Climate change deniers have found their way into textbooks in the Lone Star State.

A sixth grade textbook leaves school children in Texas to debate the question “Is Global Warming a Result of Human Activity?” The only problem is 97 percent of scientists already agree that humans are to blame. So the question becomes highly misleading for the sixth graders that will soon be dealing with the issue head on.

This new textbook has been flagged by the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) for misleading students. The book compares viewpoints from the Heartland Institute, an advocacy group backed by the Koch Brothers and Big Tobacco among others (and well known climate change deniers), to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a Nobel prize winning scientific body. In fact, Heartland Institute famously did an advertisement comparing those that contend global climate change is human-made to psychopaths.

Heartland Institute makes its way into science textbooks:

Scientists who study the issue say it is impossible to tell if the recent small warming trend is natural, a continuation of the planet’s recovery from the more recent “Little Ice Age,” or unnatural, the result of human greenhouse gas emissions. Thousands of peer-­‐reviewed articles point to natural sources of climate variability that could explain some or even all of the warming in the second half of the twentieth century. S. Fred Singer and Dennis Avery documented natural climate cycles of approximately 1,500 years going back hundreds of thousands of years.

—Joseph Bast and James M. Taylor, “Global Warming: Not a Crisis,” The Heartland Institute”

Where are these thousands of peer reviewed articles? I’ve never seen them. A fifth grade textbook had similar concerns. Like this frightening blurb:

Scientists believe the Earth is absorbing more of the sun’s harmful rays….Some scientists say it is natural for the Earth’s temperature to be higher for a few years. They predict we’ll have some cooler years and things will even out.

The Earth’s temperature will even out? It’s natural for the Earth’s temperature to be higher for a few years? In none of the research that I’ve seen has there ever been any mention of the Earth’s temperature evening out. And then there are the embarrassing inaccuracies.

Fossil fuel emissions have also caused a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica.

Whoops..that’s just wrong. In fact, fossil fuel combustion does not cause holes in the ozone layer, rather, they are caused by CFCs.

This from one of the largest public school systems in the country. Yikes.

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Meet Naomi Klein, she’s a bad-ass of sorts. She stays out of the limelight for the most part, but her thoughtful grasp on the relationship between newly corporate green groups and their impact on the environment has turned heads.

Recently, Klein spoke about her latest book, Shock Doctrine with Salon.com, specifically discussing how big green groups have done more to send emissions through the roof than even climate deniers.

Big wins in wildlife protection and pollution reduction achieved in the ’60s and ’70s halted in the 1980s, but Naomi Klein says we’ve been fighting a losing battle for last 30 years.

“[I]t came to screeching halt when Reagan was elected. And he essentially waged war on the environmental movement very openly. We started to see some of the language that is common among those deniers – to equate environmentalism with Communism and so on. As the Cold War dwindled, environmentalism became the next target, the next Communism,” Klein said.

The Globalization of Hyperconsumerism 

The environmental movement could have responded to globalization in one of two ways: defend its values or adapt to fit the “rise of corporate government.” It chose the latter which, according to Naomi Klein, undermined its goals and made the problems worse. “We’ve globalized an utterly untenable economic model of hyperconsumerism. It’s now successfully spreading across the world, and it’s killing us,” says Klein.

While green groups like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and Sierra Club didn’t join in, many others like Nature Conservancy did in an attempt to retain their high profile status and wealthy benefactors. Now they’ve got money, but no teeth when it comes to real change, and no credibility with true environmental activists.

Standing in Solidarity

Reducing emissions by the 80 percent means that there are going to be some losers. Klein thinks that environmental groups need to strengthen literal communities rather than building ties with corporations, and stand in solidarity with what’s right.

“We can address the financial crisis and the ecological crisis at the same time. I believe that. But I think it’s by building coalitions with people, not with corporations, that you are going to get those wins. And what I see is really a willingness to sacrifice the basic principles of solidarity[.]”

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Image: ioerror

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