Upset with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's passage of global warming legislation in 2009, he said: "You can't regulate God." At the same time, Barton implied in 2009 that wind is a "finite resource," and there was a claim made that Barton was suggesting that greater use of wind turbines would "slow the winds down," which would "cause the temperature to go up," although a report in "Snopes" suggested that Barton was merely quoting an academic study which suggested that increased use of wind turbines might have unintended consequences for the environment, and that the claim about the linkage between increased use of wind turbines and slowing down the winds was incorrect. In 2013, when discussing the Keystone XL pipeline, he referred to the Genesis flood narrative in the Bible to argue that current climate change isn't man-made. Barton rejects the scientific consensus on climate change that climate change is real and that human activity is the primary cause.