This Saturday afternoon, at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, the time for ideological issue training had arrived, and a breakout session on climate change was packed. An organizer in a long black skirt swept through and instructed people to move their chairs to the side, like her father’s Baptist congregation would do when space got tight.
"It’s already warmer in here, all the CO2 in the room," chuckled a tall, suited attendee.
"This is a hot topic!" cracked another.
This gathering, an annual affair put on by the arch-conservative Family Research Council (FRC), felt slightly different from the massive protest at the Capitol last weekend. Values Voters are on the older side, more socially than fiscally conservative, and spend more time thumbing through Bibles than watching Glenn Beck. Still, a succession of speeches by movement conservatives, 2012 hopefuls, and a former Miss California (Carrie Prejean the Ubiquitous) had turned the place into a veritable revival meeting.
Those in this particular hotel meeting room had been drawn by a terrifying tagline: "Global Warming Hysteria: The new face of the ‘pro-death movement.'" The program intoned, "If people are the problem, what's the final solution?" The session may have been planned in response to a recent study by the UK-based Optimum Population Trust and the London School of Economics, which concluded that providing contraception to those who would like it is the most cost-effective way to combat climate change. Environmentalists have long advocated family planning as a resource conservation measure, but I'd never seen their argument couched in such borderline-Holocaustic terms before this summit. (They're on to me, I thought.)
There to deliver the indictment was Dr. Calvin Beisner, a theology professor and spokesman for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, a group set up in 2000 to bring "a balanced Biblical view of stewardship to the critical issues of environment and development." (In 2005, Beisner was also involved in the formation of Cornwall's more political arm, the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, whose website appears to have fizzled). Fittingly, he began with a prayer, and then launched into what sounded more like a sermon than a speech. He spent a little bit of time talking about the "anti-population people" and how they "see every new person entering into this world essentially as a net loss." This is wrong, he explained: Humans are unique in their capacity to produce more from their environment, and production is close to godliness.
"God started with nothing and got everything. That's a pretty decent profit margin," he explained. "We can't really beat that, but the more we make with less and less, the better we reflect the image of God."
After that, however, the meeting became possibly the most upbeat of the conference (other breakout session topics included "Countering the Homosexual Agenda," "ObamaCare: Rationing Your Health Away," and "Thugogracy: the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy"). Beisner sped through a blitz of charts, citing studies by people with many letters after their names, to illustrate that there was nothing really to worry about. Even if human beings are pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere, he explained, more carbon dioxide increases plant growth efficiency: higher crop yields, more food supply, lower prices, more people get fed. He put up a slide with a gradually leveling curve, for how CO2 might increase temperature in the future. "We're about at the saturation point," he said. The room audibly sighed in relief.
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