Teach-In, turn out, cool off
By: Paul Chesser, OpEd Contributor
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January 29, 2009
By now the practice of educational indoctrination by environmental extremists is well known, from public school showings of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” to widespread emphasis every year on Earth Day, to daily guilt trips thrown at students by eco-conscious teachers.
The latest scheme in the enviros’ toolbox arrives next week with the National Teach-In on Global Warming. Scheduled for Feb. 5, the collaborating educators endeavor to “engage over a million Americans in solutions-driven dialogue.”
You might ask, “solutions to what” – the devastatingly decreasing global surface temperatures over the last 10 years? The catastrophically cooling oceans? The awful all-time record extent of Antarctic ice?
No, those actual, observed phenomena are not what these panickers will screech and teach. Contrarily, they instead harp about the predictions churned out in their Carnackian computer models that have for years foretold of massive global temperature increase because of burned fossil fuels that release heat-trapping gasses into the atmosphere. The temperature data show otherwise, but that doesn’t stop their schtick:
Answer from Carnac the Magnificent Computer Diviner: “Baked Alaska.”
Question: “Name one of many absurd, panic-inducing warnings used to convince millions of children and their parents that their SUVs, incandescent bulbs, and gas-powered lawnmowers will destroy the planet.”
I know – I’m not laughing either. But lest you think that exaggerates the bad jokes delivered by these Unknown Enviro-comics (who wouldn’t be caught dead with plastic bags on their heads), check out some real punch lines from the Teach-In promoters:
* “The window for action on global warming is measured in months, not years.”
* “…for young people, this is not about left and right. It is your future at stake, and only you have the moral authority to speak for that future.”
* “Decisions that we make—or fail to make—in 2009 will have profound impacts not only for our children and grandchildren, but for every human being that will ever inhabit the face of this earth from now until the end of time.”
That I-scare-ya hysteria would be hilarious if they weren’t so serious.
The guru behind the Teach-In is Eban Goodstein, an economics professor at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon. Years ago he founded a small-potatoes nonprofit called the Green House Network, which boasts that his group held 16 (sixteen!) training sessions over seven (7!) years, in roughly a half-dozen of the nation’s most enviro-wackiest states (Arizona an exception), and produced “a nationwide network including hundreds of volunteer climate change activists.”
Presumably, it’s these Stepford conservationists who launched the first Teach-In last January, also under the auspices of the GHN. Goodstein & company proudly note that they’ve turned over this prolific speaker training program to Al Gore’s climate concentration camp, also known as “The Climate Project.”
This year Eban the Environoiac moved his Teach-In project under yet another nonprofit that is stitched into the quilt of the eco-eccentrics, called Education for Global Warming Solutions.
EdSolv, as the Stepfords like to call it, has a “social change philosophy” which is “dedicated to building the grassroots movement for clean energy solutions that can stop global warming.” Building grassroots is what public education is all about, right?!
A quick survey (www.nationalteachin.org) of the Teach-In “models” shows that they target all levels: colleges and universities, high schools, K-8 schools, and do-it-yourselfers who want to push the agenda with businesses, groups, and religious organizations. The suggestions for co-opting the youngest craniums include ideas such as:
* Explain how “even though a thing may not require energy to work, the creation of the thing may have taken a lot of energy and contributed to global warming”
* “Start a letter-writing campaign; have students write their own letters or postcards to local, regional, or even national legislators encouraging them to draft and adopt legislature that will contribute to global warming solutions”
* “Adopt a forest”
If anyone doubts that Eban the Environoiac is pressing his blame-humans hysterics while ignoring real education and actual observations about the global temperature drop, just read his writings.
“Only young people possess the moral authority to demand the kind of action from our government needed soon: Laws stabilizing and then cutting global warming pollution, and channeling tens of billions of dollars into clean energy research,” Goodstein wrote for InsideHigherEd.com, an online journal.
That’s Carnac the Magnificent Alarmist, ladies and gentleman – soothsaying an imagined crisis to build an artificial “moral authority.”
Paul Chesser is director of Climate Strategies Watch at http://www.climatestrategieswatch.com/
