Why Are Gas Prices So High? Hint: It’s a Worldview Issue

So why are gas prices so high? Well, hint, it's a worldview issue. Cal Beisner joins us today, right here on the Christian Real View 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. Thank you to you, our listeners, for your prayer, your encouragement, and support. You can connect with us by calling our toll-free number, 1-888-646-2233, or writing to Box 401, Excelsior, Minnesota, 55331, or visiting our website, thechristrealview.org. So just as the root of redefining marriage and gender is rebellion against God's Word, so the same motivation drives the left-wing, quote, climate change movement. God commanded Adam and Eve in the very first chapter of Scripture to, quote, 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.

That's Genesis 1, verse 28. This is what is called the dominion mandate, where man, as the pinnacle of God's creation, is called to populate the earth and rule over it in ways that, above all, benefit mankind and glorify God. Now, the humanistic, environmental worldview reverses this. The environment, or Mother Earth, is prioritized above the needs of man and worshipped instead of the Creator. Because we all live in and are dependent on natural resources of the earth for energy, food, water, air, shelter, raw materials to make things, medicines, clothes, and more, and because we are all drawn to the beauty, majesty, and power of God's creation, co-opting environmental issues through lying and scaring people is one of the most useful means to achieve godless, humanistic ends. This week on the Christian worldview, Cal Beisner, president of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, which is, quote, a network of Christian theologians, natural scientists, economists, and other scholars educating for biblical earth stewardship, economic development for the poor, and the proclamation in defense of the good news of salvation by God's grace received through faith in Jesus Christ's death and resurrection, unquote, what a great mission statement Cal joins us to discuss how the war on energy, specifically fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal, harms mankind, especially those who are most vulnerable. So bringing it down to simple questions we all face, why are fuel prices so high when our nation is blessed with all kinds of fossil fuel resources? Is the transition to electric vehicles, which is taking place right now, going to improve life and the environment?

And is it true, as we are constantly harangued, that man is causing irreversible and catastrophic climate change through the use of fossil fuels? We invite you today to hear an uncommon and biblical perspective as Cal answers these questions and more. Let's get to the first segment of the interview with Cal Beisner. Cal, thank you for coming on The Christian Worldview today. You've been on the program many times over the years, but for new listeners, tell us how you came to saving faith in Christ. And how does your biblical worldview drive who you are and what you do with the Cornwall Alliance? Well, David, this is a wonderful question because I love to tell the story.

There's a hymn that goes by that line, isn't there? I love to tell the story of God's redeeming love in Christ Jesus. I was born to parents who were churchgoers but probably really didn't understand the gospel very well. And early in my life, my father was with the US State Department and we lived in Calcutta, India. And there I witnessed two things that came to very deeply affect me later in my life, much later in my life.

One was a beautiful, beautiful tree in the courtyard of the apartment complex where we lived. And as a little child, I just have picture memories and memories of that. But the other was that for a period of about six months while my mother was very, very ill and couldn't take care of me, we had a nurse, an Ayah, who would walk me by the hand to the home of an Indian family where I would spend the day.

And along the way, down a number of blocks, I would step over the bodies of people who had died overnight of starvation and disease. And, you know, as a little child, that was pretty shaking. And those picture memories have stayed with me ever since as well. Considerably later, when I was in seventh grade in Southern California after my dad had changed jobs a couple of times, my dad took my mother and me, who was by then fully recovered from her illness in India, to a Billy Graham crusade in Anaheim, California. And there, my dad and I both really heard and understood the gospel for the first time. And we gave our lives to Christ. We embraced him as our savior. We learned that we needed to stop trusting ourselves in any way and trust in Christ alone because his death on the cross was the event in which he paid the penalty for our sins.

And in his resurrection, he gained victory over death, not only for himself, but also for all who would trust in him. So my father and I were both converted then. My mother was converted a few years later. And early in my Christian life as a freshman in high school, so two years later, I began to be discipled by staff members of Campus Crusade for Christ on my high school campus who taught me how to witness to people. And I eventually earned the nickname of Campus Preacher at Edison High School in Huntington Beach, California, because I would basically witness to anything that moved.

The very first time I ever tried that, though, the fellow to whom I spoke, fellow student, turned out to be a Jehovah's Witness, and he began witnessing to me. And he challenged the doctrine of the Trinity. I had no idea why I believed in the Trinity, but I knew that I did. And so I went to a Christian bookstore, and that was the beginning of my just studying voluminously through the years, buying what eventually became a personal library of over 8,000 books and learning apologetics to serve personal evangelism.

And that became really the mainstay of my life for about the next 10 years or so. And then bit by bit, the Lord built on other parts of my life, all related to the saving work of Christ, all related to teaching people the biblical worldview and theology and ethics. And that really underlies the work of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, which is the ministry that I started. There's a connection between those early childhood memories of the beautiful tree and of the bodies of people who died overnight and my eventual work with the Cornwall Alliance. The tree memory tells me of the beauty of God's creation and of my desire to see that beauty preserved and even enhanced.

But the people who had died of starvation and disease tell me of the horrors of poverty. And so I've always wanted to be used by the Lord to help people simultaneously to be good stewards of God's creation and to embrace the kinds of ideas, the kinds of economic systems and so on that lift and keep entire societies out of poverty. And so those priorities are right at the very center of the Cornwall Alliance.

Thank you for sharing that with us today. Cal Beisner joins us on The Christian Real View. He's the president of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.

Their direct website is cornwallalliance.org. We also have them linked at our website, thechristianrealview.org. This is why we love to have you on the program because you bring a strong biblical worldview to these issues of the environment, to economics, to ethics. We're going to talk about energy today.

You bring a strong biblical worldview to these things, which is so rare, unfortunately, in our world, even within the church. So that's why we appreciate you, Cal, and what you're doing with the Cornwall Alliance. Let's talk first about the topic of energy. And I think everyone listening today understands who owns a vehicle or a truck or does anything on the road that requires gasoline. Gas prices are incredibly high right now.

They've dropped a little bit, but they were hovering at $5 or even more, depending on where you are in the country. They've dropped some now, but this is much higher than the past administration when Trump was president. The question being brought up is, you know, why do you think gas prices are so high right now? And sometimes I just get shocked that people will say, well, it's the war in Ukraine and Putin did this. And that's, of course, what the president is saying.

So I ask you that question. Why are gas prices so high right now? Well, the war in Ukraine certainly has contributed to the increase in gas prices since February. But there was a major increase in gas prices starting very, very shortly after Biden was inaugurated in January of 2021.

And that increase was fairly steady over the next year. And so you obviously can't blame that on the war in Ukraine. Further, although the war in Ukraine affects global gas prices, oil prices and, of course, gas comes from oil, if the United States were still producing and refining petroleum at the same rates that we were during the Trump administration, although we'd have seen some increase in gas prices following the start of the war in Ukraine, we wouldn't have seen nearly so much as we have seen because our production was the greatest in the world. We were the number one producer of oil in the world prior to Biden's taking office. But his policies are very intentionally to reduce America's use of all fossil fuels, not just oil, but also coal and natural gas, and eventually to eliminate those energy sources from America's mix. When you know that that's your government's policy, it's pretty tough as a CEO of a major oil company or a coal company or a natural gas company. To determine that you're going to invest billions of dollars into new exploration, new drilling or mining, new refining and so on, because you know that the president has determined that your industry is going to be destroyed. Now, Biden's not going to be in office forever.

We will have different presidents in the future. There will be changes in policy, but at least for the short term anyway. Those policies have resulted in far less exploration, far less drilling, far less refining. And we are down to about a tenth of the refining capacity now. I think it is might be a bit more than that, that we had, say, 20 years ago, simply because U.S. environmental policy has made it absurdly expensive to build or even to upgrade current refining facilities. So really, like probably 90 percent anyway of the increase in oil prices over the last two and a half years now since Biden took office, is attributable far more to American policy than to anything that Russia has done in Ukraine. The question is, though, it takes energy to do anything to have trucks, goods. Everything's becoming more expensive because energy prices have gone up because the price of oil and gasoline and diesel is so high.

Yes. How do they think that is not going to impact the country and people so negatively that it just totally destroys the economy and makes people lose their businesses? I mean, how do they think that this ends up? You know, David, one of the big mistakes, I think, is forced to overgeneralize when we ask how do they think that this will work?

Well, who are they? And there are some who simply are economically ignorant and they have no idea that this will be the consequence of their policies. There are others who, like the leaders of the Biden administration, have simply decided we must make a transition from fossil fuels, which result in carbon dioxide emissions, which result in some global warming. And we happen to think that that global warming is going to be catastrophic.

Therefore, it must be prevented. We must make a transition from fossil fuels to so-called renewables, wind and solar being the chief ones. And if we must make that transition, well, getting the price of fossil fuel energy rising rapidly gets people to purchase less and to burn less.

And so there are those who simply see this as the price of the transition that has to be made. Now, there are others in the environmental movement, and I think there are probably some of these in the Biden administration, who actually have a very anti-human worldview, who think that human beings are far too many in the world, that the world is overpopulated and that it would be much better if the total human population of the earth were around, oh, 500 million, perhaps a billion instead of the roughly 8 billion that is estimated now, which means we need to get rid of about 95 percent of us. Well, since, as you pointed out, energy is the ability to do work, and everything we do depends on our having energy, well, the ability to do work determines how much food, clothing, shelter, medical care, education, transportation, communication, everything else that we get to enjoy. And how much of those things we get to enjoy has a very, very strong influence on how healthy we are and how long we live. And so if you want to reduce human population, probably the easiest way is to reduce access to energy. When we look at the places in the world that have the lowest life expectancy and the places that have the highest life expectancy, the lowest life expectancy consistently correlates with lowest energy use. The highest life expectancy correlates with highest energy use. So if you want people to die off faster, well, you want to restrict their access to energy.

And cutting out fossil fuels, making them too expensive for people to use, is a quick and easy way to do that. Carl Beissner with us today here on the Christian ReelView radio program. He's the president of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. And Carl has recommended a short book for listeners to the Christian ReelView called Global Warming Skepticism for Busy People by Roy Spencer. This is a 113-page softcover book that dispels the scaremongering and exaggerations about climate change with actual facts. You can order this book for a donation of any amount to the Christian ReelView.

The normal retail price is $13 plus shipping. Just get in contact with us the usual ways at our website, thechristianreelview.org, calling us toll free at 1-888-646-2233 or writing to us at Box 401, Excelsior, Minnesota, 55331. Scripture commands that children are to be brought up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. Offering biblically sound resources for children is one of our top ministry priorities. At our store at thechristianreelview.org, you will find carefully selected children's Bibles and books along with video and audio resources. Check out the Bible infographics for kids books, Little Pilgrim's Progress, and the popular Adam Raccoon set. Theo is a 15-episode video series addressing key doctrines of the faith that is a must-see for children and adults. Satan and the world are bent on capturing the heart and mind of your child.

Instead, get sound resources that will train them up in the way they should go. Browse and order at thechristianreelview.org or give us a call for recommendations at 1-888-646-2233. That's 1-888-646-2233 or thechristianreelview.org. For a limited time, we are offering My Boy Ben for a donation of any amount to The Christian ReelView. The book is the true story of a yellow lab that I had back when I was competing on the professional tennis tour.

It's about relationships with Ben, my parents, with the childhood friend I would eventually marry, but ultimately with God, who causes all things, even the hard things, to work together for good. You can order a signed and personalized copy for yourself or for your friend who enjoys a good story, loves dogs, sports, or the outdoors, and most of all needs to hear about God's grace and the gospel. My Boy Ben is owned by The Christian ReelView.

It's 264 pages, hardcover, and retails for $24.95. To order, go to thechristianreelview.org or call 1-888-646-2233 or write to Box 401, Excelsior, Minnesota, 55331. Welcome back to The Christian ReelView. I'm David Wheaton.

Be sure to visit our website, thechristianreelview.org, where you can subscribe to our free weekly email and annual print letter, order resources for adults and children, and support the ministry. Now back to the interview with Cal Beisner, president of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. Cal, everything is moving toward electric now, trying to get electric vehicles on the road. All the major companies now, GM, Ford, other ones, international companies as well, are all pushing electric vehicles.

They're really coming. They're going to be produced in mass whether we want them or not. Zero emissions, quote, unquote, of course. Where do you get the electricity to power those cars? Where does that come from? Is that a good thing for the economy, the environment, and people's finances?

Well, let's take it backward. For people's finances, electric vehicles cost on average about $10,000 more than do comparable internal combustion engine vehicles. And so that's an initial hurt. The next hurt is that the electricity that you need for those electric vehicles, once you have counted in all the various different hidden costs, turns out to be roughly equal in cost to you over the lifetime of your vehicle to the gasoline or diesel that you would use in the same vehicle if it were internal combustion engine, ICE. So in terms of finances to persons, they're significant reduction in financial well-being for most people who buy them, which is why you see the vast majority of people who do buy electric vehicles are considerably on toward the upper part of the income spectrum in America. Next, regarding the economy as a whole, well, in order to electrify all of the cars in the United States, we would have to be producing a vast amount more electricity than we are, far more than double. And if we're going to do that at the same time that we're cutting back on fossil fuel use, we're going to have to multiply immensely the number of wind turbines and solar arrays that are generating electricity. About a year ago now, a Harvard University research team released a paper in which they estimated in order to provide all of the electricity that the United States currently uses from wind turbines, we would have to essentially cover everything from the Atlantic Coast to the Mississippi with wind factories. I don't call them farms.

On farms, you grow animals and plants. We would have to cover all that land with wind factories. Then if we wanted to produce enough more electricity to power all of the vehicles in America with electricity instead of gas or diesel, we'd have to cover all the rest of the land from the Mississippi to the Pacific with wind turbines. That's horrible for the economy because it takes so much land out of use for other purposes, including especially farming.

It's going to make food far more expensive for everybody. But it's also horrible for the environment because all these wind turbines everywhere or solar arrays, and by the way, we would need to be much more dense with solar arrays because the actual production kilowatt hours per square mile covered by these things is much lower than with wind. We would have to cover such vast amounts of land with these that the effect on biodiversity, on ecosystems would be just horrible, let alone the aesthetics of it all. I happen to be from a generation in which we thought that environmentalists liked for the world to be beautiful. I'm not sure many things that are more ugly than a vast landscape dominated by 600-foot tall wind turbines or just covered with black solar arrays all over the ground.

That's aesthetically bad. It's ecologically bad. It's really bad for the environment itself. And so it's really shocking that so many environmentalists support wind and solar as they do. That was really well answered because we see these wind turbines, these solar fields all over Minnesota where we are from. And you're right. It is very ugly. It ruins God's beautiful landscape. And also when you talk about wildlife and growing things, it takes room away from doing those kinds of things.

So it's just really wholeheartedly agree with your answer there. Cal Beisner with us today here on the Christian Real View. The president of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. Their website is cornwallalliance.org. They are celebrating their 17th birthday, so to speak, this year as an organization. They're having a matching donation go on right now. If you'd like to support this excellent nonprofit organization, go to cornwallalliance.org. Or you can come to thechristianrealview.org.

There's a link right over to them at our own website. Cal, just one more question on energy and the environment. You wrote a recent column where you quoted a headline that said fossil fuel extraction must be stopped to limit global warming. You said that's the headline of an article at earth.com, an environmental activist website. It purports to convey the message of a study done in May 2022 in environmental research letters. Quote, Existing fossil fuel extraction would warm the world beyond one point five degrees Celsius.

Though the study, interestingly enough, you say, makes no such claim. According to the study, the world has already committed through its twenty five thousand oil and gas fields and three thousand coal mines to emitting so much carbon dioxide that global warming cannot be limited to the one point five degrees Celsius targeted by the Paris Climate Agreement and the Glasgow Climate Pact. That means, say the authors, quote, that staying below one point five degrees Celsius may require governments and companies not only to cease licensing and development of new fields and mines, but also to prematurely decommission a significant portion of those already developed. And then you go on to say this, that what they don't mention is that both China and India, which together quoting you constitute thirty five percent of the world's population, have every intention to increase their consumption of fossil fuels for decades to come and are absolutely justified in doing so to ensure that there are two point eight billion people can flourish. So the question is, there's a folly here, Cal, of non shared participation in trying to reduce greenhouse gases, as they call them, carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

In other words, China and India aren't going to play along with this, but America and some of the Western nations are. But is the premise of even the idea of fossil fuel use harms the environment because it warms it and therefore harms human beings? I think I ask you almost every time you come on the program, because the messaging is so strong that man is causing climate change that threatens our very existence.

And Christians will say the same thing, you know, bad storms come, hot weather, fires, whatever. Oh, it's climate change, global warming. So the question is, what is the latest evidence for whether and how man's activities are actually impacting a climate negatively? The last word you added there is really important negatively. There's plenty of evidence that we impact climate.

We impacted on a local and a regional and even a global scale. The issue is how negative that is, if negative at all. But let's start with the claim that our emissions of carbon dioxide as we burn fossil fuels are causing dangerous to catastrophic warming. And that somehow or other we must meet this one point five degrees Celsius goal or target of limiting global warming to that. There is simply no rationale for that one point five degree target.

It's essentially arbitrary. But let's talk about what really happens as greenhouse gases increase in the atmosphere and global average surface temperature rises in response. What you don't get is an increase in temperature that is the same amount all around the world. Instead, according to greenhouse gas warming theory, and I think this is very well established, the warming happens primarily in the winter, primarily toward the poles, primarily at night for a variety of different reasons that are too technical to go into right now.

But frankly, nobody in the discussion challenges this basic thrust. Well, you know, winter is the coldest time of the year. The poles are the coldest part of the planet, and night is colder than daytime. So when you have an increase in average global surface temperature, the reason you do is that most of that warming is happening toward the poles in the winter at night. That is, we're raising the lowest temperatures, and very little of that warming is happening toward the equator in the summer in the daytime. So the result is you have fewer and less intense cold snaps without a significant change in the number or intensity of heat waves. Well, cold snaps kill on average 20 times as many people per day as do heat waves. And so just simply the reduction in cold snaps without a 20-fold increase in heat waves means you're going to have a reduction in human mortality in response to temperature extremes.

That's a good thing. Furthermore, this increase in average temperature toward the poles in the winter at night means that you expand growing areas. Plants can grow farther, you know, into higher latitudes, closer to the poles. They can grow at higher altitudes where it's colder. They can grow earlier in the spring, later in the fall. You move the last freeze back, you move the first freeze later in the year, and that means a longer growing season. That means more food for everything that eats plants and for everything that eats things that do eat plants.

That's all to the good. The fact is we know from geologic history that there have been periods when Earth's average temperature was not 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than it was at the start of the Industrial Revolution, which is the UN's target for limiting warming, but three or four degrees Celsius warmer than that. And those were the most fruitful, plentiful times for plant growth all over the world, and since animals depend on plants, that means that they're the best times for animals as well. Cold is a real problem. Warmth is not a significant problem. So how should Christians respond to the charge that there are so many more weather-related disasters and that they are much more devastating now? Since the year 1900, 120 years ago, human mortality in response to weather-related disasters, heat waves, cold snaps, hurricanes, droughts, floods, tornadoes, anything you can think of that is weather-related, human mortality rates related to those have dropped by over 98%. That's partly because, in fact, there's been no increase in the frequency or the intensity of any weather-related disasters, contrary to plenty of contrary claims in the mainstream media and by environmentalists. Cornwall Alliance's director of education and research, Dr. David LeGates, recently retired professor of climatology at the University of Delaware, has been a long-term monitor of the data on all of those things.

He keeps the raw data. There simply has been no increase in the frequency or intensity of any of these things. But second, our economic production of buildings, of electrical systems and things of that sort protects us from weather-related disasters. When you get a hurricane that hits or a tropical cyclone that hits a very, very poor area with poorly constructed housing, with no electricity or a very fragile electric grid, you get far more deaths than you do if that hurricane hits Miami.

And the reason is that Miami has protected itself. Now, how did it do that? It did that because it had abundant, affordable, reliable energy to do all the production of those things that protect us. It's called mastering climate or mastering weather. We can do that with abundant energy. But those who want us to cut our fossil fuel use in order to limit global warming are telling us that we need to have less energy and that it needs to cost us more. And that means we do less mastery of nature, less mastery of weather-related disasters. So that's how to make people more vulnerable to anything that comes with climate change rather than less.

Let me add this one other point here, too. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which publishes these periodic assessment reports on climate change, supposedly aggregating the findings of thousands and thousands of scientific studies published over the previous five or six years or so. The IPCC never, in its technical reports, uses language like crisis or catastrophe or existential threat.

Never. And in fact, as it paints scenarios for our future, even in its climatologically worst scenarios, humanity is multiple times better off at the end of this century than it is right now. That is, people are more prosperous and therefore they have healthier and longer lives regardless what's happening to the climate. Because frankly, you can thrive in any climate from the Arctic Circle to the Sahara Desert to the Amazon rainforest if you have adequate money, adequate economic production.

If you don't, you can't thrive in the best tropical paradise. Well, that's just so different from what you hear the mainstream worldview on this is. So that's why we appreciate your perspective today here, Cal. Cal Beisner with us today on the Christian worldview, the president of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.

OK, just a short time out here for some ministry announcements. Cal has recommended a short book called Global Warming Skepticism for Busy People. The book dispels the typical scare mongering and exaggerations we so often hear about climate change with actual facts. The book is not overtly Christian, Cal tells me. It doesn't have chapter and verse biblical references, but the author is a believer and he's a young earth creationist. So you know he's coming from a biblical perspective. You can order Global Warming Skepticism for Busy People for a donation of any amount to the Christian worldview.

The normal retail price is $13 plus shipping. Just order it the usual ways through our website, thechristianrealview.org or by calling 1-888-646-2233 or by writing to us at Box 401 Excelsior, Minnesota 55331. David Wheaton here inviting you to the Christian Real View Golf Event on Monday, September 19th at Woodhill Country Club in Wazeta, Minnesota. This is a rare opportunity to experience Woodhill with its immaculate condition, challenging greens and beautiful setting all in support of the Christian Real View Radio Ministry. Your registration includes lunch on the lawn, practice range, player gift and 18 holes with cart followed by appetizers and awards. Make a hole in one on number 16 and you'll take home a brand new Chevy. Bring your foursome or we can fit you into a group.

There are lots of hole sponsor opportunities as well. We hope to see you on Monday, September 19th. Registration deadline is Labor Day. To find out more and to register, visit thechristianrealview.org or call 1-888-646-2233. That's 1-888-646-2233 or thechristianrealview.org. For a limited time, we are offering My Boy Ben for a donation of any amount to the Christian Real View. The book is the true story of a yellow lab that I had back when I was competing on the professional tennis tour.

It's about relationships with Ben, my parents, with the childhood friend I would eventually marry, but ultimately with God who causes all things, even the hard things, to work together for good. You can order a signed and personalized copy for yourself or for your friend who enjoys a good story, loves dogs, sports, or the outdoors, and most of all needs to hear about God's grace and the gospel. My Boy Ben is owned by the Christian Real View.

It's 264 pages, hardcover, and retails for $24.95. To order, go to thechristianrealview.org or call 1-888-646-2233 or write to Box 401, Excelsior, Minnesota, 55331. Thanks for joining us today on the Christian Real View. I'm David Wheaton, the host. Just a reminder that today's program and past programs are archived at our website, thechristianrealview.org.

Transcripts and short takes are also available. Now back to the interview with Cal Beisner as we discuss energy and the environment. One more topic related to the environment, which is farming.

You brought this up just a few moments ago. We've read the reports about Microsoft founder Bill Gates buying, I think he's the largest farmland owner in America now. It's kind of an odd thing if you think about it. A guy who's involved in computers and so forth is all of a sudden buying farmland and he's behind a push for non-meat farming. You know, they think cows emit methane.

They think it's bad for the environment, just one of the craziest things you could ever imagine. Even the Chinese are being allowed to buy land, specifically farmland, in this country. That's extremely troubling even from a national security standpoint. So I won't ask you to speculate on that whole topic for now, but also we see what's going on over in Sri Lanka recently. And maybe some listeners haven't heard about this, but the economy, the country, basically went into a kind of a collapse in Sri Lanka, which is off the coast of India, over a lack of food. But also there have been uprisings in Holland, in Europe, by farmers there. And now Canada, our nation to the north here, is trying to implement some of these, I think you can maybe call them governmental mandates to do organic farming, without fertilizers and pesticides and that kind of thing.

Tell us what's going on with these organic mandates and what it's doing to these countries. One of the basic, what are called the laws of ecology, coined by Barry Commoner back in the 1960s. One of those four laws of ecology is nature knows best. If that were the case, we should all just sit back and try to live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. No industry, no actual farming or anything else like that.

Just gather your nuts and dig up your roots and try to kill a deer or something every once in a while to try to get a little meat. If nature knows best, that's the way we ought to live. Well, frankly, an awful lot of people in the environmentalist movement, especially those who call themselves deep ecologists, think exactly that. And so they think that our farming should all be very, very natural. And of course, even defining what's natural is a bit of a problem. I mean, if you've ever eaten broccoli, you've eaten something that's not natural because broccoli didn't exist in its present form 150 years ago. The corn or maize that we eat today is not natural.

It's the result of thousands of years of hybridization. Totally natural corn in its earliest pre-hybridization state was essentially impossible for humans to consume. And the same goes for practically all of our vegetables.

Tomatoes, for instance, nothing at all like what they were in nature. But what the natural movement is arguing for is that we should not use any fertilizers or insecticides or herbicides or fungicides that are the product of chemical engineering of some sort. Now, the vast majority of our fertilizers right now around the world come from chemical processes starting with natural gas. And these we use to provide the nitrogenous minerals that are absolutely essential to plants growing. The difference here is immense. You can get a much higher yield per acre if you're able to apply nitrogenous fertilizer originating from natural gas through this chemical process than you can by using natural fertilizers, basically dung and urine.

And it's a much cleaner process as well. It doesn't have all of the pathogens associated with dung and urine. And yet the leaders of the government of Sri Lanka were persuaded last year to issue an order that there would be no more imports of chemical fertilizers. And that over, I think it was a three-year period that was intended, all farming in Sri Lanka would have to cease using any chemical fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides, fungicides have to go totally natural. Well, as farmers tried to comply with this, their crop yields plummeted. And as a result, their agricultural production plummeted and people started going hungry.

That generated mass protests in Sri Lanka, leading to the collapse of the government and the resignation, indeed, the flight of the president and the prime minister, complete overthrow and revolution of the government. We are seeing similar things on a smaller scale in the Netherlands right now, where its government has determined that its farmers need to raise less beef in order to protect the world from global warming and that they need to use more natural versus chemical engineered fertilizers and the like. What's happening here, and I'll go ahead and tie this to Bill Gates, what's happening here is the triumph of environmentalist worldview that sees the earth as a fragile but nurturing system in which if we would just minimize our impact on it, everything would be great. Versus a, I would say a biblical worldview of the earth that sees nature not as a fragile system, but as an extremely robust, resilient, self correcting, very, very non delicate thing, but very, very dangerous unless we are able to master it.

Yet it has tremendous potential if we master it. Now, the environmentalists want us to minimize our impact on nature because they see it as fragile and because they see it as naturally nurturing. We as biblically thinking Christians need to realize instead in keeping with Genesis 1 28 where God having created Adam and Eve and his own image and bless them, said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and everything that moves on the face of the earth. So we're not supposed to minimize our impact on the earth. We are supposed to optimize our impact or the way we put it at the Cornwall alliances. Godly dominion rooted in Genesis 1 28 means working together to enhance the fruitfulness and the beauty and the safety of the earth to the glory of God and the benefit of our neighbors.

So that we're addressing the two great commandments to love God and to love neighbor. This is our proper act. Where we do that best, we find that people thrive, where we don't, people suffer. And that's exactly what we're seeing in Sri Lanka. And it is spreading to more and more countries as energy prices rise in response to the climate wars. And as the environmentalists persuade more and more governments to adopt pro organic farming policies.

This is going to starve people. And that I think is not something that we as Christians want to see happen. Cal Beissner with us today on the Christian Real View. He is the president of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.

Their website is cornwallalliance.org or just go to thechristianrealview.org where we have a link directly over to them. Final question for you today, Cal. We've been hearing from different sources just about upcoming food shortages, even in first world nations like America, prices of fertilizer at the beginning of the season, farmers were saying with COVID and the lockdowns and the mandates and all this, it was really going to hurt prices of food and so forth. Well, now we're hearing about food shortages. How likely do you think that is going to be the case here in America for the average person that we're going to be short on food in our country?

It's very hard to try to put a sort of a number on that. What I can tell you is that already plenty of people are finding that certain food products, whether they are produce or meat, poultry, fish, are more likely to be missing from their supermarket shelves in the last year than they had ever experienced in the last 30 or 40 years. And certainly the lockdowns associated with COVID had a lot to do with the supply chain problems. The increase in the price of fertilizer has been very difficult for many, many farmers. And so we're seeing prices rise and yet ordinarily in a free economy, when the price of something rises, the supply will rise in response because producers see an opportunity to make profit. That's what we're not seeing. And we're not seeing it precisely because of government policies that bind the hands of our farmers and of our food processors. We will probably see us come out of that a little bit over the next couple of years as the supply chain problems that came from the COVID lockdown policies diminish.

But I don't think we'll see a major reversal of that until we see a major reversal of government policy that makes particularly fossil fuels less expensive and more widely used. Because energy is the ground floor of all production. If you think back to even your grade school education, sometime along the line you were told energy equals the capacity to do work. Well, work is how we get our food, our clothing, our shelter, our education, our transportation, our communication and everything else.

Work is how we get all that stuff, right? Well, if energy is the capacity to do work, more energy means you can do more work. Less energy means you can do less work. And so more energy means more work means more food, clothing, shelter, etc. So as long as the government policies remain anti fossil fuels, while fossil fuels produce roughly 85% of all the energy used in the world, we are going to see less work getting done. And if less work is getting done, less supply occurs of all the things that are the products of work. And as less supply happens, you wind up with two things, shortages and higher prices. That hurts the poor more than anybody else, but it hurts everybody except the few elites who are tied into the particular parts of the economy that go the opposite direction. That is, if you're tied into wind or solar industries, if you're tied into the organic farming industry and things like that, well, you can profit out of these things. But what that means is that you are profiting from other people's suffering because your products, wind and solar energy and organic food, are more expensive and less reliable than your competitors' products of fossil fuel energy and of modern mechanized, chemically driven agriculture that allows us to produce so much more food per acre that we can leave far more acreage unfarmed and therefore available for beautiful forests, for ecosystems that support wildlife.

So if you're into that, you're harming not only people, but also the natural world around us. What you're saying is so counter to what we hear coming from the government, the educational system, the media, just the opposite of what you're hearing from Cal Beisner. And Cal, thank you so much for coming on the Christian Real View today.

We look forward to part two next week as we talk about the economy and other issues going on in our country right now. All of God's best and grace to you. Well, thank you very much, David. God bless you.

All right. That's all we have time for today here on the Christian Real View radio program. Hope you gained from this conversation with Cal Beisner. The organization he leads, the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, would be an excellent organization for you to get connected with and support. This month is their 17th year as an organization, and they are doing a matching gift challenge this month if you would like to support them.

Their website is cornwallalliance.org. The conversation with him today is just another reminder. When one diverts from or rejects God and the truth of his word, results are always catastrophic. Wrong beliefs lead to wrong conclusions, and that's why it's so important to have an accurate biblical worldview. And that starts with coming to know God through his son, Jesus Christ.

Repent and believe in who Jesus Christ is and what he has done for us on the cross. You can find out more by going to our website, thechristianrealview.org, and clicking on the page, What Must I Do to Be Saved? Just a reminder that you can order Global Warming Skepticism for Busy People. It's a 113 page soft cover that retails for $13 plus shipping for a donation of any amount to The Christian Real View.

Our information on how you can order it comes immediately after today's program. Let's remember, we may live in a fallen world that is full of lies, but Jesus Christ and his word are the same yesterday, and today, and forever. They are the truth, 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 thechristianrealview.org or call toll-free 1-888-646-2233. 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 1-888-646-2233, or write to Box 401, Excelsior, Minnesota, 55331. That's Box 401, Excelsior, Minnesota, 55331. Thanks for listening to The Christian Worldview.