How fracking billionaires, Ben Shapiro, and PragerU built a climate crisis-denial empire
It was the height of summer and Pastor Farris Wilks was warning that if we didn’t all stop sinning, God was going to scorch the Earth and melt the polar ice caps.
“We’re going to reap what we have sown, and what we have sown has not been good,” Wilks explained in his self-assured Texas drawl. “Think of all the murder that has happened in this country… all the babies that have been murdered… sexual perversion of all kinds.”
Wilks told his congregation in the small Texas town of Rising Star that the spike in global temperatures could be related to these sinful excesses. Maybe, he said, us “getting a little scorched here” was a message from God, and there was little if anything we could do about it.
“We didn’t create the Earth, so how could we ever save the Earth, or save all the animals even on the Earth, or save the polar caps?” Wilks said that day in July 2013, according to a recording obtained by the watchdog group Right Wing Watch. Ultimately, the fate of the planet was up to God alone: “If he wants the polar caps to remain in place, then he will leave them there.”
Wilks was no ordinary pastor. Along with his brother Dan Wilks, he was one of the U.S.’ newest billionaires. And their fortune came from an industry directly related to the planetary changes Wilks described in his sermon: fracking for oil and gas. [Continue reading…]