How Climate Change is Truth Exchange

GUEST: DAVID LEGATES, Climatologist and Director of Research and Education, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation

When God created Adam and Eve, he gave them a dominion mandate: “God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Genesis 1:28).

The dictionary defines a steward as “a person who manages another’s property.” God gave man a steward role with His “property”—the earth. But predictably, man rebels against God’s design and worships himself and the earth.

Scripture explains this in Romans 1: “For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures” (Romans 1:21-23).

Did you notice the result of dishonoring God is futility and foolishness? This describes the God-rejecting environmental movement—we’re told cows and crops are bad, using oil and gas is bad, and humans are especially bad because we’re causing “climate change” and thus there needs to be billions less people so the earth can be saved.

Never mind that the “experts” are wrong time and again with their predictions of doom and gloom for the earth. The next storm, the next flood, the next forest fire…well, “it’s man-caused climate change and we must act before it’s too late!”

As our guest David Le Gates, climatologist and Director of Research and Education for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, will tell us, the world’s environmental worldview is actually a religion, one that worships the earth and man. He will refute the pervasive junk science that is constantly being foisted on us from scientists, politicians, and the media.

Christians aren’t immune to the propaganda, accepting that “loving neighbor” means believing those who have “exchanged the truth of God for a lie” (Romans 1:25). Why would we believe anyone who rejects the most fundamental truth that God exists and has spoken in His Word?

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Transcript

How Climate Change is Truth Exchange
with Guest: David Legates
SATURDAY, August 09, 2025 at 8:00am CT





HOST: DAVID WHEATON:
How climate change is actually truth exchange. That is a topic we'll discuss today right here on The Christian Worldview radio program, where the mission is to sharpen the biblical worldview of Christians and to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. I'm David Wheaton, the host. The Christian Worldview is a non-profit listener-supported radio ministry. Our website is TheChristianWorldview.org and the rest of our contact information will be given throughout today's program. As always, thank you for your notes of encouragement, financial support in lifting us up in prayer.

When God created Adam and Eve, He gave them a dominion mandate. God blessed them and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and rule over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the earth." Genesis 1-28, the dictionary defines a steward as, quote, "A person who manages another's property", unquote. God gave man a steward role with His property, the earth. We are to worship God and rule the earth wisely on His behalf. Predictably though, man rebels against God's design and worships himself and the earth. Scripture explains this in Romans chapter one, for even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, "And their foolish heart was darkened, professing to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and of four-footed animals and crawling creatures." Romans 1-21 through 23.

Notice the foolish human reasoning that results from dishonoring God. So, when it comes to the environment, we're told cows and crops are bad. Using the oil and gas in the earth is bad, but especially, humans are bad because we're causing climate change and thus there needs to be billions less people so the earth can be saved. Never mind that the so-called experts are wrong time and again with their predictions of death and disaster. The next storm, the next flood, the next forest fire. Well, it's man-caused climate change and we must act before it's too late.

Audio Sound Bite: John Kerry:
Sea ice, which is melting at a rate that the Arctic Ocean now increasingly is exposed. In five years, scientists predict we will have the first ice-free Arctic summer.

HOST: DAVID WHEATON:
That was politician John Kerry back in 2009, 16 years ago. As our guest, David Legates, climatologist and director of research and education for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation will tell us, "The world's environmental worldview is actually a religion, one that worships the earth, and man. He will refute the relentless junk science that is constantly being forced on us from scientists, politicians, and the media. Christians aren't immune to this propaganda. Having accepted that to, quote, love thy neighbor, means to walk lockstep with those who have exchanged the truth of God for a lie." Romans 1-25, why would we agree with anyone who rejects the most fundamental truth that God exists and has spoken in his word?

David, thank you for coming on The Christian Worldview radio program today. The organization you work for, the Cornwall Alliance says this on their website, "We believe that responsible stewardship of the earth means working together to enhance its fruitfulness, beauty and safety, all for the glory of God and the benefit of our neighbors. We also advocate for policies that lift people out of poverty through principles such as private property rights, entrepreneurship, free trade, limited government, and access to abundant, affordable and reliable energy. At our core, we proclaim and defend the good news of salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ's atoning death and victorious resurrection." I just love that mission statement of the Cornwall Alliance. But David, perhaps you could explain generally, I know there's much you could go into here, but give us a framework as we have our conversation today for what God's mandate for stewarding His creation looks like, both in principle and in policies.

GUEST: DAVID LEGATES:
I think it comes out of Matthew 22, Jesus is talking with the Pharisees and they ask Him a number of questions and He says essentially all of the law and the prophets can be summarized in two great commandments. That is put God first and treat others as equals. And I think that is the point here in stewarding His creation through what we do. I got in a discussion with a Christian climatologist a while back and her argument was that creation is God's second-greatest gift to mankind and we need to protect creation at all costs. And I disagreed because I think the way I read Genesis, God brought everything that He had created to Adam, God proclaimed it to be good and it was. And Adam obviously can't have anything to do with creation, but Adam could get a buy-in by being able to name things.

At the end of all that it was good, but it was not sufficient. And so God, therefore, created a helper, a second person. And so I believe that God's second-greatest gift is not the whole of creation, it is other people. And that's why the two great commandments focus first on putting God first and then taking care of others. That, I think, is what we should be using creation for, is to accomplish these two great commandments.

HOST: DAVID WHEATON:
Now, David, I want to play a soundbite from 1982 on CBS news with Dan Rather, where they did a report on what they were considering the climate crisis ahead.

Audio Sound Bite: Dan Rather:
Many scientists claim that the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere has been rising over the past 100 years. That the great sheets of pack ice in Antarctica are melting at a much more rapid rate than previously. Finally, that the sea level has been rising with increasing swiftness over the past 40 years. If these scientists are correct, about 25% of Florida would be flooded -- along with low-lying areas all over the world. Climate changes could produce widespread disruption of agriculture. The American farm belt might be too dry and the wheat and corn crops would have to move to Canada.
Scientists blame the odorless, colorless carbon dioxide gas for these potentially dangerous changes around the planet. It is the greenhouse effect. The gas allows sunlight to filter down and warm the earth, but like the glass of a greenhouse, the carbon dioxide tends to trap heat so that it cannot rise into space -- the scientists maintain that the coal, oil and gas we've been burning for a hundred years have produced more and more carbon dioxide and helped overheat the earth. Now, some political leaders endorse the demands for more CO2 monitoring stations, like this one in Hawaii, and they share the anger of the scientists at Reagan Administration budget cuts at a time when they feel closer to getting definitive answers.

Audio Sound Bite: David Culhane:
And what they find out will affect the lives and fortunes of millions of people. The very survival of cities like this one. David Culhane, CBS News, New York.

HOST: DAVID WHEATON:
This debate around climate change or environmentalism or the green movement, this is nothing new, David. Could you explain the worldview or really more specifically the religious doctrine behind the Environmental or Green Movement, whatever you'd like to call it, and why it has become so accepted and promoted?

GUEST: DAVID LEGATES:
The interesting thing is if you'd gone back about a decade, it wouldn't have been global warming. It would've been global cooling. See, when I got into school in the late seventies, that was the issue, is not that climate was going to become so hot that we would burn, it is that the temperature was dropping, we were headed towards the next ice age. The worldview and the Green Movement, and I wish I could use video with this, but I characterize it as an equilateral triangle and that is that God, humans and the rest of creation are at one of your three corners. And if we look at the biblical worldview, you put God at the top, you have humans, and then the rest of creation at the bottom, that's the way it should be.

If we spin that 120 degrees, then humans become at the top. Humans can therefore create whatever God they want, because God is subservient to humans. Little G that is. And then creation is whatever humans want to do, and that becomes secular humanism, and that's where we were for a while. But if you turn it for another 120 degrees, then creation becomes on top. In fact, creation becomes God through pantheism and panentheism, and then humans are subject to creation, not the other way around. So, the idea is that we, being consumers rather than producers, are therefore destroying the environment. And as a result we need to have much, much fewer of us. And so yes, depopulation is really what we're after and a lot of people would say that we really need less than a million people on the planet and knowing that we have about 8 billion now, that means we've got to kill off an awful lot of people.

Unfortunately, a lot of these programs that they're proposing would do just that. They would cause lots of people to die. They would cause the number of people to diminish considerably, and that's what I believe that the worldview behind the Green Movement is, essentially to put the rest of the planet or the rest of creation ahead of humans and to treat humans not as equal to creation but as subservient to it.

HOST: DAVID WHEATON:
I'm assuming the proponents of this are the ones that don't want to be killed off, though.

GUEST: DAVID LEGATES:
No, of course not.

HOST: DAVID WHEATON:
David Legates is our guest today here on The Christian Worldview. I want to play another sound bite, and this is from a person you know for sure, Dr. Patrick Moore. He was one of the co-founders of Greenpeace, which was a very much of a secular, environmental organization. He did an interview where he said this about some of the common assertions of the Green Movement regarding the temperatures rising, the greenhouse gas effect and so forth.

Audio Sound Bite: Dr. Patrick Moore:
... the difference between the temperature 200 years ago and the temperature now. And you go into this 1.5 degrees and the earth is going to burn up. That's less than between breakfast and lunch. It is so stupidly ridiculous to say that a 1.5 degrees Celsius increase in global atmospheric temperature is going to be a disaster. As a matter of fact, it will open up vast areas of farmland that were too cold before.

HOST: DAVID WHEATON:
What went into his conversion, quote, unquote, to go from being such a proponent of godless environmentalism to rejecting all of that. And then what are some of the big assertions? There's one of them he just gave that, Oh, the temperatures are rising around the world, but he says 1.5 degrees Celsius is nothing. What are some of the big assertions that we should be aware of that are just patently false?

GUEST: DAVID LEGATES:
Let me go back to Pat Moore. He's a friend of mine and you'll notice Greenpeace has sort of distanced themselves from him now. I don't think he has sort of a change in heart. I think what happened is that originally Greenpeace was focused on nuclear issues and when that sort of disappeared, they moved off into the environment and he used the same sort of ideas there and said, Well, wait a minute, warmer conditions aren't necessarily bad, in fact, humans have done better. Civilization has thrived when temperatures are warmer. Civilizations have struggled more when temperatures go down.

So, if you want a world that's warmer or colder and you want to be able to have civilization, humans doing better, the choice is warmer rather than colder. Warmer conditions actually kill fewer people. Colder conditions kill more people. So, if you are really looking at the assertion of the green movement that the earth would be harmed, it won't be. Temperature warming is better for plants, we know that plants grow better under more carbon dioxide, plants grow better under warmer conditions, and that's in fact what we see from the satellite record. So, everything sort of indicates that a warmer world is a better world, not a worse world, yet what we're told is warming is bad and all the disasters that are going to occur because of it are occurring because warmer world has more variability when in fact, from a climatological standpoint, a warmer world actually has less variability and a colder world has more variability.

HOST: DAVID WHEATON:
And the big caveat is that the world isn't just warming, but man is causing the warming. That's a key question here. How much does man's use of fossil fuels or our activities on earth actually impact the climate?

GUEST: DAVID LEGATES:
I think it impacts it positively because I think carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide are all three warming gases. That is, there are more complicated gases in the way they're structured, and so they vibrate, or if you want to think of it, they dance in ways in which they absorb heat energy. Whereas, nitrogen, oxygen, argon, the three most common gases in the atmosphere, don't. And also we always point out that water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas of the mall and everybody ignores water vapor as being a greenhouse gas because as I testified to Congress once, and Michael Mann, a climatologist essentially said... Or I think Senator Vittert said to him, "Why do you ignore water vapor as a gas?" And he said, "Because we can't regulate it." And I think that's the point, is we can regulate carbon dioxide, we can regulate methane and nitrous oxide.

Nitrous oxide is a weird case because nitrous oxide gets into the atmosphere essentially by synthetic fertilizers. And we know that half of the planet are fed by synthetic fertilizers and you look at the effect of fertilization on plants, they grow much better. You can get more food from them, they feed a lot more people. Sri Lanka a couple years ago forgone nitrous oxide and synthetic fertilizers and literally they put their entire country into a famine because of it. The interesting thing about nitrous oxide is, I talked about the proportion of the gas in the atmosphere, and essentially if you take the University of Alabama's football stadium, which seats about a hundred thousand people almost exactly, and you take a hundred of those stadiums, how many t-shirts would you have to have to give to people in those a hundred stadiums to give the same proportion as nitrous oxide? And the answer is three. Yet, because of that small concentration, because it's being increased by human activity because it's a greenhouse gas, it becomes demonized and we have to stop it even though they know half of the planet is fed by fertilizers.

HOST: DAVID WHEATON:
Speaking of demonization, David, as you were discussing there, one aspect of our economy has been incredibly demonized and you wouldn't think so because it's, quote, unquote, natural. It's out in the country, it's farming. Those who grow crops or those who have cows, dairy farms, cattle farms, ranches. It's said that they are contributing to climate change because of the gas that cows release and as you mentioned, the fertilizers they use and the fuel they use to run their tractors. That seems somewhat surprising to me because farmers and ranchers are always held in the highest esteem. Why the disconnect in that particular industry?

GUEST: DAVID LEGATES:
I currently live in Delaware and one of the things we have in Delaware is an attempt to change agriculture over from farming plants, corn, soybeans, so forth, and start to put in solar panels. And we did a report with CFACT on this and we interviewed a number of local farmers and one said, "They're offering me $3,000 an acre to put it into solar panels. I can't make that if I put it into corn, soybean or any other crop, and I'd have to go through the trouble of growing it, watering it, taking care of it, and then harvesting it and taking it to market." Instead, what they're saying is, We'll just give you the money. Of course, where does that money come from? It's all subsidies from the federal government, from the state government and so forth.

And the idea somehow is that that gives us much more solar energy and the solar energy is going to be the thing that solves our energy crisis. It's not. Solar and wind are both nondispatchable, meaning you get them when you get them and you can't store them. We don't have batteries big enough, for example, to run large sections of the population. New York City, for one hour would require a battery field about the size of the state of Delaware. We just don't have that. The other thought though that we keep being told is that wind and solar are clean and green. They're none of the above. The idea is you have to use strip mining to get it out. You have to take and put minerals in to be able to separate the minerals that you need, the rare earth elements to build these batteries, to build solar panels, and most of that in many places of the world comes from either child labor or slave labor.

So, the idea is we're not taking care of other humans. It destroys the environment to get these out, and yet we're constantly told, It's clean and green, and fossil fuels, which have essentially brought millions out of poverty... Billions, I should say, out of poverty, are somehow evil because they're producing greenhouse gases.

HOST: DAVID WHEATON:
I'm so glad you're refuting so many of these common and pervasive assertions that are made by the environmental movement David. One of the things about all these assertions being made is they create anxiety in people, and people actually believe that we're destroying the earth, it's not going to be around for a while. Listen to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and what she had to say here in 2019.
Audio Sound Bite: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:

Millennials and people and Gen Z and all these folks that come after us are looking up and we're like, The world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change. And your biggest issue is... Your biggest issue is, How are we going to pay for it?

HOST: DAVID WHEATON:
To what extent David is the younger generation, who doesn't have the experience of living over decades and have seen this all in the past from the sixties and fifties, when it was first coming out. As you were talking about, they were threatening about ice age back then, now as global warming. The younger generation's experiencing anxiety, a mental health crisis over all these alleged environmental threats. How real is that do you think in the younger generation?

GUEST: DAVID LEGATES:
How many times have we been told that you have 12 years to solve this problem? Over and over again, we're told. In just a short time period, 12 years, 10 years, 8 years, otherwise it'll all be gone and then those time periods pass and what happens? Nothing. We just are told, Well, it'll be another 12 years or so. But the problem is the kids have been told this since the first time they get into any kind of learning condition that you go to school, they go to preschool, they're told, We are destroying the environment, you are creating the problem. And that certainly brings into mental health crisis. There's a lot of young adults now that do not want to have children because they're afraid of bringing children into a world that will not be sustainable, that effectively, by the time their young children will become adults, that the temperature will be so hot you just can't stand to be outside, we can't raise enough food, they're going to starve and all these things. And of course that creates a mental health issue.

The other weird thing is that they play into this. The Australian Broadcasting company had a website and essentially what happened is kids could go to the website and there's 12 questions that you answer based upon what you're doing to the environment. At the end you have a pig and the pig gets bigger and bigger depending upon the answers you give. And if it gets too big, it explodes. If you take what the average person would put for those 12 questions, you find out that essentially you will expire your allotment of carbon dioxide, or your footprint, by the time you are nine years old. So, imagine a 14-year-old at this website now realizes, I have done more to destroy the planet than I'm allowed to do to when I was nine. Everything I do from here on out is going to be a fundamental destruction to the planet. That puts an undue burden on them.

But the weird thing about this is if you take it apart, and I did, the first 10 questions really have no meaning, it's the last two. The question number 11 is, "How much money do you make per year?" And if you're living dirt poor, then it doesn't go up much. Your pig doesn't expand, but if you make quite a bit, then your pig will expand considerably and most likely blow up. However, question 12 is, "How much of your income do you give to environmental organizations?" And if you put a high number there, you're essentially allowed the indulgence of making more money. So, as long as you make more money and you give it to environmental organizations, your pig will be small and you'll have a small footprint and that is almost the take-home message.

As long as you pay for what you're doing by giving to environmental organizations, everything will be fine. And I think that creates this issue that people are being tuned from the moment they get their hands on them, essentially that the world is coming to an end, it's all your fault. And that for a young child puts an undue burden on them and obviously creates mental issues.

HOST: DAVID WHEATON:
The system you just described sounds exactly like a religious works righteousness system. If you just do these good works and give to the right people, well then you can be absolved of your sins of being alive. David Legates with us today here on The Christian Worldview. The predictions, as you've mentioned a couple times throughout our conversation today, have been just wrong consistently, going back to the fifties. I have audio from a piece The Epoch Times did on all the wrong predictions of the climate change movement. I'm just going to play about a minute of it just to give you a taste and then follow up with a question.
Audio Sound Bite from The Epoch Times:
The fact that very often it's exactly these types of bold predictions about specific dates when something should happen but winds up not coming true, which has pretty much undermined the credibility of so-called climate experts. At least in the eyes of most of the public. Let's begin our journey in October of 1958, that was when the New York Times published an article in which they wrote this, quote, "Some scientists estimate that the polar ice pack is 40% thinner and 12% less an area than it was a half century ago, and that even within the lifetime of our children, the Arctic Ocean may open, enabling ships to sail over the North Pole." At the time the article mentioned the Arctic ice sheet was about seven feet thick, which was again in 1958 and today when we look at today's data, it's still about seven feet thick.

In June of 2008, you had the National Geographic News. It's a news outlet citing an environmental scientist writing this, quote, "We're actually projecting this year that the North Pole may be free of ice for the first time in history." In that same month -- continuing to issue this predictions one after the other and these predictions, after they fail to materialize, will they lead more and more people to trust these so-called climate scientists less and less-

HOST: DAVID WHEATON:
Okay, I'm going to stop it there, David. And the soundbite goes through year by year of these predictions made by the elite intelligentsia that were completely wrong. When these elite climate change, I guess you could call them scaremongers are wrong about their predictions, why isn't the entire realm of the environmental movement completely discredited? How do they keep going on as if they're not making these wrong predictions and we should believe them this time?

GUEST: DAVID LEGATES:
Very few people hold them accountable. If you went to Glacier National Park, there was a big sign-up there, said that these glaciers will be gone by the year 2020. And on January 1st, 2020, they took down the sign. The idea is they just keep pushing things into the future because there is no drop dead deadline. If you remember back to the Y2K incident, that had a deadline on January 1st, 2000, all your computers are going to crash, nuclear reactors are going to have problems. Everything connected to the computer world is going to go haywire and the world as we know it is going to cease to happen. What happened on January 1st, 2020? Virtually nothing.

And I remember the week going into that, everything, CNN, all of the news, had people on there saying, This is what's going to happen. And when it never did, they never brought those people back out and said, "What went wrong? Why did your forecast not occur?" And of course, they were told in scriptures, "You're not speaking from God if your predictions are not coming true. So, if you say, God hath thus said and it doesn't come true, then God hath not said and you are therefore not of God." Essentially it should work the same with science. If you say, "We have only 12 years or the temperature's going to be unbearable," and it's not, then you didn't know about science well enough to be able to tell us about it, you should be discredited. Unfortunately, nobody ever holds these people to it. They just come back, make a new forecast and people become continuously scared.
HOST: DAVID WHEATON:
Amazing. David, I want to ask you about several specific issues with regards to the environment and what's taking place. The first one is, and something you and I were discussing before the interview today, is these Canadian wildfires that are burning in Canada, that are sending smoke. Now we are in the upper Midwest, it has been awful here this summer, not every day, but we just had a period of about five days in a row where the air was just cloudy. It looked like a fog had come over our area. And people here are just wondering, What is going on? We don't remember this kind of thing happening when we were younger at all, where you get these forest fires way to the north of us and impacting the whole area.

And so my question is, why are these forest fires so pervasive now when they weren't in the past? And as you go and read online on social media, you'll see people commenting, "Well, it's because we've had global warming and now the forests are drier and so they're burning more." What is behind these forest fires that are impacting so much of the United States?

GUEST: DAVID LEGATES:
From what I've determined, it's said a significant proportion of wildfires, particularly in places like Manitoba, were human-caused, as much as 90% of them. By human caused, it says abandoned campfires, hot machinery or the one I liked in British Columbia is, where in Osprey apparently dropped the fish onto a power line, it created sparks, the sparks set fire to the vegetation below and away goes a wildfire. But the problem has been, we have for decades attempted to keep fires in control. The idea is, fires burning is bad, we want old growth forests left just as they were. And decades of this have led to accumulation of vegetation that's dry and that's the fuel for fires. Boreal forests, for example, as you get up in Canada, where natural fire cycles are just simply part of the ecosystem, well, if you don't allow fires to happen, you increase the fuel, the fuel gets bigger and bigger and so when you have a fire, it becomes even more intense.

The policies that have led for humans, essentially in foreign management, have led to the accumulation of this dry vegetation, which increases fuel for fires, which essentially makes them bigger and more frequent when they occur. And so that has become a fundamental problem recently, is that it's not only human-started, but it's human-fueled.

HOST: DAVID WHEATON:
Now, one more incident that happened recently where the tragic floods in Texas that, I think, nearly 150 people died in these flash floods down in Texas. And again, the explanation there was, Look, there are more violent storms today like these floods because of global warming. What caused that? Just something typical is happening in creation, or what?

GUEST: DAVID LEGATES:
Part of the issue has been that the change in land use has become a fundamental issue. In Delaware, for example, I was a state climatologist for a time, I was asked, "Are we seeing more floods in New Castle County?" This is where Wilmington, Delaware and essentially the surrounding area has been urbanizing quite a bit. And my answer was yes. Is it human induced? Of course. Does this have anything to do with climate change? And the answer is not at all. What has happened is we've had the growth of the cities. I show a picture of 1937 in a small area north of Wilmington, called Talleysville, it was dirt roads, it was grasslands, it was forests, and essentially when the rain fell in that area, it took a while to get to the Brandywine Creek.

What happens now is urban street flooding, the area has been replaced with parking lots, with asphalt, with concrete, with hardscore buildings, essentially the surface has become more impervious, the rain falls, it doesn't soak in and it moves faster. Now, in this area where they had flash floods in Texas, to some extent it's affected by growth of Austin and San Antonio. But in addition, the Texas Hill Country has been long known as Flash Flood Alley because you've got steep terrain, you've got clay rich soils, and it causes rapid runoff, funneling water in the rivers. And so it's the way the geography essentially of the area works, is that you have rocky topography, you have sparse vegetation, the water doesn't seep in, it's all largely impervious surfaces. So, when you have a heavy rain event, and I think this was spawned largely by the remnants of tropical storm Barry, when that water falls on an area, it just simply runs off over land, which is much faster than if it's sunk into the ground and took a while to get to the river.

And so as a result, you're going to get bigger flood peaks, you're also going to get more droughts at the other end of the spectrum. In Delaware, we're seeing more droughts. The answer is it has everything to do with the fact that in that same area that I talked about in Talleysville, you've got more people living there, you've got more water-intensive activities, more water-intensive businesses, when the resources run low, essentially then you have more people demanding the water. And so it just makes that resource even more scarce. And so yeah, we're seeing more floods and more droughts. A large extent in most places on the planet, those are being exacerbated by urbanization and land-use change and not by climate change.

HOST: DAVID WHEATON:
I hope you're listening carefully to his answers as they debunk the assertions that are constantly made by public and private figures, that man is causing climate change and that is causing anything negative in our environment.
The tentacles of environmentalism reach everything almost in life. But here's two more. The first one is just the issue of recycling. We're constantly told we need to recycle cardboard, plastics, glass, metals because we need to save the environment. Can you just give us a thought on the effectiveness of all the recycling effort that this country goes through?

GUEST: DAVID LEGATES:
Well, I think recycling is good. However, like you say, what does actually get recycled? And there are some indications that much of what you put in the recycling bin, A, should never be in there in the first place and, B, never actually gets recycled. One of the problems, for example, is we have gone to single stream recycling. One of the things we used to do is you would take it down to a school or something and you would sort glass in one container, paper in another, corrugated cardboard in a third and you have all these containers in which you would do the sorting. Then they would come pick it up and everything was fine, but now we've gone to single stream because most people didn't want to do that. And so now you can do it at the side, you just put all your recycles in one bin and we'll figure it out.
The problem is that they really don't want you to put glass in there, but they can't tell you that because glass was one of the first things we could figure out how to recycle. But if you put a glass bottle in single stream recycling, chances are, by the time it gets into the truck, through the truck, gets unloaded at the source, that bottle is now little teeny yards of glass that are in everything. And so getting the glass out of the paper and separating it all on the other end becomes, in many cases, a serious issue. And the question of course, is this really saving the environment if you have what you think is recycling, but we're throwing it away anyway. And so that's my concern is that recycling is a good idea and a good way to steward the environment, but practically the way it happens is probably not doing what you think it's doing.

HOST: DAVID WHEATON:
What about the issue of, you mentioned this already, the transition oil and gas over to electric forms of energy, especially with regard to vehicles. Where we're told that our whole vehicle fleet in America is going to change over by 2030 or 2035 to electric vehicles. Of course Elon Musk is the big proponent of this. Is this transition to electric vehicles going to happen? Is that a good thing? And what should we know about this movement to go away from combustion engines?

GUEST: DAVID LEGATES:
Well, if you'd asked me two weeks ago, I would've said, "I don't know." I do know now, at least under this administration, it will not happen. Back, Tuesday, I think a couple of weeks ago, late July, both the EPA and the Department of Energy released potential rule makings. And from the Department of Energy's standpoint, one of their arguments is to get away from the demand on wind and solar and in particular on electrical vehicles. The problem has been, and I'm in the area of the PJM grid, there's a number of grids that run the United States. PJM stands for Pennsylvania, Jersey and Maryland, but that grid extends all the way up to New York. It extends all the way up to Chicago and down into northern North Carolina. It's one of the largest grids and actually it produces more energy historically for other grids when they need it.

PJM has said, because of the idea that we're shutting down fossil fuel plants and they're being forced to pick up more wind and solar, that what's happening is they guessed that by 2030 we would start to see brownouts and blackouts. And the latest update, they said, "We expect that to happen by 2026," which of course is next year. So, if you continue to put electric vehicles, everything electric onto the grid, then the grid has to supply more and more electricity. When you overload it with the transient wind and solar and remove the solid sources of natural gas, of fossil fuels and so forth from the network, which they're doing, the grid just can never keep up with it. And that becomes a fundamental problem that PJM is facing.

The other point that people always forget is they think the grid is like a huge battery in which you take all the energy you dump into it, and whenever you need it you pull it out. It's not, it's a just-in-time process because I worked with Duke Energy for a bit trying to do hydroelectric power generation, and they said, "When we generate energy, there's only four things we can do to it. One is sell it to our customers. Two is sell it to say Virginia power and sell it to their customers. Three, we can use it to pump water back up over the dam, which is highly inefficient, but it's a possibility. And the fourth thing is to simply ground it out and throw it away." There's no real way to store lots of energy. As I mentioned before, to keep New York City running for one hour, you'd need a battery field as big as the state of Delaware.

And so the grid just doesn't work that way, but people think it does, and that's where the people that run the grid know that we are potentially in trouble if everything gets moved off onto the grid and electric.

HOST: DAVID WHEATON:
All right, David, final question or two for you. It says on your site, "The Cornwall message, is most important, the gospel of salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. But after that, the good news that biblical earth stewardship spells better life for humankind and all the rest of the world alike, this message will bring true peace and a healthy mental outlook to our youth. At our core, we proclaim and defend the good news of salvation by grace, through faith in Jesus Christ's atoning death in victorious resurrection." And then there's affirmation of, "You are all standing on the sovereignty of God and creation, history and salvation, the authority and errancy and of the Bible, the responsibilities of humanity to care for creation, while recognizing human exceptionalism, the need for truth-driven environmental stewardship," which you've been giving us today. I'm so thankful for that.

So, my question is, as we've talked about all these environment and climate change issues going on in broader society, what is the response when your peers, academics, hear about this gospel mission of Cornwall?

GUEST: DAVID LEGATES:
It's interesting that you ask me, “What does academics think of us?” And the reason is because I spent, like I said, most of my life at the University of Delaware, I was faculty member there from 2000 to 2022. So, a little over 20 years. Towards the end, the UD Review, which is a student newspaper, wrote two essays blasting me largely for being a Christian and part of Cornwall. And in one of them, they wrote, "As the good book says, Professor Legates, the earth lies defiled under its inhabitants." Then they go on to talk about how the climate change catastrophe is already upon us. The crisis is here, the dead are beginning to pile up, the earth lies defiled.

And so if you try to figure out where... If they mean the good book, they mean the holy scripture, then where that phrase comes from is Isaiah 24-5. And if you actually went back and read it says, "The Earth is also defiled by its inhabitants for they have violated laws, altered statutes and broke the everlasting covenant." And of course the article does actually go on to say, "Unlike the prophet Isaiah, we at the review, aren't too sure the youth has defiled because its inhabitants have done all these things." But as Isaiah clearly says, The earth is defiled, not because we have used fossil fuels, not because we have put carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but because we have violated God's laws, we have altered his statutes and we have broken his everlasting covenant. So, it's our relationship with God that has failed, that has caused the earth to be defiled.

And the interesting thing is, the chair of the department came to me and he's a Muslim and he said, "Where's the outcry?" And I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Well, if that had happened to me and they were quoting the Quran, there would be Muslim groups on the president's doorstep demanding an explanation." And I said, "Well, you see what happens." And he said, "Well, you should go talk to our DEI officer." I knew what was going to happen. I said, "Well, I'll do it, so I'll know what she has to say." We had a long talk and then she concluded by saying, "Well, I'm a Christian and I believe Christians should be loved by everybody. So, if people at the review are having issues with you, maybe you should sit down, have an introspection, and then apologize to the university community for what you've done." Then she got up and stormed off and, it was her office actually, I walked out and the secretary said, "She's asked you to leave, sir.

But I thought that was interesting because I can't imagine anybody else and any other group... Figure one, would a DEI officer have said to them, Well, it must be your fault, you figure out what you've done wrong and apologize to the rest of us because of it. But you can do that to Christians because that's the way academics behave is that Christianity is somehow a backward religion. And as I said, I am very much glad to be out of that scenario.

HOST: DAVID WHEATON:
Yeah, I'm sure you've lived very many decades in that world of education and the opposition rebellion against God and his word. You're very familiar with it. David, we so much appreciate your coming on the Christian Worldview radio program today. So, thankful that God has ordered your life to understand these issues that many are deceived about, many are lying about in positions of authority. And so just in 60 seconds, what would be your final exhortation today to Christians listening, perhaps pastors of churches, as we all are bombarded with environmental assertions and narratives that are false and misleading.

GUEST: DAVID LEGATES:
Well, as Cal usually says, first Thessalonians, 5-21 says to test all things, hold fast to what is true. And that's what I've done in science all along, is look at the science behind it. For a while, I was on the side of people that are now saying the Earth is coming to an end. I disagree with them because what I've learned about climate, what I've learned about God as well, is that that is not the case. And so I tested things and I'm holding fast to what is true and the scriptures are true. Much of what we hear in science is not.

HOST: DAVID WHEATON:
Well, David, thank you so much again for coming on the program and for all your great work at the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. All of God's best and grace to you.

GUEST: DAVID LEGATES:
Thank you.

HOST: DAVID WHEATON:
If you missed any of the interview with David Legates, Christian climatologist at the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, just go to our website, TheChristianWorldview.org, where all of our programs are archived. We actually couldn't fit in the whole interview with David, so we put an additional question about chem trails and cloud seeding on The Christian Worldview Short Takes podcast. You can hear that on our website or search for it in your podcast app. Keep in mind that The Christian Worldview Radio Program and The Christian Worldview Short Takes are separate podcasts.

We very much appreciate Cornwall Alliance’s, independent thinking and biblical worldview on the environment, but also their gospel mission, and I think they're the best organization at this in the world right now. They have free, online courses and all sorts of resources if you'd like to go deeper, founder Cal Beisner has been a good friend and guest on this program many times. This month is Cornwall's 20th anniversary and they have a matching gift opportunity if you'd like to help them. Cornwallalliance.org is their website.

As we've been saying today, the climate change worldview is truth exchange. Romans one says that, "Those who reject God in his word exchange the truth of God for a lie and worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator." Frankly, that is the bottom line choice for each one of us. God created us to worship Him, but will we worship Him and believe Him and His gospel of salvation through Christ, believe His word, yes by faith? Or will we believe, by faith, those who reject God and His word and are false prophets making false predictions? This issue of environmentalism isn't going away. Everything we do in life intersects with the environment, even breathing. So, it's a very useful tool to manipulate and control people. This is why we must be discerning, test all things against scripture and have a healthy skepticism of anyone who rejects or twists God's word.

Thank you for joining us today in The Christian Worldview and for your support of this non-profit radio ministry. Let's remember that the climate may change back and forth, but Jesus Christ and His word are the same yesterday and today and forever. So, until next time, think biblically. Live accordingly. And stand firm.

The mission of The Christian Worldview is to sharpen the biblical worldview of Christians and to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. We hope today's broadcast encouraged you toward that end. To hear a replay of today's program, order a transcript or find out what must I do to be saved. Go to TheChristianWorldview.org or call toll-free, 888-646-2233. The Christian Worldview is a listener-supported, nonprofit radio ministry furnished by the Overcomer Foundation. To make a donation, become a Christian Worldview partner, order resources, subscribe to our free newsletter, or contact us, visit TheChristianWorldview.org. Call 888-646-2233, or write to box 401 Excelsior, Minnesota, 55331. Thanks for listening to The Christian Worldview.