Why the cool reception for global warming?

Over on the Balloon Juice political blog, there's a discussion about Global Warming in which commenters speculate as to why conservative Christians tend to be so antagonistic towards the Global Warming concept. One commenter sums it up with this chestnut:

God promised he wouldn’t flood the earth twice. Egro, anyone who talks about melting icecaps is conspiring with Satan to deceive us as the end-times approach.

While it's snarky, that misses some of the real cultural antagonism that Evangelicals tend to feel towards environmentalists. I've got some longer-winded thoughts rolling around (some tied into Francis Schaeffer's role as the saddened father of the Christian Political Right), but for now a summary will have to do.

While there are obviously lots of reasons people consider themselves global warming skeptics, the phenomenon in the church traces its way back to the gulf middle class Christians and the 'hippie/new age' connotations of the environmental movement in the US. This cultural gulf is not to be dismissed: think of the distance between an earnest bible college student, and a PETA activist who use 'Gaia' as a proper pronoun. The battle lines between the "New Age Movement" and "Christians" became entrenched in the 1980s, with issues like 'population control' being a code-word for 'Chinese forced abortion' in religious circles. Grappling with the malthusians on that one landed a lot of Christian front-men in the same camp as the Cato Institute folks and other conservative debunkers.

By the time Global Warming became a hot topic, the "our side, their side" divisions were deeply entrenched. To this day, lots of segue-free jabs can be heard coming from the religious right about "earth-worshipers" and so on. A swing back towards earlier concepts of 'Environmental stewardship' is only just beginning to gain traction inside the subculture, and it's still regarded with a great deal of suspicion.