Having just spent a wonderful week enjoying the spectacular beauty of the Caribbean island of St. Maarten, I am of a mind to peruse the issue of modern environmentalism, for it in many ways threatens to destroy our way of life.  And since I’ve just returned from a wonderfully warm place where I spent seven days inhaling and exhaling (much of it through a snorkel), it seems that the appropriate items of study for us today will be a look at the environmental war on carbon dioxide and the hysteria over (perceived) man-caused global warming (or cooling, depending on the day of the week), especially now that Al Gore is finished gracing us with his inane 24-hour clime-athon, in which he blames every ill upon planet earth on such an illusory and false concept.

By way of full disclosure, though, I must admit to being one who loves warmth.  I love warm days and warm oceans, and so if our planet should choose to warm itself by a few degrees here or there, I’ll certainly be one of the last to complain.  With all due apologies to Scandinavians and Eskimos everywhere, I imagine ice ages are pretty lame events as far as events go, and if they manage to make themselves scarce for the next thirty years or so (which is about all the time I have left), it’ll be just fine with me.  The warmer, the better.

Proverbs 1:7 makes it clear that the beginning of learning (in all things) is the fear of the Lord, which means that all fields of study must first acknowledge God’s existence and His nature in order to be legitimate fields of study, and environmentalism is no different.  When God is not acknowledged in a field of study, it is flawed in its foundations and will lead to inappropriate conclusions, and the hysteria over climate change today is a rather perfect and humorous example of this.

God created our planet to revolve around our sun, and to receive from it light and warmth, something that seems to escape the current dull-witted environmental movement.  When the sun shines, it gets warmer here on planet Earth.  When the sun doesn’t shine, it gets cooler.  This happens every single day.  When the sun comes up, we experience global warming.  When the sun goes down, we experience global cooling.  The key ingredient here is – yep, you guessed it – the sun.

Even when the most generous of estimates is given to humanity’s industrial ability to create heat on a planetary scale, the sun smashes such output by a scale of at least fourteen thousand to one.  Humanity simply cannot in any way compete with the sheer volume of British Thermal Units pumped continuously into our atmosphere by our sun, and to think otherwise is hubris on the grandest of scales.  We simply can’t make a dent in the issue either way, for the magnitude of the sun’s power trumps all.

What does change from time to time, however, is the relative output of the sun itself, since it is not a steady-state machine (apparently proving that God is not German).  When the output from dear old sol waxes in strength, the earth warms (such as during the Medieval Warming Period) and the global sales of surfboards rise rapidly.  When the solar output wanes, things here cool down and we all head for St. Maarten.  Global warming and cooling trends are utterly dependent upon the relative strength of the sun’s radiative processes.

We move now to the issue of carbon dioxide, which the EPA (Early Paleolithic Agency) declared a health hazard in December of 2009.  Let’s just think about that for a moment.  Carbon dioxide is bad for the planet?  Funny, but I seem to recall from elementary school biology lessons that carbon dioxide is necessary for plant life to exist.  So let’s review: God created a system in which we (and all creatures) exhale carbon dioxide, which in turn is the building block necessary for flora to live and grow, and which in turn convert the carbon dioxide into breathable oxygen. It is the original and most basic circle of life, but our vaunted EPA has now declared carbon dioxide a pollutant, effectively calling God a great, cosmic idiot.  Not particularly wise.

By now we’ve all been brow-beat with the hysteria over the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and are told that if we don’t curtail industrial activity all will soon be lost.  To this end the EPA and their global partners are hell-bent on capping and taxing the production of such a dangerous pollutant in the interests of saving Earth from certain destruction.  All that education, and the best idea they have is a breath tax.  Really?  Mom and Dad must be so proud.

Everyone just needs to sit back and take a deep breath, and then exhale without inhibition.  God knew what He was doing when he designed us and our planetary home.  Total carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is less than .004%, so we could easily quadruple the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere without in any measurable way affecting it.  To put it in perspective, if our atmosphere were represented by a 100-yard football field, .004% of that field would equal less than one quarter of one inch of the final yard of the playing field.  It’s incidental in the extreme, and in any event, more carbon dioxide simply means better conditions for plant growth, which is a good thing.

What is dangerous about the rabid environmental movement is what it ultimately hopes to accomplish, though, and this is no joking matter.  I have not called the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) the Early Paleolithic Agency simply for humor’s sake, but rather to point out the sinister objectives behind the movement it champions, for its goal is to drive human existence back into the Stone Age, and it would see humanity shackled to primitive living through fealty to its imposed environmental ideals.

Our modern industrial and post-industrial age has seen a tremendous rise in the quality of human life, and for the first time since the Flood the people of vast portions of Earth are experiencing Eden-like living conditions, thanks in large part to the widescale availability of electricity and the internal combustion engine.  As a result, we are comfortable people, we are educated people, we are clean people, we are healthy people, we are a long-lived people and we are a happy and prosperous people.

That humanity would dare achieve such comfort and delight in life is a deep and searing affront to our ancient Enemy, and so he must influence human thinking toward industrial regression, for a humanity mired in squalor is much more to his liking.  We must therefore beware of the modern environmental movement, for its purpose is clearly that of a regressive humanity, and will have the end result of seeing us once again living in caves and defecating in the forests.

As beings created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26,28), humanity’s brow was meant for the crown of civilization and not for the muck of savagery, and we must firmly resist this modern movement to return us to sticks and stones.  There is a place – and a fine place – for environmentalism, but it must be founded upon an understanding of God and His nature in order to be appropriate, lest it become a tool of the Enemy.  And modern environmentalism has become just that.

Finally, if these Henny Penny environmentalists were truly concerned about the environment, they would take a look at the Scriptures for the two great known man-caused incidents of climate change and learn something from them.  The first was the Flood of Genesis 6, and the second was the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19.  Both involved drastic changes to the environment, and one of them on the global scale so purportedly feared by our overbearing green friends.  If they really are worried about climate change, I suggest to the environmentalists that they focus more on holy living and less on measuring our exhalations.

Regarding the government’s role in environmentalism, it really has no Biblical basis for existence, but we shall explore that topic in my next article, after which we shall return to the Biblist Papers once again.