How the religious right became climate sceptics

Evangelicals in the USA didn’t get their environmental scepticism from the Bible. It’s come from elsewhere, explains Neall Pogue

In 1993 a popular Christian high school science textbook in the USA denied the existence of human-caused global warming. To reiterate the overall message, a poem featured at the top of the section read, “Roses are red, Violets are blue, They both grow better with more CO2.”

Elsewhere in the book, the authors dismissed the validity of other environmental issues including acid rain, ozone depletion and the dangers of pesticides. Such a position reflected the anti-environmental views held amongst the wider white conservative evangelical community in the United States that make up the religious right movement.

Thirty years on, opposition to environmental concerns may seem like an expected position held by millions of white evangelicals in the US.