Climate denial is framed as moral-religious duty by its proponents, not just scientific doubt.

Evidence

Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who once brandished a snowball on the Senate floor as proof that climate change was a myth, has characterized global warming as the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” (Sheppard, 2015). In his attacks on climate science, he sees himself as “doing the Lord’s work” (Johnson, 2011). Ironically, Pope Benedict had a different view on God’s will. The pope invoked a “global responsibility” to find the “moral will” to fight the “threatening catastrophe of climate change” (Johnson, 2011). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2741

Categorization

• XREF: Directly instantiates the chapter’s moral-disengagement thesis: Inhofe’s Lord’s-work framing is a classic moral justification relabeling — contrasts nicely with the Pope’s opposite moral framing of the same facts.
• SEED: Essay angle: how both sides of a dispute recruit religious moral authority for opposite conclusions about the same physical facts — the rhetoric of divine mandate on climate.