The number of people I knew in my church whose reason for denying climate change boiled down to “Humans don’t have the power to change God’s creation like that, anyway even if we did God’s gonna call us up to heaven before anything really bad can happen” was not small, and I can’t imagine it getting smaller in the intervening decades. If anything I expect there’s a vocal “gotta use up all that oil before the Rapture!” contingent these days.
Had a friend pose the argument that using oil for energy does lend rapid advancement to society at the cost of climate impact. He seemed to downplay the degree of climate impact, postulating that would be resolved faster by finding very effective solutions beyond the incremental green energy we have today. Not that we shouldn’t invest in green energy, but rather utilizing abundant available fossil fuels where advantageous to get things going. I.e., modernize African nations rapidly to bring a wider society to contribute towards greater real solutions sooner rather than later.
Definitely left a bunch of the risk of such a gamble not paying off out of his consideration.
The number of people I knew in my church whose reason for denying climate change boiled down to “Humans don’t have the power to change God’s creation like that, anyway even if we did God’s gonna call us up to heaven before anything really bad can happen” was not small, and I can’t imagine it getting smaller in the intervening decades. If anything I expect there’s a vocal “gotta use up all that oil before the Rapture!” contingent these days.
I heard similar notions, with an added “and if it get too bad god will fix it for us”.
Oh, yeah. You are terrifying.
Had a friend pose the argument that using oil for energy does lend rapid advancement to society at the cost of climate impact. He seemed to downplay the degree of climate impact, postulating that would be resolved faster by finding very effective solutions beyond the incremental green energy we have today. Not that we shouldn’t invest in green energy, but rather utilizing abundant available fossil fuels where advantageous to get things going. I.e., modernize African nations rapidly to bring a wider society to contribute towards greater real solutions sooner rather than later.
Definitely left a bunch of the risk of such a gamble not paying off out of his consideration.