By Tony Thomas
This is the second of three essays on the parallel education universe of leftist Cool.org within Australian schools (Part I is here). Today I’ll discuss Cool’s agitprop for sending kids out on campaigns, plus its determination to brand Net Zero follies as “misinformation” .
Cool doesn’t just feed kids its climate factoids, it wants kids to preach the green gospel to schoolmates, parents and the community. One lesson is illustrated with an Afro-haired girl of colour aged about 11 and using a bullhorn. It could be a metaphor, more probably it’s literal.
A template tells teachers to dish out “Campaign Role Badges”[1], including Energy Explorer, Creative Captain, Message Master and Team Leader. This leader presents the group’s finished campaign to the class, ensuring Young Pioneers-style conformity to the ideology (As a Communist kid myself in Perth, I wore the East Germans’ Young Pioneer neckerchief).
One lesson for 10- to 11-year-old’s is headed, Designing a Media Campaign to Promote Clean Energy Facts. Teachers’ job: “Share some of the following examples of accurate clean energy campaigns with your class. Where possible, encourage students to assess how their campaign could counter misinformation in the clean energy sector.”
Then there’s ‘Climate Action pays off.’ Key message:
“This campaign advocates for a faster, fair and well-planned rollout of clean energy technologies to lower the cost of living, future-proof the Australian economy, and create more employment opportunities. Target audience: working and retired Australians.”
♦ Energising Australia [renewables in remote regions]: For people living in urban areas to visualise the scale of production and cracking pace at which the renewable energy industry in Australia is growing.
♦ UN Climate Action Super Heroes. Key message: This campaign seeks to empower children to be leaders for change and believe in the impact they can have on the planet.
Other kids are activated to do a “myth-busting” campaign against “deniers”. Cool’s teachers tell kids of ages 10 to 12 to design their own “media campaign to promote clean energy facts.” This is meant to be engaging and accurate, while attacking any sceptic “misinformation” such as devastation of forests to instal wind farms, and Chinese use of slave labour and contaminated mining for solar panel and battery minerals.
Call to action: Students will present their clean energy digital campaigns to their peers, communicating their intent, creative choices, and effective use of digital tools to portray their message. Students will evaluate their campaigns both critically and creatively via communicative and reflective peer feedback before making changes to improve their overall campaign.
Cool’s supplementary unit, How to Fundraise instructs kids about collecting cash and online payments from outsiders. The lesson makes no mention of kids’ vulnerability to strangers, or receipts, book-keeping and permissions. I hope every child stays safe, and is honest with their stash of acquired cash. This cash-raising
…can contribute to meaningful and sustainable change. It may be that you need to campaign to shop owners, car users, kids and teachers at your school or people at your local council…this could include writing letters or an article for a local newspaper.
As if any newspaper would print kids’ effusions!
Keep up the pressure…Change can take time and people often need to be reminded several times before they really engage with an issue…Campaigns have and continue to play a crucial role in driving change, raising awareness, promoting causes and achieving [Cool’s] societal goals.” (My emphases throughout).
In Years 9-10, the kids’ campaigns go like this:
Students will analyse Australia’s policies that have led to clean energy adoption by participating in group research and developing a communication plan for a chosen clean energy policy.
Success criteria: Students can design an advocacy campaign to support or improve a clean energy policy (and) analyse the effectiveness of real-world examples of clean energy policies.
I don’t think kids are actually capable of cost-benefit analyses of electric vehicle compulsions, windfarm subsidies, and concealed carbon taxes — about which politicians hotly argue and rival thinktanks obfuscate. Nor have kids the advanced skills to apply IPCC formulae to work out the reduction of global warming if all such Australian policies were a total success (the answer is zero detectable impact).
Cool’s authors seem terrified that kids might locate and adopt climate-sceptical views, so they are carefully steered away from the best sceptic websites like joannenova.com.au and WUWT, which Cool labels as not credible, i.e. kids might find them unduly persuasive. They are instead pointed to Cool’s favoured “community experts on clean energy”, including the Guardian and vested interests in clean energy subsidies like the Clean Energy Council.
A unit under the header Reflection says,
Climate change denial is on the rise among teenagers. What role do you think schools have in addressing this issue? What should schools be doing?
Cool bewails that much climate messaging to classes is counter-productive:
A Cool+ unit for teachers’ edification is titled, Students, Schools and Eco-Anxiety: Teaching and Learning for Eco-Optimism. In it, Cool bewails that the classroom messaging is not getting traction:
While many countries, schooling systems and schools state [their] commitment to climate change education, the outcomes have been found to be not only poor but also counter-productive in terms of students’ actions and dispositions. This course will provide insight into the findings from a global review of climate change education with a focus on eco-anxiety an unanticipated consequence. It will also provide strategies for addressing this in schools and classrooms and provide examples of how this phenomenon is being minimised in different locations in the world.
Hence Cool gives kids entire lessons excoriating “Climate Denial” – Cool is either oblivious or supportive of the echo to Holocaust Denial.[2] It defines “Denial” as rejecting the notions that climate change exists (a straw man, given sceptics’ affection for geology) and that “Humans are causing the climate to change” despite alleged overwhelming scientific evidence (sceptics dispute only the severity, as in purported “catastrophic” warming, and emphasise the benefits such as CO2 having greened the plant).
The Cool lesson for Year 10 continues,
In some cases, climate deniers actively spread disinformation about climate change to suit a personal or political agenda. This can have profound effects on how we address the challenges posed by climate change.
In the “Climate Literacy: Climate Change Denial And Disinformation” lesson,
Students explore climate denialism and the myths often presented about climate change. They explore the facts that bust these myths, look at the implications of climate denialism on meeting the challenges of climate change, and create a communication piece to address climate disinformation.
Cool’s contortions to side-step sceptic material verge on the bizarre. Cool quotes as misinformation the 2022 Nobel laureate John Clauser, who worked at Columbia University, claiming the global warming hullaballoo is a hoax by the West’s elite. Kids do not learn till the eighth paragraph that Clausen won his Nobel for physics. And the source article quoted is a piece from “Azernews”, “Azerbaijan’s first English language newspaper published since 1997.” How and why Cool chose an Azerbaijan newspaper for the sourcing is a mystery.
Students are re-drilled in Cool’s Ten Commandments like “Myth 3: Renewable energy is expensive” and “Myth 4: Solar and wind can’t work because they are dependent on the Weather.” I rather liked “Myth 10: It’s too late – nothing can be done about it” because with China, India, USA, Russia and most of the third world going all-out for fossil fuel, the West’s net zero quest is a dead duck.
While Cool and teachers boast they are deploying real-world campaign material, I have come across no mention of growing Chinese or Indian emissions growth anywhere in all the Cool climate units I have accessed. China’s emissions trajectory as it builds one or two coal-fired electricity plants a week renders the entire West’s net-zero quest pointless. Even Cool’s nine-year-olds could grasp this fact, were Cool ever to mention it.
Cool emphasises “pre-bunking”, i.e. hitting kids with supposed energy facts before any sceptical attitudes can form. To “pre-bunk” sceptics, kids are told to agree or disagree with feel-good statements like
♦ Renewable Energy Set to Power One-Third of Global Electricity by 2025 [as if]
♦ Solar and Wind: The Only Hope For Our Energy Future [as if]
♦ Clean Energy Investments Continue to Grow Worldwide [but are swamped by coal and gas energy growth]
♦ Fossil Fuels Doomed as Renewables Take Over [as if]
♦ Australia on Track for 50% Renewable Energy by 2025 [what!?], and
♦ Renewable energy: A bright future?
Cool’s list includes only two dissenting views — of an ‘Aunt Sally’ kind — namely
♦ “Green Energy: Too Expensive and Unreliable for Real-World Use”, and
♦ Clean Energy Transition Threatens Millions of Jobs [as if sceptics would deploy a term like “Clean Energy Transition”]
Fact-checking Cool is like playing whack-a-mole. For example, Cool invites an indignant reaction from kids about “US meteorologists harassed for reporting on climate crisis.” Cool’s case study actually concerns a TV weatherman, Chris Gloninger in Massachusetts, who has a Bachelor meteorological qualification. He quit after abusive pushback including death threats because he was regularly injecting climate hype into his daily weather reports.[3] Little do Cool’s kids realise that the practice of TV weatherpeople hyping climate change stems from a top-down policy introduced a few years back by Covering Climate Now, a 500-strong cabal of climate-hyping media organisations that include AFP, Reuters and The Guardian, to swing TV weather reporters into climate propaganda roles.
And Cool gets kids to play a “Cranky Uncle” game invented by “scientist” (actually psychologist) John Cook to fight scepticism. Cook’s history includes the forced retraction of a co-authored peer-reviewed paper. There was a particularly bizarre episode during Cook’s keynote research on “denialism” when Queensland University colleagues in his back-office maybe photoshopped, and certainly stored in their on-line library, fake pics of him and themselves in Nazi and Himmler regalia at stormtrooper rallies rendered as analogous to climate conferences.
Cool refers kids to a news piece in the leftist Guardian, saying that it “focuses on the political party, The Greens, and their call to Murdoch executives before the Senate inquiry into greenwashing.” The Greens’ attack job accuses Murdoch papers of insufficient disclosure that some fossil-fuel advocacy was paid advertorials. The Press Council dealt with this complaint on April 16 and found the papers had no case to answer. I doubt Cool will ever amend its anti-Murdoch propaganda to take this Press Council rebuttal into account. As the matter stands, Cool, The Guardian and the Greens Party are peddling misinformation to kids.
Cool labels even mild criticism of renewables by its supporters as “Misinformation”. This includes the fact that the mining of rare minerals, and manufacturing of renewables gear, can involve heavy and energy-intensive pollution along with human rights violations. Similarly, Cool labels as “Misinformation” arguments about wind farms disrupting thousands of hectares of farm or forest land, solar farms harming biodiversity, and battery backup being uneconomic, not to mention the risk of lithium fires and lifecycle pollution.
Cool has no scruples about peddling its own misinformation, constantly claiming that solar and wind create “cheap” energy, and that renewables’ intermittency drawback is either solved or soon will be. Dogmatic and contestable statements abound, with Cool catechisms for kids including
Claim: Electric vehicles are too expensive for average families
Truth: This doesn’t consider long-term savings and decreasing costs.
Claim: The electricity for EVs comes mostly from fossil fuels
Truth: This ignores the increasing share of renewables in the energy mix.
Claim: Solar panels produce significant waste
Truth: This doesn’t mention that fossil fuel energy generates far more waste.
Claim: Climate change is a natural cycle and not caused by humans
Truth: This contradicts overwhelming scientific evidence.
Children are supposed to flag emotive phrases, and reject them in favour of “neutral, evidence-based language used for facts.” It cites the following phrases as “facts” about renewables:
♦ “The initial cost of solar panels can be high” but “they save money over time through reduced energy bills”
♦ “Experts agree that [panels] produce clean energy without polluting the air”
♦ “Wind power has been proven to create jobs and boost local economies” [subsidised renewables jobs actually destroy unsubsidised jobs in the real economy].
♦ “Advancements in technology have made (renewables) more efficient than ever” [ for as long as the wind blows and the sun shines].
♦ “Data shows that transitioning to renewable energy is essential for a sustainable future” [What data? Cool’s course writers have no idea about science writing].
One lesson quizzes kids on trustworthy news sources. My guess is that the Cool’s “correct” answers include government websites, the UN, the ABC, the Nine stable, Guardian, academics and school principals. A villainous source provided for kids to hiss at is “Donald Trump”.
One Cool polemic against “disinformation” backfires because Cool authors have neither funnybone nor ability to grasp any argument outside their green silo. In a video for class use, a team from the US climate sceptic group CFACT, led by satirical blogger Marc Morano, take their boat to an offshore wind-turbine development. Greenpeace-like, they use bullhorns to chant “Save the Whales” to the rig. CFACT is satirising Greenpeace and other whale-lovers for ignoring these giant offshore edifices. Morano and friends shout, “Why are you killing the planet to save it? It makes no sense. This is insanity! Please stop.”
But Cool doesn’t’ get it and warns kids: “Disinformation: This video depicts boat protest footage of a group claiming that wind farms harm whales.”
As I’ve written many times, the Coalition leadership since Tony Abbott have shown no interest in curbing leftist indoctrination in schools, achieved through the bureaucracy and outsiders like Cool and its ally, billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes. As Liberal poll workers agreed when I voted at the weekend, Scott Morrison emasculated his party when he signed it on to Net Zero mania.
Tony’s latest book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95
[1] Some links might not work owing to Cool’s paywalling
[2] Climate Literacy: Climate Change Denial And Disinformation.
[3] “With the help of respected industry experts, community advocates, and politicians, [Gloninger’s] series explained the science of climate mitigation and adaptation, provided examples of how climate change is affecting people at the local level, and showcased some of the advancements being made in clean and renewable energy.”
