Islamic Leaders Call For End To Fossil Fuels, Will Probably Jihad Your SUV

Shouldn't that be "Hooray, we have hydrogen"?

Well, this ought to inspire some conspiracy theories! Tuesday, an International Islamic Climate Change Symposium held in Istanbul (not Constantinople) declared that climate change is real, happening now, and caused by human activity. The group called for immediate action to slow the warming of the planet, because Allah would rather not see mass extinctions, thank you. Considering that wingnuts are already convinced climate science is just a scam to make scientists rich, we're guessing that any combination of the words "Islam" and "global warming" will cause more than a few rightwing heads to explode. Yes, Louie Gohmert, we're looking at you.

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The conference's final declaration couches its message about the need to move away from fossil fuels in theological language, which we suppose is pretty much what an Islamic Climate Change Symposium would do:

Our species, though selected to be a caretaker or steward (khalifah) on the earth, has been the cause of such corruption and devastation on it that we are in danger ending life as we know it on our planet ... But the same fossil fuels that helped us achieve most of the prosperity we see today are the main cause of climate change. Excessive pollution from fossil fuels threatens to destroy the gifts bestowed on us by God, whom we know as Allah -- gifts such as a functioning climate, healthy air to breathe, regular seasons, and living oceans. But our attitude to these gifts has been short-sighted, and we have abused them. What will future generations say of us, who leave them a degraded planet as our legacy? How will we face our Lord and Creator?

Hmm ... change around a few of the words from Arabic to Latin, and it sounds like the sort of thing that Pope Francis has been saying about the climate as well, what with all that "stewardship of creation" and "don't wreck the planet" stuff. Just wait'll Rick Santorum finds out that the pope isn't just washing Muslims' feet, he's also trying to save the same planet that they live on! Is that even allowed? Given the dependence of so many Islamic nations on oil production, we wouldn't be surprised if a Saudi branch of the Heartland Institute opened up soon. Drillers have to stick together.

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We checked around some of the usual paranoid rightwing websites and were astonished that we didn't see a single post warning about the terrifying prospect of the scary Muslims teaming up with the dangerous socialist-scientific cabal to force Americans to give up their Suburbans, Navigators, and Escalades. The most we could find was a fairly neutral Daily Caller piece , which was skeptical that Arab nations would ever give up their reliance on oil, and a piece at the rightwing Hot Air blog expressing astonishment that there's any such thing as "Muslim environmentalists," since apparently the only thing Muslims ever do is drill oil wells and set off car bombs. The comments section was far livelier, with the some "ehrmagerd the leftist scientists and ISIS are linking up!!!!1!" freakouts, a very funny joke about how ISIS will now have to use solar ovens instead of gasoline to burn captured pilots alive, and a sage prediction that it's all a scam to ensure that every Muslim nation has an excuse to start a nuclear "energy" program so they can get The Bomb.

On the whole, the wingnuttosphere appears to be ignoring the story, although we have faith that somewhere in a basement, some keyboard warrior is already explaining how the doctrine of  taqiyya  means that the entire declaration is just a sneaky Islamofascist plot to trick us into giving up all our fracking wells so that the Gulf states can jack up the price of oil on us again. It hasn't hit Alex Jones's Infowars site just yet, which is a real disappointment, since some fantastic conspiracy theory could surely tie the conference's declaration in with any number of other grave threats to our freedom.

We'd like to help them out with this jarring fact:  The acronym for "International Islamic Climate Change Symposium" is "IICCS," which sounds almost exactly like ISIS! Before you know it, ISIS will trade its Toyota pickups for a fleet of Teslas, and then who'll be laughing? That's right: the New World Order.

[ ThinkProgress / IICCS declaration ]