In July, the Florida Department of Education announced that it now includes standards by PragerU Kids. It’s good to have a wide variety of resources from which to draw for educational materials, right? Sure, but it’s imperative that those resources have been developed by an accredited educational organization. In the case of PragerU Kids, the “U” must stand for “Unnecessary,” as PragerU is not an actual accredited university, according to the Database of Accredited Postsecondary Institutions and Programs. And PragerU Kids is spreading climate denial information to Florida’s children.
What’s behind this blatant disinformation? The fossil fuel industry is petrified that their golden eggs are cracking. The IMF has indicated that a carbon tax could discourage the use of fossil fuels and encourage a shift to less-polluting fuels, thereby limiting the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions that are by far the most prevalent greenhouse gas.
Michael Mann, the renowned climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, said that the irony in the decision by DeSantis’s administration to allow these climate denial videos “is that this gambit would make Goebbels himself blush.”
Founded in 2009 by radio talk‐show host Dennis Prager, PragerU explains on its website that it is an online platform that exists as “a free alternative to the dominant left-wing ideology in culture, media, and education.” Its videos are dominated by right-wing commentary, and each costs $25,000 to produce. The platform includes content for students as a way to combat against what the group describes as “woke agendas” that “are infiltrating classrooms, culture, and social media.” It says its “edutainment” videos, mostly available on Facebook and YouTube, accumulated more than 1.2 billion views in 2022 and more than 7 billion since its founding. PragerU has received substantial funding from Dan and Farris Wilks, two brothers who are petroleum industry billionaires, who also vociferously spread climate denial.
PragerU Kids is one in what is becoming a long line of children’s texts designed specifically to inculcate the next generation with questions about climate pollution — to the benefit of fossil fuel companies and their subsidiaries, including politicians.
Horace Mann, known as the founder of US mass education, said, “If any person seeks for greatness, let them forget greatness and ask for truth, and they will find both. If you wish to write well, study the life about you, life in the public streets. Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up the vacancies of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge.” Florida’s WPTV contacted all 67 school districts to determine how many were planning to incorporate the PragerU materials into the curriculum. Only 2– Sarasota and Volusia — answered in the affirmative. Those schools seem to adhere to the classic definition of schooling, which teaches critical thinking to students so they can study their communities objectively and learn to think for themselves, as Mann outlined.
In response to accusations of promoting youth indoctrination, Prager admitted to the receptive conservative group Moms for Liberty, “We bring doctrines to children. That is a very fair statement. I said, ‘But what is the bad of our indoctrination?’”
Indoctrinating Children through Climate Denial
Climate denial in the PragerU videos is shocking.
It likens youth climate activists to Nazis, and kids who fight back against such oppression much like Jews in a World War II Warsaw ghetto.
WTF?
“Wind and solar just aren’t powerful enough to power the modern world,” a character explains in a video. But it’s been proven that huge drops in the cost of solar and wind power in the last few years have unlocked an energy reserve that can meet world demand 100 times over — and most is already economic compared with fossil fuels.
“The energy from them isn’t dense or robust enough” to be inadequate as energy sources, according to the videos. “Renewable energy sources don’t contribute much energy… Unlike coal, energy from the wind or sun is unreliable, expensive, and difficult to store.” What’s totally missing in these statements is that, as large amounts of wind and solar resources are connected to the grid, long-duration energy storage will prevent curtailment of renewable energy sources resources during periods of excess generation.
The warming of atmosphere, oceans, and regions as an existential threat is depicted as just part of natural long-term cycles. That’s a convenient narrative, one that for-profit climate entrepreneurs like PragerU promote to stir up controversy about a zero emissions future for the Earth. Their goal is to incite confusion and anger in an effort to undermine governance that looks ahead to a zero emissions future.
In marine environments from lakes to oceans, plastics are the most abundant type of pollutant. As plastic waste is exposed to the elements, it eventually breaks down and fragments into 5 mm particles called “microplastics.” Humans as well as marine creatures are ingesting microplastics, but a PragerU Kids video reroutes the facts to argue that using plastics, which have fossil fuels as their base, is better than killing animals. Leo Baekeland, the Belgian chemist known for the invention of Bakelite, is shown in the video declaring that “fossil fuels are cheap and plentiful, thank goodness!”
Marissa Streit, chief executive of PragerU, said in a statement, “The purpose of our climate videos is to allow for real debate, create an opening for scientists who have been bullied and marginalized by tyrannical elites and legacy institutions. Only when allowing true science to take place via debate, questioning, and inquiry will we be able to see the type of innovation that our world need to resolve problems we face.”
“True science?” An entire generation of Floridians could now be led to believe falsely that climate change is natural and is overblown. It is a worldview that has little resemblance to reality.
- The economic and health costs of air pollution from burning fossil fuels top $8 billion per day globally.
- Climate pollution is directly tied to increased extreme weather events and natural disasters, causing the US alone in 2022 $165.1 billion.
- In the last 5 years, climate disasters have cost us a total of $595.5 billion — one-quarter of the total disaster cost of the last 42 years.
- Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency now says that solar power is now the most inexpensive electricity that has ever existed.
These numbers don’t lie, nor does independent research into the corrosive effects of disinformation and destabilizing lies.
We must not forget that, in 2022, Governor Ron DeSantis announced in a news release that he signed “House Bill (HB) 7, to give businesses, employees, children and families tools to stand up against discrimination and woke indoctrination.”
“Here we have a politician who regularly trades in antisemitic and racist, misogynistic, and homophobic tropes promoting agenda-driven disinformation,” Mann continued about DeSantis, “in place of actual science to further the agenda of the fossil fuel interests funding him and his party.”
Calling PragerU “a resource for schools,” Time magazine engaged in dangerous false equivalency by suggesting that climate denial content is up for debate, that facts are representative of different points of view. Merely by writing comparatively like this,Time reproduced right wing ideology for a mass audience. “Of course, to many Americans on the other side of the aisle,” Time explained, “those who take the PragerU perspective are the ones doing the hijacking.” Shame on you, Time.
Final Thoughts about Climate Denial
Florida, whose governor has called climate change “leftwing stuff,” is not the only state in which PragerU is causing controversy. In New Hampshire (“live free or die”) Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut is pushing for the State Board of Education to allow high school students to earn graduation credit by completing the conservative nonprofit’s financial literacy course. Objections come from many demographic groups but focus specifically on PragerU’s lack of accreditation. Edelblut said his team is prepared to continue working with PragerU to make sure all of the board’s questions and concerns are addressed and was dismayed how heated the response to his recommendation became.
Edelblut, a Republican businessman whose 7 children were homeschooled, confirmed to the Boston Globe that he’s thinking about running for governor in 2024, as he did in 2016.
The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee has stepped up pressure on university academics who study disinformation, according to columnist Renee Loth in the Boston Globe, “demanding records going back years, interviewing professors, and threatening to sue if they don’t swiftly comply.” Lawsuits cite individual researchers, subjecting them to harassment and jeopardizing their funding. They say they’re looking into whether the researchers are working alongside the federal government to suppress free speech online, but “their chosen targets suggest their concerns aren’t exactly content neutral.” They include:
- the Election Integrity Partnership, a joint project of Stanford University and the University of Washington, which tracked attempts to “delegitimize election results without evidence” during the 2020 presidential election; and,
- the Virality Project, which flagged disinformation about COVID-19 vaccines, is funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.
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