Fox News host Tucker Carlson said Friday that environmentalism was becoming a “cult of climate” and filling a void left by a lack of “religious faith” as environmental activists no longer care about data.

“You may remember a writer called Michael Crichton, he was a force in American entertainment, he was a novelist, he was a movie producer, turned out a ton of top films and best-selling books, the Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, et cetera, et cetera,” Carlson, an honorary board member of the Daily Caller News Foundation, said, going on to describe a talk Crichton gave in San Francisco where he said that environmentalism had become a religion that viewed the Industrial Revolution as its original sin. (RELATED: ‘What The Green New Deal Looks Like’: Tucker Hammers AOC Over Sri Lanka Collapse)

“As church attendance and self-identified religious faith have fallen off a cliff in this country, the cult of climate has grown stronger,” Carlson said.

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The Biden administration canceled offshore oil and gas leases in May, imposed new regulations on onshore drilling in April and revoked a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline in January 2021. President Joe Biden promised to phase out fossil fuels during his 2020 campaign for president.

Carlson also played clips of media figures claiming that hurricanes were becoming bigger threats due to climate change, before noting that the data showed hurricanes were becoming less frequent.

“Nobody cares about data anymore; we saw that with COVID as well. Wear a cloth mask, said Fauci even as he privately admitted that cloth masks are useless to prevent the transmission of COVID,” Carlson said. “Take the COVID shot, Kathy Hochul told us, standing at a pulpit, because, and were quoting, ‘That’s what god wants.’ So once again, whatever this is, it is not science by definition, it’s religion. But despite the fact the Constitution prohibits the U.S. government from having a state religion, that now is our state religion.”

“Zealots want to punish people in the name of their faith,” Carlson added later, noting that some hospitals planned to reduce the amount of anesthesia given to surgical patients in the name of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

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