Al Gore Turns Science Into Religion

That thud you just heard is Earth Day doing a face plant. Earth Day is to the Greens what Christmas is to Christians. It’s their central religious holiday. And while Christianity continues to thrive around the world—2.6 billion and growing, environmentalism is a religion in decline.

Make no mistake. It’s a religion. Recently the Free Press ran an article by Roger Pielke, Jr., probably the world’s leading expert on extreme weather events. Pielke referenced Al Gore’s speech from about twenty years ago, given to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Pielke said the speech was important because it turned global warming from a scientific issue into a political issue. I would modestly correct Pielke; it turned it into a religious issue. Pielke said, “An Inconvenient Truth was not really about science: It was a sermon—complete with a moral arc (with those who are evil and those who are righteous), a clear account of sin (fossil fuel emissions), a warning of coming judgment (floods, storms, tipping points), and a path to redemption (political will, renewable energy, personal responsibility). The film ends with a call to conversion.”

For years I have referred to the environmental movement as the Green cult. It is a substitute religion for the true Christian faith. And it is a false religion as Pielke shows.

It has failed. We are now ten years past the Paris Accords when the world’s elite sought to organize human society into a weapon to fight climate change. Did the Paris Agreement…actually achieve anything? The record is damning. Global fossil CO2 emissions are roughly 5% higher today than at the moment Paris was signed. The 2024 rate of increase in atmospheric CO2 was the largest ever recorded.

Bjorn Lomborg said the developed world has spent 20 trillion dollars on renewable energy and achieved absolutely nothing. 20 trillion that could have been spent alleviating poverty in the developing world where 700 million people still live on less than two dollars a day.

The Green cult is one of the most destructive ideologies in human history. The world’s poor condemned to continued suffering. People foregoing children in order to save the planet. Young people struggling with depression because of impending doom. Increased spending that hurts America’s working families. The chief enemy of the third world poor is environmentalism. The West got rich burning fossil fuels. Now we are denying poor people in Africa the right to do the same thing. All in the name of a Green religion which is about as anti-scientific as you can get. It’s so appropriate that Earth Day is celebrated on Lenin’s birthday.

If the Green cultists are destructive and appallingly stupid why do they hold on to it?

What’s their motivation?

It’s where the money is. When my daughter was attending college her biology class had a special session on writing requests for grant money. The lecturer said without apparent irony, to be sure and include a comment on fighting global warming in your application. It greatly increased your chances of getting funded. I remember a Harvard researcher saying that in the science community grad students basically said, you give me the money and I will prove whatever you want. We see that today with the scandal of fraudulent research. Up to half of research results cannot be replicated. In other words, they are based on bogus research. The greatest scientific scam in history is global warming.

The Green cult is motivated by a hunger for political power. Their message is basically; the world is going to end unless you give us money and power to stop it. Have you ever wondered why every single political leftist believes in catastrophic climate change? There is not a single exception I have ever read or even heard of. Conservatives are all over the map on this issue with some believing in global warming and others calling it a scam. But on the Left belief in the climate cult is unanimous. There is not a single dissenting voice. Why? Jeremiads about climate catastrophe give them power and power is what they live for. The only solution they ever offer is planetary governance. A supranational organization that tells everyone what to do. This is what Marxism has always wanted, so the Green cult fits its preferences perfectly.

The most important reason Green cultists believe their own nonsense is religious. The Greens have rejected the true God of the Bible. And when you reject the true God you have to place your trust in something else. So the Greens worship nature—and government. They call for a worldwide controlling political structure that fights the climate bogeyman. A political structure that is controlled, of course, by them.

The Green cult is a terrifying religion. I am sure the average member of a tribe in Mexico was terrified of the Aztecs. They intended to cut your heart out for theological reasons. Green cultists are not only anti-Christian, they are anti-human.

In 1990, the late Alexander King, cofounder of the Club of Rome in 1968, argued against the use of DDT to control malaria: “My own doubts came when DDT was introduced for civilian use. In Guyana, within two years it had almost eliminated malaria, but at the same time, the birth rate had doubled. … My chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it has greatly added to the population problem.” Oh. It allowed children to live instead of die. During their reign of terror the Aztecs sacrificed about two million souls on their altars. Since the ban on DDT malaria has killed upwards of 60 million Africans. Who is worse? The Aztecs or Alexander King? Then there was the observation made in 1971 by Michael McClosky, the former executive director of the Sierra Club, during an Ethiopian famine: “The worst thing we could do is give aid…. the best thing would be to just let nature seek its own balance and to let the people there just starve.”



That’s the kind of religion we are dealing with. That’s what happens when people depart from the true God to worship idols.

The death of the Green cult is great news for humanity. May God hasten the day.

More: Christianity vs. the Green Religion; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHdkYg9MeXg

Roger Pielke, Jr., on the religious nature of the environmental movement; https://www.thefp.com/p/how-al-gore-politicized-climate-science?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The Failure of the Paris Accords: https://unherd.com/2026/04/the-paris-agreement-was-a-fantasy/?set_edition=us&tl_inbound=1&tl_groups%5B0%5D=18743&tl_period_type=3&utm_source=UnHerd+Today&utm_campaign=4f8edb802c-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2026_04_22_10_47&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_79fd0df946-4f8edb802c-35277013

Earth Day goes splat; https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2026/04/21/earth_day_2026_our_power_our_planettm_our_propaganda_redux_1177849.html

Apart from the fact that none of this has anything to do with “climate facts,” one would think that this horror parade would have made life on earth ever more sickly, disease-ridden, and short. And one would be wrong: human life expectancy at birth now is 73.49 years, an increase of over 61% from the life expectancy of 45.51 years in 1950. For more on the absurdities of the crusade against plastics, see my 2024 Earth Day column.