#119 Demand Destruction of God’s Creation

The Biden Administration is performing demand destruction on fossil fuels.  They are a part of God’s creation, that was intended to warm, transport, and feed the poor.  

 

Creation or the Created

Christians believe that humans come first, and the rest of creation comes second.  Scripture from Genesis 1:26 reads, “Then God said, Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and overall the creatures that move along the ground.”  That means we are “royalty” according to some theologians.  Environmentalists don’t agree.  They believe creation is more important than the created human beings that God put on the earth. 

 

Victor Davis-Hanson, writing in the Epoch Times this week in an article titled, “The Green Immoralists,” points out, “Climate-change moralists love humanity so much in the abstract that they must shut down its life-giving gas, coal, and oil. And they value humans so little that they don’t worry in the here and now that ensuing fuel shortages and exorbitant costs cause wars, spike inflation, and threaten people’s ability to travel or keep warm.”

But this the same crowd who supports abortion, so we should not be surprised that they favor the earth over humans.  That’s why the Christian worldview: Creation, Fall, Redemption is such a critical underpinning of philosophy.  It determines the order of our “loves” as Davey Naugle termed it in his book Worldview.  I made the economics applications in my little book Economics and the Christian Worldview.

 

What is Demanded, gets Supplied

I was a member of a group of professors who visited Russia in 1993, sponsored by Campus Crusade for Christ, which is now called Cru.  Lecturing in Moscow, one cold, dark March night in 1993, I noticed that their questions had a theme.  They essentially wanted me to give them a formula where they could fill in the blanks and get rich as Americans did.  So I blurted out, “Supply a demand.”  It’s as easy as that.  Do you want to get rich?  Supply a demand.

That’s because demands GET supplied, one way or another.  Human needs have never changed.  How we satisfy them changes.  Humans have always wanted heat, cooling, light, and transportation.  In economics, we study how substitutes have arisen for those basic needs, but the needs have not changed.  

Quoting Victor Davis-Hanson again, “The Biden administration stopped all gas and oil production in the ANWR region of Alaska. It ended all new federal leases for drilling. It is canceling major new pipelines. It is leveraging lending agencies not to finance oil and gas drilling.”  They have declared a war on oil.

 

Demand Destruction

Clearly, the Biden administration was engaging in what’s called demand destruction.  That’s where you raise the price of something so people will use less of it.  Increasing the price of tobacco and alcohol via sin taxes are a good example of this concept.  Demand destruction of the oil industry was practiced during the Obama administration, and they’re doing it now in the Biden administration.  

In a Wall Street Journal editorial this week, oil expert Harold Hamm wrote about how Americans need relief from high gas prices,