarmists want us to do about that will do more harm than good. That's even if they're right

on the question of the science, which I think that they badly exaggerate. The easiest way to show that is to refer to a very important document issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change back in 2018 called a special report on global warming of 1.8 degrees Celsius. Around about 400 pages into that report, they say that if we did absolutely nothing, to slow warming. The result would be about two and a half degrees Celsius of warming of global average surface temperature by the year 2100. And then they say that the impact of that on the global economy would be to reduce gross world product, the total value of everything produced

around the world in a given year, to reduce gross world product in the year 2100. by 2.6%. Now, that might sound bad. The problem is that it neglects what else has been happening over that period of time. Over that period of time, a pretty conservative forecast

would say that we're going to have about 3% annual growth in gross world product. That's roughly what it was through the 20th century, and with AI and all sorts of other technological biological advances, there are good reasons to think it would be faster in the 21st century, but let's be generous here. Okay? So if you combine that 3% annual growth in gross world product

with what is forecast in terms of population growth, and then you apply that to gross world product reduced by 2% in 2100, the result is that instead of the average person being approximately 9.1 times more productive and therefore producing 9.1 times as much per year in 2100 as in 2018, he's only producing about 8.9 times as much as in 2018. And he's been producing more and more every year all through the period of the whole century. Therefore, he is going to be many times wealthier in 2100 than the average person was in 2018 or any year before. Now, the importance of that is this. Wealth enables us to protect ourselves from anything related to climate and weather disasters. Extreme weather events, yes, do they cause human mortality? Yes. But the average

annual rate of human mortality due to extreme weather events has fallen by over 99% in the last 100 years. And that includes, by the way, the roughly 40 years or so that we think have probably we've seen largely human-induced global warming. So, in other words, the wealth protects us from whatever global warming might bring about in the way of extreme weather. So the conclusion of that is, even if they're right about how much warming comes, and I think that they're mistaken, I think they exaggerate the warming effect of greenhouse gases, but even if they're right, their solution is wrong. Do we know, I mean, this is the thing, even if they're right, that's a good approach here. From everything I've seen, you know, we've had climate alarmist predictions going back since the 70s where they say, oh, because we're burning fossil fuels, we're going to have this bad outcome, this bad outcome. You know, there are these lists that I've compiled and gone over.

there isn't supposed to be snow on Mount Kilimanjaro right now. You know, there are so many examples. The Maldives are supposed to have sunk beneath the waves. In that same year you just mentioned, 2018, that was predicted to happen. And they're still there. I think the world's wealthy are very glad that the Maldives are not underwater at this point. But how much do we know, like can we even know, if the climate alarm are anywhere in the ballpark of correct.

I mean, I think the global climate system, there are too many things feeding into it for us to isolate, for us even to say with certainty that things are going to keep warming, but for us even to isolate, like, oh, we know that it's carbon emissions that are causing this.

I mean, I think it is almost, you know, hubristic of us to say that we know this. Yeah, you know, There's a very well-known evangelical spokesperson for the climate alarmist position. That's Dr. Catherine Hayho. She is actually a climate scientist, atmospheric scientist. And she says, look, it's basic physics. When you add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, basic physics tells us that it's going to warm.

Yeah, that's right. That is right. Absolutely, because a greenhouse gas absorbs a little bit of infrared, that is heat, as it bounces from the surface of the earth out towards space, and it re-radiates that, and some of it comes back down toward the surface. So the surface will be somewhat warmer than it otherwise would be all other things being equal. But that's the problem you hinted at when you pointed out that there are so many different factors in the climate system. Now, it's also basic physics that if you drop a rock and a feather at the same moment from the same height, they will hit the ground at the same moment, unless, of course, they're in air, in which case the rock plummets and the feather kind of wafts down a little by a little like this, you know.

And if it's windy, the feather might blow up into a tree and get stuck and never come down, right? So reality is a whole lot more complicated than basic physics. Now, the climate system is probably the most complex natural system we have ever studied, with the exceptions of the human brain and DNA. And there are thousands of feedback mechanisms in the climate system. Most of those, we cannot even come close to putting quantified measurements on. and even the ones that we can, we can't be very precise in those qualifications. And if you can't be precise in those quantifications, you're modeling by computer of how that

atmosphere, that ocean, that landmass interacts together cannot be conclusive. Now, what we actually see is that the models that the models, that have been run, what's called the C-MIP or coupled model intercomparison project models, and there have been generations of those. We're now in the sixth generation. Those on average tend to simulate anywhere from two to four times as much warming as we actually measure with our instruments, whether, you know, surface instruments or satellite measurement systems, whatever. And what that tells us is that the models are not accurately describing how the climate system works.

Now, the great Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman said the key to science is this. When we want to understand how something works in nature, first we make a guess. We call that a hypothesis, right? That way it sounds much more scientific. We guess, and then we make predictions of what we should find if our guess is right. Then we go out and in the real world, whether it's in a laboratory or out in nature, we look. We make observations, and we see if what we observe matches what we predicted. And he said, if our observations contradict our predictions, then our guess is wrong.

Period. Doesn't matter how smart you are. It doesn't matter how beautiful your guess is. And I would add, and it doesn't matter how many people agree with you. If the observations contradict the predictions, the model, the guess, is wrong. Computer models are hypotheses. They're not facts, right? And they're not evidence. The evidence is what we see in the real world. So we know that the models are mistaken. Yeah. Even when it doesn't conflict, that doesn't prove that you are right. I mean, that's the other aspect of science is that you can get the result that aligns with your hypothesis and still be wrong, but they're not even getting that. Because your alleged cause might happen to correlate with a different alleged cause that you haven't taken account of yet, right? So when it comes to the climate system, for example, they're focusing in terms. entirely on greenhouse gases, especially on carbon dioxide. And that's kind of funny because water vapor and clouds, which is water vapor, condensed, between the two of those, they account for anywhere between about 85 and 95% of all of the warming of Earth's surface. But when they focus just on the greenhouse gases, they're leaving out such things as variations in solar energy output, variations in solar magnetic wind output, which causes variations in the influx of galactic cosmic rays,

which in turn cause variations in cloudiness. They're leaving out cloudiness itself, and they have to leave that out because none of our computers is capable of running a model sophisticated enough to get clouds at the scale at which they actually happen. You know, our models are based on grids that are hundreds of kilometers in width, right? And clouds happen on a much smaller scale than that. And yet, clouds are probably the most important control of surface temperature. So they leave those out. They largely leave out the role of ocean currents, which,

move in cycles and they change over time, various different periodicities. So the problem is over-dependence on models and under-dependence on real-world observation. And here's sort of a conclusion to that part of the discussion. In the last roughly decade, more and more work has been done on empirical ways, rather than modeled ways, of understanding what's happening. in the climate system related to global average temperature. Those empirical methods of estimating what's called climate sensitivity, how much warming you can expect from adding so much of greenhouse gas to the atmosphere.

Those empirical estimates of climate sensitivity are running, oh, anywhere from about a quarter of a degree to close to two degrees per doubling of CO2 content in the atmosphere. The most common range for them is, oh, around 0.75 to 1.2 degrees, something like that. That's much lower than what the models on which the climate alarmists depend, right? So I've heard, you know, we've been talking about this. You've been delving into the science deeper than I often go. But I haven't heard from you this claim. We have on the left the suggestion that if you disagree with climate alarmism, you deny science.

And there also is this claim, I hear a lot from those who say, you know, a lot of evangelical Christians question the science. Well, they say, the critics say, that this is all because we believe that the Bible, the biblical book of Revelation is coming. that you're going to have the end times. And so we want the Earth to warm up because we want the end of days. And I mean, every time I hear that, I cringe and I say that's absolutely not true. But I want to hear your response to this.

There are many ways that I think when you live in the climate alarmist bubble and you think the only reason somebody could have for disagreeing is that they're either bought off by big oil. or that they're somehow messed up in the head. How do you deal with this gas lighting that we hear from the alarmists? Yeah, bought off by big oil as opposed to those who are bought off by big wind or big solar.

You know, that, by the way, is a logical fallacy called the argumentum ad hominem circumstantial. You're saying that because somebody's conclusion may affect his own outcomes in something, Therefore, it's not credible. Tell that to your oncologist the next time he diagnoses you with cancer. You know, he may have something to benefit from the diagnosis, but you better check it out very carefully, right? But, yeah, I mean, the notion that the climate realists, like myself and like the Cornwall Alliance and like hundreds, thousands of other scientists, are somehow driven by a passion for bringing on the apocalypse, you know. We want the world to burn up, right? That's a total straw man. I mean, especially in my case, anyway, in my eschatological view, I'm what's called

a post-millennialist. So I don't buy any of that stuff anyway, right? But, you know, who cares? If we can be sloppy about science, we can be sloppy about theology, too, right? You know, the notion that as you started off very early on, that, hey, if you don't buy into this, you don't love your neighbor, right? I mean, that's kind of the real crux of the matter. If you really love your neighbor, you're going to want to fight climate change. That is a really lousy excuse because it presupposes the very thing that is in debate. It's, you know, logicians, I used to teach logic in seminary, by the way, but logicians call that argument in a circle, right? Circular reasoning.

It presupposes the conclusion that you need to support. The fact is, I think, and this is not setting this up as a reason to embrace my view of climate change, right? That would be circular reasoning. But I think that those folks on the other side are embracing policies that will harm the very people they say they want to protect. And so I could question, well, then you don't really love your neighbor, right? But I won't do that because I refuse to confuse motivation with rational explanation and conclusion. So, you know, I think, for example, that when we look at the enormous contribution that coal, oil, and natural gas, hydrocarbon fuels, have made to lifting billions of people out of abject poverty, into prosperity, into longer, healthier life, and life with far more abundant options as to what we can do. Right? When I look at that and then I hear people condemning these as somehow evil, these fossil fuels, evil, I say, where have you been for the last two centuries? The last three centuries? Have you bothered to look at the world? Have you bothered to look at the fact that it's precisely the parts of the world that have made the least use of hydrocarbons that have the

highest rates still of extreme poverty. And it's the parts of the world that have made the most use of these that have the highest rates of prosperity, the lowest rates of disease, the longest life expectancies, and on and on. To me, the whole thing is just an example of great historical ignorance standing in the way of really understanding what is in some ways a complex issue, but really in many ways not that terribly complex. Fossil fuels, hydrocarbons, are the source of roughly 84% of all the energy human beings use in the world today. Energy is defined, we learned back in middle school, as the capacity to do work. But you have to do work in order to produce food, clothing, shelter, education, transportation, communication,

medical care, everything, right? Everything we do requires work. The more energy you can apply, the more work you can get done, and therefore, the more of all of those things you can have, right? If you're objecting to 84% of the energy that we get, then you're objecting to 84% of all the wealth, all the production that goes on in the world, i.e., you want 84% of the world that now eats well to eat poorly or starve. You want 84% of the world that's now housed well to be housed poorly or not at all.

Transported well or transported poorly or not at all. I think that's just horrifically self-contradictory. Let's dive into that because I think in the West today, it's very easy for us to take for granted the prosperity we have, and to get focused on a moral issue that we think, you know, they constantly say, you know, climate change is happening, you can't question it, and then there are all these negative effects and how dare you, you know, not fight this. Meanwhile, you know, I think those of us who have a modicum of understanding of how our ancestors lived, understand that grinding poverty is the natural human condition,

that's been with us since the beginning. Naked came I into this world and naked shall I return. That's the natural condition. Well, and like I think, you know, this morning I took my frozen breakfast burrito out of a freezer, which is a device that most of human history could barely have understood, took it out, put it into a microwave, which is another device that most of human history could never of understood and ate something warm that my hands didn't create and that, you know, all of these things that have to exist just for me to have a quick and simple and fairly healthy

breakfast, you know, this is the kind of thing. Like, I am immensely, you know, privileged as one way of saying it, wealthy. You know, I've benefited from all these things in the past. And I want those structures that enabled that wealth to continue and be expanded to those who don't enjoy the things that I enjoy. Yeah. It's really sad that our public education system and frankly most of our private education system in America today does such a lousy job of teaching history. For the entire history of mankind, average life expectancy at birth was around 27. or 28 years. Yeah.

The, the, the, um, roughly, roughly half of all people born would die before their fifth birthday. And by the way, those two stats applied to the so-called wealthy, who by our standards were miserably poor, as well as to everybody else. So, for example, Queen Anne of England in the early 17th century, early 18th century, pardon me. She had 19 children, not one of them survived to adulthood. And yet she was immensely rich by the standards of her day. So, you know, we don't appreciate the incredible blessings that we have today.

So I take your illustration of your burrito, your freezer, your microwave, And I just expanded out to so many other things. I mean, the foods, the ingredients that went into that burrito were shipped, some of them probably halfway around the world by ships or trucks or planes running on fuel made from petroleum. And yet people demonize petroleum. they wouldn't have most of their dietary choices were it not for petroleum. So, you know, I think there's just a lot of ignorance and it's very sad. We can be really grateful that now average life expectancy around the world is right around about 70 years. In most developed countries, it's right around 80 years.

even in the developing countries, life expectancy has risen more rapidly than it did in the developed countries because the wealth of the developed countries enables developing countries to trade with them and to expand their economies faster than we expanded ours. India went, for example, from roughly 50% of its population was in what the UN would describe as extreme poverty in about. the year 1980, 85 actually. I just ran these figures yesterday. And by 2024, that percentage was down to somewhere under 10, probably around 9, maybe around 8. It took the United States almost twice as long to make that same transition. But we finished that transition around

1959 instead of starting it around 1985. This is something to celebrate, and it's something that is driven by our access to abundant, affordable, reliable energy, most of which comes from hydrocarbon fuels. And, by the way, nuclear. And if any environmentalist is not celebrating nuclear energy, he should go and repent. reliable. Yeah, they should repent. Well, I think that is the other aspect of this. So we've talked a lot about how carbon fuels enrich people across the world. We've talked about the decline in natural disasters. We've talked about why the climate alarmist narrative doesn't hold up. But I also think

there's another piece. You know, I'm a little bit of fan. It's complicated because he was also progressive. But Theodore Roosevelt has always been somewhat of a hero of mine. And this idea of safeguarding the environment, protecting the earth, you know, doing, and from a Christian perspective, where we're not saying the earth is Gaia, we need to worship her. But we're saying as human beings, we have been entrusted by our creator with many gifts of the natural environment among them, and we need to be good stewards of what God has given us. How do we be good stewards and celebrate fossil fuels? And what, you know, I see a huge gap right now in the green movement where I feel like they're not talking enough about how we're going to change our

trash, or we're going to deal with the issue of, you know, these very basic environmental issues are all getting pushed aside for the great climate apocalypse that never seems to happen. And, you know, I want us to safeguard the earth. Yeah. A quick aside here early on in that you said reducing natural disasters. I think what you meant was reducing human mortality due to natural disasters. Reducing the negative effects on humans of natural disasters. But I will pick up on that real briefly and point out that, though there has not generally

been a reduction in extreme weather events over the observable time, right? There has not been an increase in the frequency or intensity of any extreme weather events. Now, computer models of climate change call for such, but real world observation shows there has not been such. And in fact, for hurricanes anyway, there has been a slight decline in the frequency and intensity of hurricanes over about the last 40 or 50 years. But now let's get to this issue of our stewardship of the earth. The Cornwall Alliance has as our name, Cornwall Alliance for the stewardship of creation. That is dear to our hearts.

That combined with economic development for the poor. And we see those two as integrally interrelated and mutually beneficial to each. other, whereas most of the environmental movement sees economic development, economic growth, as harmful to the environment. Now, I can address that in a number of different ways. A very simple way is this. Suppose you go to a city you've never been in before, and you want to know, you want to find out, by your own observation, what's the wealthiest part of this city, what's the poorest part of this city?

Do you look in order to find the wealthiest part? for the dirtiest part or the cleanest part? Obviously, the cleanest part. Do you look for the dirtiest part or the cleanest part? Now, the answer to that is pretty obvious to all of us. Well, that's because the poor people don't care about dirt. No, no, no, no, no. That's not the reason for that.

The poor people care about dirt just as much as the wealthy people do, but they can't afford to fight dirt as much as the wealthier people can. A clean, healthful, beautiful environment is a costly good. And newsflash, wealthier people can afford more costly goods than poorer people can. So, economic growth, economic development is what enables us to make a cleaner, healthier, safer environment. At the Cornwall Alliance, we look back again and again to Genesis 128. where we read that God blessed Adam and Eve after he had created them male and female. God blessed them and he said to them,

Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the seas and the birds of the air and everything that moves on the face of the earth. What does that mean? What should that dominion look like? Now, a lot of environmentalists will blame that verse for licensing the Judeo-Christian religious tradition to think, well, we can just rake the planet, abuse it any way we want. Of course, you will not find that notion in any rabbinic or Christian commentary on the verse. So that, too, is straw man, right?

That's what they will say, based on Lynn White Jr.'s essay, the historical roots of our ecological crisis back in 1967 in Science magazine. But the reality is that that verse tells us to, mirror God because we're created in God's image. So what did God do? We find that out in the first 27 verses of Genesis. He starts with nothing and he makes everything, right? He starts with darkness and makes light. He starts with chaos and makes order. He starts with non-life and makes life and great abundance of life and he tells every variety of life to be fruitful and multiply. So what should we be doing? We should be making more and more out of less and less. We should be

discovering more and more knowledge, light, right? We should be bringing greater order out of lesser order and more life out of less life, and we should be enhancing the abundance of life. All of those things are possible to us as we become wealthier to do those things, right? So what Genesis 128 really is telling us is that our calling as human beings made in God's image is to enhance the fruitfulness and the beauty and the safety of the earth to the glory of God and to the benefit of our neighbors, which means we're addressing the two great commandments to love God and to love neighbor. And at the Cornwall Alliance, we realize that humanity will not do that beyond the extent to which it remains in rebellion against God. Therefore, the third major

part of our mission is the proclamation and defense of the gospel of Jesus Christ, because it's through that good news that sinners like me can be reconciled to the Holy God by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, in his satisfactory, sacrificial. death on the cross, that reconciles us to God so that then we can begin to understand and use his world the way he wants us to do it. So what we really learn historically is that it is Christianity building on that understanding that birthed the whole notion that we should be taking good care of the earth, that we don't need to see nature as our enemy, which it is, by the way, if you are dirt poor, right? I mean, try living anywhere in extreme poverty. Storms, cold, heat,

those are a problem to you. Instead of seeing nature as our enemy, we can see nature as something for us to cultivate and guard, which is what we're told in Genesis 2.15, we're supposed to do with the garden. But we're supposed to multiply and fill the earth, meaning we're moving. out from the garden to fill the rest of the earth and transform it from wilderness into garden. That's the call that we have as Christians. Yeah, yeah, I thought there was a very beautiful way of saying transforming it from wilderness into garden that really echoes Genesis in a powerful way. Well, I think we've covered a lot. We've gone for a while. I think all of it has been fantastic. Is there anything else that you think we haven't touched on, that you'd

like to touch on, and where can people find the Cornwall Alliance? Well, they can find us at cornwallalliance.org. That's cornwall alliance.org. They can also look us up on Facebook and X and YouTube and the like. And we have a podcast called Created to Rain, created to rain podcast on all the major platforms. I think what I would point to as a sort of a closing observation here would be that we really need to learn to look at things from the perspective of the two-thirds world, the developing world. And a good friend of mine, Vijay Jaya Raj, who's both an environmental scientist with a particular focus on climate science and an energy management specialist, Vijay coined the term climate colonialism. And what I believe we're seeing in the demand from wealthy Western nations that we try to fight, climate change by reducing our use of fossil fuels, is that they are demanding that the poorest

nations of the world forego the use of the most abundant, affordable, reliable energy sources that can lift them out of poverty and keep them out of poverty. What that really looks like is the West saying to the rest, we made it out, you have to stay. And I think that that's just morally unconscionable. In my early childhood, I lived in Kolkata, India for a while. And for about six months, because of illness in my family, my mother was paralyzed for a time, I would be taken every morning early to another family, to an Indian family, to spend the day. All along the way, we were stepping over the bodies of people who had died overnight, of

starvation and disease. Those pictures have lived with me ever since. And when I see people saying it's more important to fight climate change than to see poor parts of the world rise and stay out of poverty, I say

you've never seen poverty. And that upsets me. As well it should. Well, on that very somber note, I'd like to thank you for joining us and i pray that we can win this debate so that more of those people can be lifted out

of poverty going forward that is i think that really is the heart of the issue and i thank you for keeping that at the focus thank you very much god bless you