Are you scared of the weather? The climate change activists want you to be.
Hi, I’m Rex Rogers and this is episode #216 of Discerning What Is Best, a podcast applying unchanging biblical principles in a rapidly changing world, and a Christian worldview to current issues and everyday life.
Climate change is the now an all-purpose explanation for every weather event. Hurricane? Climate change. Flood? Climate change. Earthquake? Climate change. Fires, failing crops, migration—what’s now called “climate refugees.” Climate change is now said to exacerbate existing gender inequalities and vulnerabilities, and to create something called environmental racism. Everything, it seems, is due to climate change.
On several occasions, President Joe Biden called climate change “an existential threat to human existence as we know it." Can’t get much stronger than that. Yet for all the focus on climate change, this perceived threat has not been mitigated, or for that matter amounted to much.
Global warming was a bugaboo for a time, but “climate change” became the preferred phrase when global warming predictions didn’t pan out. In the past 100 years, earth’s temperature has increased about 2 degrees Fahrenheit. Supposedly, this temperature increase is largely driven by human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, and industrial agriculture. But is it really?
Media tries to pump up climate change because fear sells. But the problem with climate change catastrophe hysteria is that it cannot be proven, and the emotion cannot be sustained.
Certain eternalities get in the way. Human beings cannot predict the climate years hence. Human beings cannot control the weather. Human beings can affect the environment, but they cannot change or destroy it. Weather events always were, are, and always will be.
Being real: the global energy “crisis” is manmade. Insofar as there are problems related to climate they track back not to the weather anomalies but to climate change policies—poor human choices, bad management, politics.
And the argued solution for climate change – so called green technology – does not deliver. Wind turbines and solar panels are unreliable—they require wind and sun that is not always present—and they’re built from nonrenewable materials—iron ore, concrete, plastic. Green technology is more costly, more material intensive, less efficient.
And for all the media or environmental lobby excitement, wind and solar supply less than 3% of the world’s energy. Fossil fuels—oil, coal, and natural gas—supply 84% of the world’s energy. Oil is the source of 97% of global transportation energy. Replacing fossil fuels is economically and practically infeasible.
Wind and solar do more harm than good, killing eagles, hawks, falcons, owls, bats, insects. When wind turbines reach the end of their productive life, the financial and environmental cost of disposing of the enormous blades is prohibitive. Such blades are made of fiberglass, contain toxic materials, must be cut up—which takes time and money and energy—and then buried in landfills where they’ll never biodegrade.
Solar heat farms require vast acres of forest and farmland to be cleared, encumbered, and made unavailable for green growth. Solar farms give off an amount of heat that kills flora and fauna within its range.
Wind and solar only produce about 10% of global electric needs, so the overall impact of wind and solar is environmental degradation.
Meanwhile, fossil fuels—oil, coal, natural gas—that media and the environmental lobby argue are threatening to the environment is a source comes enormous economic, social, and practical benefits, particularly cost-efficient energy needed for economic empowerment. Fossil fuels make possible our healthcare and longer life expectancy. They make possible an economy that reduces poverty. Fossil fuels help protect us from the vagaries of climate disasters, thus save lives. Compared to how people lived throughout human history, even society’s poor live today in relative well-being if not luxury.
“Take fossil fuels away, and you don’t solve climate change—you spark a global humanitarian crisis.
- No tractors = no food
- No trucks = no medicine
- No heat = cold deaths
- No A/C = heatstroke
- No power = hospitals go dark.”
“But that’s not the scary fantasy the Left sells you in their dystopian climate documentaries. Instead, they promise a mythical green utopia where solar panels power skyscrapers, Teslas line the highways, and no one ever gets their hands dirty digging anything out of the ground. It's a delusion, wrapped in privilege, sold with fear.”
Remove fossil fuels and remove energy. Remove energy and in a blink, we are back to little house on the prairie.
Big Environment activist groups, the environmental protection lobby, are more about raising funds, stopping progress, and reducing America’s economic opportunities, than about saving nature. “You'd think they were poor and desperate. But they're rich. They get richer by peddling deceit. ‘Polar bears face extinction and bees are dying off!’ It's not true. Polar bear and bee populations are increasing. ‘These scares drive donations,’ says science writer Jon Entine. ‘They feel that the only way they can talk about environmental issues is to frame it with hysteria, crisis…They also recognize that hysteria generates donations. The oxygen for these organizations is money donated by people who think they're doing good.’ So, you give them billions.”
You think you are saving the bees, but your donation is really going to attorneys hired to badger whatever cause attracts media, like “use electric cars or destroy nature.”
“The Sierra Club brags: ‘Our legal team has stopped thousands of miles of fossil fuel pipelines and dozens of large power plants.’ But pipelines are better for the earth than shipping oil by truck. America needs power plants to power our future, including nuclear plants. But last year, Friends of the Earth sued to shut down Diablo Canyon, California's last nuclear plant.” Meanwhile, nuclear energy remains the best option for producing more clean, efficient, cheaper, abundant, safe energy for the future. But so far, the Climate Change Catastrophe crowd and the Environmental Justice lobby have fought against nuclear for largely political reasons.
Nuclear energy offers many positives: low greenhouse gas emissions; high energy density, meaning a small amount of nuclear fuel produces a massive amount of energy compared to coal, gas, or renewables; unlike solar and wind, nuclear doesn’t depend on weather; and nuclear energy reduces dependence on fossil fuel imports.
Environmental opposition to nuclear energy is due to a combination of risk perception, environmental values, and strategic priorities: Nuclear accidents: Three Mile Island (1979), Chernobyl (1986), Fukushima (2011) are seen as proof that nuclear power carries catastrophic risks; radioactive waste; high costs and delays; and a renewables first philosophy, meaning many environmentalists believe the future lies in 100% renewables + storage, viewing nuclear as unnecessary, risky, and a distraction from proven clean technologies.
Trash, by the way, or garbage is another source of renewable energy, if the fanatical environmental lobby and states attempting to provide what they call “climate leadership” would get out of the way.
“Both garbage and electricity challenges by using natural gas to power waste-to-energy (WTE) generating plants that burn trash, thereby reducing the need to landfill or export garbage, while increasing recycling, producing reliable, affordable, much-needed electricity, and reducing blackout risks that are climbing every year.”
“More WTE plants could help solve garbage, energy, landfill and pollution problems in metropolitan areas across the country (and worldwide).”
Both the resources and the science exist to make possible a bright future in energy production for the U.S.A., which means a productive economy and a hopeful future for citizens. But the challenge is political – climate change doomsday frenzy, anti-nuclear energy anxiety, and leftist globalists whose goal is not climate change or conservation but totalitarian control of the masses.
Development of fossil fuels, encouragement of entrepreneurial research and innovation, launching a plan to build more nuclear power plants all should be embraced.
God gave us creation and empowered us to steward and develop it. The wilderness is there for us to cultivate for the flourishing of humanity and the glory of God.
Well, we’ll see you again soon. This podcast is about Discerning What Is Best. If you find this thought-provoking and helpful, follow us on your favorite podcast platform. For more Christian commentary, see my website, r-e-x-m as in Martin, that’s rexmrogers.com, or check my YouTube channel @DrRexRogers.
And remember, it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2025
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