With the ClimateGate revelations of flimsy “science” behind the man-made global warming theory, the role of the religious left in promoting this fraudulent scheme now deserves serious media scrutiny. Walter Grazer, who served as the Director of the Environmental Justice Program for the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops from 1993 to 2007 and is now interim executive director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment (NRPE), was asked for a comment on ClimateGate and replied, “I am really not up on that issue at all.”

Ignoring the growing scandal, the National Religious Coalition on Creation Care issued a press release on the occasion of the opening of the Copenhagen climate change conference declaring that “climate change is a moral and ethical issue because it deals with lifestyle issues and choices that all people must face.” Cardinal Theodore McCarrick was quoted as saying that Catholic bishops will be promoting a new “Climate Covenant” and “take the message on the seriousness of climate change to every Catholic parish in America.”

But what is the real agenda behind the fraudulent “science?” Is it something more than political and economic control over people’s lives?

Dr. James Wanliss, Associate Professor of Physics at Presbyterian College, has written The Green Dragon, a book about how environmentalism is actually committed to “the reconstruction of a pagan world order” and “rejection of Christian spirituality.” Wanliss argues that the environmental movement “is a religion with a vision of sin and repentance, heaven and hell. It even has a special vocabulary, with words like ‘sustainability’ and ‘carbon neutral.’ Its communion is organic food. Its sacraments are sex, abortion, and when all else fails, sterilization. Its saints are Al Gore and the InterGovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

“Both professing Protestants and Roman Catholics bear a burden of guilt for the current political mess we are in with the global warming and other hysterias,” he argues. “If the church had not turned from the gospel of Jesus Christ it is unlikely the Green Dragon would have been able to so deeply sink its fangs into our lives.”

Green Religion

Major U.S. religious groups involved in the “climate change” campaign include the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, the Catholic Campaign on Climate Change, the Evangelical Environmental Network and the Evangelical Climate Initiative.

Dr. E. Calvin Beisner, national spokesman for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, identifies evangelical leftist Ron Sider as a key figure behind the Evangelical Environmental Network and the Evangelical Climate Initiative. “He’s been pressing for wealth redistribution for over thirty years, and the global treaty being touted to fight global warming is nothing if it isn’t an exercise in wealth redistribution,” says Beisner.

Sider, who is also founder and president of Evangelicals for Social Action, is the author of Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger.

Richard Cizik, who served for ten years as vice president for governmental affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals, was instrumental in creating the Evangelical Climate Initiative. He now serves as a fellow of the George Soros-funded Open Society Institute, where his current job is to “organize and host gatherings of evangelical faith leaders, policy-makers and academics” on climate change. 

Beisner says it’s a shame that evangelicals are being asked to jump on the global warming bandwagon right when the wheels are falling off because of the ClimateGate scandal.

Big Liberal Money

Wanliss identifies the National Council of Churches (NCC) as playing a major role. He says massive infusions of  “green”–money, that is–for the NCC come from left-leaning philanthropies including Pew Charitable Trusts, Tides Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Turner Foundation, W. Alton Jones Foundation, V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation, and New World Foundation.

As a result, “There has been, in past decades, a cosmic shift towards a social climate that begins to favor the environment–polar bears, trees, and bugs–over human beings.”

Another major player, the National Religious Partnership for the Environment (NRPE), “has an awesome army of organizational links and is itself something of a matryoshka, the Russian nested doll, which is never what it appears at first sight. For it is also not grassroots but launched with funding from left-leaning foundations, primarily the Pew Charitable Trust,” he says.

NRPE describes itself as “an association of independent faith groups” that includes the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the National Council of Churches, the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, and the Evangelical Environmental Network.

“When it began in 1993,” Wanliss says, “NRPE had over $5 million in grants to accomplish the goal, according to executive director Paul Gorman, of utilizing churches to produce a ‘distinctly religious response to the crisis of environmental sustainability and social justice.’ The Partnership has been able to spread environmentalist propaganda and teaching aids to almost every Jewish, and to several hundred thousand Protestant congregations in America.”

Through another entity, the Au Sable Institute, Wanliss says that these forces “have infiltrated Christian higher education by careful placement of teachers and teaching materials on environmental activism in schools associated with the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU). Many of these schools are conservative in politics or theology. What they teach there under the Au Sable banner, will surprise their supporters. Not surprisingly, the Au Sable Institute and the NRPE share a subset of the same donor pool. Little by little wolves try to douse Christian resistance and lead sheep by troubled waters to accept the inevitability of a divine environmental movement.”

The Catholic Coalition on Climate Change was launched in 2006 as a vehicle of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. This group says that “Because we are not experts on climate change and its consequences, we rely on a scientific consensus (best represented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) to guide our activities.” Of course, it is the IPCC that is embroiled in the ClimateGate scandal.

In addition to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Catholic Coalition on Climate Change enjoys the active support of  the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities, Carmelite NGO, Catholic Charities USA; the Catholic Health Association of the United States, Catholic Relief Services, the Conference of Major Superiors of Men, the Franciscan Action Network, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, and the National Council of Catholic Women.

A related organization is the Catholic Climate Covenant, which claims that the poor are suffering because of the “carbon footprints” of people in the United States and other “rich” nations.

Wanliss says such notions are essential to the “alternative religion” of environmentalism.

Penance for New “Sin”

He explains that “people with money to burn can buy indulgences just like in the medieval Roman Catholic Church. In that religion priests sold indulgences to souls burdened with guilt over their sins. Even today, when Roman indulgences are not generally for sale-at least not for money–forgiveness is only assured to those who complete the required tasks that earn the indulgence. The green movement has absorbed these faux religious elements, and for each one has its own ersatz affectation. Whatever it may mean, raping the earth is not ecologically sound or morally attractive. But if you must rape Mother Earth, then be sure to visit the Green Dragon and pay a sum of money to cleanse your guilt, until next time. Forgiveness for sins is only a carbon offset away.”

“It is possible to calculate the extent of one’s sins online,” Wanliss points out. “According to TerraPass, over the past three years my weekly driving has resulted in about 5,224 pounds of CO2 a year, and for a mere $29.95 I can buy an indulgence that will offset the environmental impact of my reckless, indeed sacrilegious, lifestyle. These ‘carbon offsets’ will do as little for the salvation of the world as papal indulgences would for my soul. But for people with a desperate spiritual hunger it is a panacea and penance they are eager to embrace, and an incredible gift to give-it promises guilt free living and a purpose driven life. If only it were true. Go ahead, say the Gore-like business barons, pay the toll at our gate, and this year ‘Give the gift of green.'”

Meanwhile, America Magazine, the national Catholic weekly published by the Jesuits, is complaining that Congress did not pass legislation on greenhouse gas emissions before the current United Nations Copenhagen meeting. “The United States will thus remain the only developed nation with no established target for carbon reduction,” it says.

It praises the National Religious Partnership for the Environment and the Catholic Campaign on Climate Change for being “vigorous advocates for integrating the world’s poor in a climate covenant with funding for both adapting infrastructure to meet the hardships of changing climate and for transferring green technology.”

It goes on, “If the planet is to survive, as Pope Benedict XVI concluded in Caritas in Veritate, all nations must accept binding reductions in carbon emissions and construct an equitable structure for energy consumption and for sharing the development of green technology among rich and poor nations–for the sake of this generation and generations to come.”

As AIM has reported, in the encyclical, the Pope says that there is a need for “a worldwide redistribution of energy resources” and that “The technologically advanced societies can and must lower their domestic energy consumption, either through an evolution in manufacturing methods or through greater ecological sensitivity among their citizens.”

At the same time, he warned that “it is contrary to authentic development to view nature as something more important than the human person” and that this position “leads to attitudes of neo-paganism or a new pantheism.”

Indeed, the U.N. Environmental Program, which is now promoting a “Global Green New Deal,” has celebrated the idea of an “Environmental Sabbath,” in which children hold hands around a tree and meditate.

Wanliss notes that George Orwell’s book Animal Farm tells of the visionary pig Old Major who had a dream that soon proved disastrous: “And now, comrades, I will tell you about my dream of last night. I cannot describe that dream to you. It was a dream of the earth as it will be when Man is forgotten.”

Wanliss cautions that attempts by Church leaders and Christian organizations to synthesize a Christian environmentalism can succeed “only by exorcising truth, and ultimately, by expelling Christianity…”But he adds, “Will it not be ironic if the Green Dragon they so adore ends up destroying them?”

 

 

U.N. DEMANDS TRILLIONS IN “CLIMATE DEBT”

You didn’t need to attend the United Nations climate change conference to know what was really going on.

Ignoring the fallacies behind the “science” of man-made global warming, a new U.N. report on “climate justice” says the U.S. and other countries owe $24 trillion in “climate debt” to the rest of the world. The report, “Climate Justice for a Changing Planet,” argues that the United States is “historically the largest global emitter” of greenhouse gas emissions and therefore has the biggest “debt” to pay.

But another U.N. report puts the figure at $45 trillion.

The U.S. failure to pay, argues leftist Canadian writer Naomi Klein, has already produced “climate rage” and a “global movement for climate justice” led by Bolivia’s socialist President Evo Morales. The implication is that if the U.S. doesn’t pay up, protests and even violence could break out.

In a statement, the Morales regime declared that “What we call for is full payment of the debt owed to us by developed countries for threatening the integrity of the Earth’s climate system, for over-consuming a shared resource that belongs fairly and equally to all people, and for maintaining lifestyles that continue to threaten the lives and livelihoods of the poor majority of the planet’s population.”

In other words, Americans are supposed to feel guilty over having a successful industrial economy. It is a system that has produced more wealth for more people than any in human history.

A detailed proposal from Bolivia says “a wealthy minority,” presumably in the U.S. and other “rich” nations, “has already over-consumed a considerable amount of environmental space,” thus “denying it to the poorer majority who needs it in the course of their development.” Naomi Klein describes the proposed payments as “reparations.”

As High As $45 Trillion

But as startling as the figure of $24 trillion sounds, a separate report from the U.N. Environmental Program says the cost could be as high as $45 trillion. It is estimated that “a package to address climate change and energy development needs at the global level may require US $45 trillion up to 2025,” it says.

The March 2009 “Global Green New Deal” report says that the global financial crisis is an opportunity to usher in a new international socialist order. “The rules of financial architecture and of global environmental governance are being simultaneously re-written in 2009,” the report explains. “We believe that there is a unique historical opportunity now to create the basis of a new Green Economy that is able to allocate natural capital and financial capital in a far more effective and efficient manner into the foreseeable future. We must not miss this chance to fundamentally shift the trajectory of human civilization.”

The author of this report was Professor Edward B. Barbier of the University of Wyoming. His “Global Green New Deal” report was prepared in consultation with the U.S. Presidential Climate Action Project, a little-known entity launched by the University of Colorado whose advisory board includes ousted White House communist “Green Jobs Czar” Van Jones. WorldNetDaily high-lighted Jones’ role in the group in a November 30 story by Aaron Klein.

Co-authored by Barbara Adams and Gretchen Luchsinger, the most recent United Nations report on “climate justice” says “because the world’s richest countries have contributed most to the problem, they have a greater obligation to take action and to do so more quickly.” Paying a “climate debt” is the way to make sure that “extreme imbalances in development are evened out.”

“China now produces the largest amount of overall national emissions, topping the United States,” the report says. “But this figure must be qualified by the fact that China’s population is four times as large as that of the United States, making its per capita emissions rate roughly 75 percent less.”

Hence, the U.S. is still the chief culprit and should pay the most.

The report was launched in conjunction with the U.N. climate change conference now taking place in Copenhagen and is designed for the consideration of policy makers and non-governmental organizations. It is being distributed by the United Nations Non-Governmental Liaison Service.

“Given the escalating pace of global warming,” the report argues, the world “now has to act with far greater urgency…” But change is possible only with “major economic and political rearrangements around the core principles of equity and sustainable development.”

These are euphemisms for destroying private property rights and the free enterprise system and creating a global socialist superstate. 

Under a heading about the need to “transform the systems and institutions that have created climate change,” the authors say that “tinkering around the edges” will not suffice and that “Governance and development models should be built around notions of justice and equity, with the objective of working for the planet and people as a whole, and evening out imbalances that are not sustainable. It is not enough to talk about low-carbon pathways through technology, for example, without also rethinking current models of production, global trade and consumption patterns.”

Proposals for “climate change financing” include a Comprehensive World Climate Change Fund, into which payments could be made, and a global carbon tax.

Attacking The Taxpayers

The ATTAC movement says, “Change the system, not the climate!” ATTAC, which stands for the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens, favors global taxes on currency transactions.

A more detailed article on “climate justice” explains that “It isn’t simply a matter of asking the rich world to pay for the devastation climate change is causing in the developing world. As a report recently launched by World Development Movement and Jubilee Debt Campaign points out, ‘climate debt’ questions a global free market system which has pushed many developing countries into high carbon pathways that they now need to find a way out of.”

This is about as clear as it gets-free markets will give way to a worldwide socialist state, created under the guise of solving a climate crisis that does not really exist.

The authors, Nick Dearden and Tim Jones, attempt to throw cold water on Lord Christopher Monckton’s contention that this amounts to a blueprint for “world communist government.” However, they acknowledge that the proposal does imply “fundamental changes in the global economy” and the “radical redistribution of the world’s resources.”

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