Why a key creationist climate change denier has gone antivaxx

Summary: The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Nature presents itself as a Christian thinktank on environmental ethics. In reality, it is a direct link between evolution denial and climate change denial, with personnel overlapping Answers in Genesis, and

direct links to the Heartland Institute, a mouthpiece for the fossil fuel industry, and the influential Heritage Foundation. It is now engaged in assembling an ideological package, based on rejection of the principle that policy should be guided by scientific knowledge, and linking together everything from evolution to environmental concerns to elementary measures for restricting the spread of Covid. The rhetoric is masterly; the consequences, lethal.

A friend just sent me a copy of materials that the Cornwall Alliance is sending to its supporters. Here is an extract [fair use claimed]:

BE ARMED AGAINST THE DANGERS OF SCIENCE SO CALLED

Question any part of the climate-change “consensus” (how much climate change is going on, how much humans contribute to it, what if anything we should do about it), and you’re instantly declared “anti-science” or even a threat to the future of the human race.

But don’t be intimidated—or fooled. That response is itself anti-science. It is rhetoric designed to win not by persuading others but by silencing them.

And it arises not just about climate change. From good old Darwinism (goo to you by way of the zoo) and Malthusianism (population growth inexorably exceeds food production and causes a sudden die-off), to the Obama Administration’s insistence that employers must provide insurance coverage for contraception and abortion regardless of their religious conscience, and COVID-19 mask, social distancing, travel, church worship, and vaccine policies.

People in America and around the world are in danger of becoming slaves of scientism and scientocracy.

The rest of the piece is a blurb for an essay by John G West that forms part of a forthcoming book on CS Lewis and his views on the relationship between science and religion (science ought to know its place), leading up to an appeal for funds. The Cornwall Alliance is a charity under US law, rather than a political body, and contributions are tax-deductible.