Cornwall Alliance

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The Cornwall Alliance or Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation is an evangelical and neoliberal front group that lobbies against environmental and climate protection and denies man-made climate change . It was founded in 2005 with support from business as the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance and has since been committed to various anti-environmental activities. It is led by Calvin Beisner , who u. a. has long-term connections to commercial enterprises and conservative think tanks. The organization also has close ties to the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow , a climate denial organization funded by ExxonMobil and Chevron , among others .

Climate change denial

The Cornwall Alliance rejects the limitation of greenhouse gas emissions for moral, theological, political and ostensibly scientific reasons and is regarded by scientists as one of the central organizations advancing the fight against climate change in the USA. The actions of the groups helped to prevent efforts that emerged in the mid-2000s to establish climate protection as an important evangelical goal. She also played an important role in building close ties between the evangelical movement and the Republican Party in the United States.

When an evangelical organization called for climate protection in 2006, the Cornwall Alliance shortly afterwards published a counter-declaration called "A Call to Truth". In this

  • dismissed the organization's findings of climate research back
  • claimed that global warming was not man-made but a natural phenomenon
  • declared that God is not responsible for the environment, but rather God
  • spoke out against lowering and in favor of increasing fossil energy consumption, because this is the best way to help poor people
  • and argued that the highest moral imperative is to keep energy prices down and economic growth sustained.

In 2009 they launched another "Call to Truth" claiming that the earth and ecosystems created by God through Intelligent Design are "robust, resilient, self-regulating and self-correcting, admirably suited for human prosperity" and that recent warming is only " one of many natural cycles of warming and cooling in geological history ". In particular, they denied that "the earth's climate system is susceptible to dangerous changes due to tiny changes in atmospheric chemistry," and that there is "no convincing scientific evidence that human contribution to greenhouse gases causes dangerous global warming." The earth is "in the grip of an idea" that "the burning of fossil fuels to provide affordable, abundant energy is causing global warming that is so dangerous that we must stop it by making our fossil fuel consumption independent of reduce costs ". But this idea fails because of theology, (natural) science and economy.

According to Dunlap and McCright, the Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming published by the Cornwall Alliance was "overloaded with denial claims and intended to counter the efforts of progressive Christians to gain support for dealing with climate change."

literature

  • Karin Edvardsson Björnberg et al .: 'Cornwallism' and Arguments against Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reductions . In: Environmental Values . 2020, doi : 10.3197 / 096327119X15579936382554 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Riley Dunlap, Aaron M. McCright: Challenging Climate Change. The Denial Countermovement. In: Riley Dunlap, Robert J. Brulle (Eds.): Climate Change and Society. Sociological Perspectives. Report of the American Sociological Association's Task Force on Sociology and Global Climate Change. Oxford University Press, 2015, 300-332, pp. 314 f.
  2. ↑ a b c Dennis Hiebert: Climate Change and Christian Anthropocentrism . In: Journal of Sociology and Christianity . tape 7 , no. 2 , 2017, p. 57–63, here 60 f .
  3. ↑ Karin Edvardsson Björnberg et al .: 'Cornwallism' and Arguments against Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reductions . In: Environmental Values . 2020, doi : 10.3197 / 096327119X15579936382554 .