What passes for "expertise" at the EPA

NBC News' Monday report on the misconduct of former EPA official John Beale is must be read to be believed. Honestly, if the following details didn't involve a lazy, greedy congenital liar swindling taxpayers out of nearly a million dollars over more than a decade of abuse, they'd be laugh-out-loud funny. Alas, it's all true, so indignation is the only proper response:

    "The EPA’s highest-paid employee and a leading expert on climate change deserves to go to prison for at least 30 months for lying to his bosses and saying he was a CIA spy working in Pakistan so he could avoid doing his real job, say federal prosecutors. John C. Beale, who pled guilty in September to bilking the government out of nearly $1 million in salary and other benefits over a decade, will be sentenced in a Washington, D.C., federal court on Wednesday. In a newly filed sentencing memo, prosecutors said that his lies were a "crime of massive proportion" that were “offensive” to those who actually do dangerous work for the CIA. Beale’s lawyer, while acknowledging his guilt, has asked for leniency and offered a psychological explanation for the climate expert’s bizarre tales."

If you're interested in Beale's psychobabble defense -- courtesy of his therapist (yes, really) -- feel free to click through. The whole "woe is me" routine leaves me profoundly unmoved, however, so let's toggle ahead to more insane morsels from the article:

    "Two new reports by the EPA inspector general’s office conclude that top officials at the agency “enabled” Beale by failing to verify any of his phony cover stories about CIA work, and failing to check on hundreds of thousands of dollars paid him in undeserved bonuses and travel expenses -- including first-class trips to London where he stayed at five-star hotels and racked up thousands in bills for limos and taxis...To explain his long absences, Beale told agency officials -- including McCarthy -- that he was engaged in intelligence work for the CIA, either at agency headquarters or in Pakistan."

At one point he claimed to be urgently needed in Pakistan because the Taliban was torturing his CIA replacement, according to Sullivan...In fact, Beale had no relationship with the CIA at all. Sullivan, the EPA investigator, said he confirmed Beale didn’t even have a security clearance. He spent much of the time he was purportedly working for the CIA at his Northern Virginia home riding bikes, doing housework and reading books, or at a vacation house on Cape Cod. “He’s never been to Langley (the CIA’s Virginia headquarters),” said Sullivan. “The CIA has no record of him ever walking through the door.”

The lies didn't stop with the CIA fantasies. America's highest paid global warming authority also claimed to have contracted malaria back when he was serving in Vietnam in order to secure a handicap parking space. He neither suffered from the disease, nor served in Vietnam -- thus qualifying Mr. Beale to be a US Senator from Connecticut:

    "In 2008, Beale didn’t show up at the EPA for six months, telling his boss that he was part of a special multi-agency election-year project relating to “candidate security.” He billed the government $57,000 for five trips to California that were made purely “for personal reasons,” his lawyer acknowledged. (His parents lived there.) He also claimed to be suffering from malaria that he got while serving in Vietnam. According to his lawyer’s filing, he didn’t have malaria and never served in Vietnam. He told the story to EPA officials so he could get special handicap parking at a garage near EPA headquarters."

Beale finally got caught after he threw a lavish "retirement" party for himself aboard a yacht, then continued to draw a paycheck for the next two years. This manipulation was first uncovered in March 2012, but it took until this past April for investigations to play out. The jig was finally up. EPA's excuse for itself is that its internal culture is so mission-oriented that the agency is prone to overlook potential red flags.

Frighteningly, I think Allahpundit is right that if Beale had been just slightly less reckless in his machinations, his scheme might still be alive and well. Instead, it took a fake retirement to finally generate sufficient scrutiny from the branch of the federal government that's evidently too focused on bankrupting the coal industry to police its own fraudulent elites.

The Obama administration's ideological project is, as ever, about government control and authority. The men and women who work in coal-fired power plants are barely an afterthought to the central planners. And when I say work, I mean work work -- which typically doesn't involve billing your employer while claiming to be on a secret overseas mission when you're actually curled up with a romance novel at your vacation home. The feds' recommended two-and-a-half-year sentence hardly seems adequate for this cretin.

SOURCE





A "jumping" climate.  Who knew?

Must be invisible jumps, I guess.  The actual 21st century temperature record is below.  Where's the jump?  Note that the graph is calibrated in tenths of one degree Celsius  



In recent years, California’s Agassiz’s desert tortoise population has been decimated by shootings, residential and commercial development, vehicle traffic, respiratory disease and predation by ravens, dogs and coyotes.

Now, dwindling populations of the reptiles with scruffy carapaces and skin as tough as rhino hide are facing an even greater threat: longer droughts spurred by climate change in their Sonoran Desert kingdom of arroyos and burrows, according to a new U.S. Geological Survey study.

Drought conditions are linked to declines in a population of desert tortoises in a square-mile study plot in Joshua Tree National Park, according to the study published in the online journal Biological Conservation.

The study, one of the few to examine a desert tortoise population’s response to climate change, surveyed about 1.4 generations of the species scientists know as Gopherus agassizii.

“The last time the climate of the Earth jumped as rapidly as it seems to be now was about 55 million years ago — and that was a five-degree increase over thousands of years,” Jeff Lovich, lead researcher of the USGS team, said in an interview. “The changes we are seeing now are virtually unprecedented, and they are occurring in a desert landscape fragmented by development and roads.”

“The desert tortoise is surviving in the current landscape by its toenails,” he said.

SOURCE





Stop Me Before I Shop in a California Emporium

For five years, California state Sen. Alex Padilla has been pushing a bill to ban grocers and large retailers from giving away single-use plastic bags. In May, he came close; his SB 405 fell 3 votes short of the 21 needed to pass in the state Senate. On Thursday, Padilla announced that he will try again in January. "I am convinced that a statewide policy is only a matter of time," quoth Padilla in a statement.

He's probably right. When Sacramento scolds decide that they've got the right to tell law-abiding taxpayers what they cannot do -- for their own good -- there's no stopping that train.

In 2007, San Francisco became the first city in America to prohibit grocers from giving away single-use plastic bags. Then-Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi boasted that his "first-in-the-nation" ban would spark similar legislation. In 2012, Ess Eff's plastic bag ban expanded to apply to all retailers. In October, the Special City's nanny bag law required restaurants to charge a dime for each paper takeout and delivery bag.

Politicians in search of easy headlines followed Mirkarimi's lead. Other cities -- including San Jose and Los Angeles -- passed their own bans.

A statewide bill by Assemblyman Marc Levine won the support of the California Grocers Association, as it promised "uniformity of experience" for shoppers and, more importantly, big retailers, which would have gotten to keep the bag fee.

It never ceases to amaze me how willingly Californians agree to be treated like sheep. Liberals are supposed to believe in choice -- but lawmakers happily abandon that mantra when they spy an opportunity to tell working people and shoppers what they cannot do.

In Sacramento, they don't even have to establish the need for their nanny laws, the science behind their nanny laws or the economics behind their nanny laws. The left has tapped into the guilt Americans feel for consuming groceries, clothes, stupid purchases. With the ban on bags, politicians have become the new priests. Their message: You can buy tons of crap -- but you have to atone by putting your purchases into sackcloth.

Do I exaggerate? Consider that Padilla's SB 405 exempted food stamp recipients because, he told me in April, he feared a bag ban would have a negative "impact on low-income families." As if their bags are different.

"It's a backlash against the consumption society," Sterling Burnett, senior fellow of the National Center for Policy Analysis. Burnett examined six cities, including San Francisco, that had banned the free distribution of single-use plastic bags, only to find no proof that the bans save cities money as sponsors promised.

Plastic bags account for such a small amount of landfill -- less than 1 percent -- he explained, that banning these flimsy receptacles doesn't really change a city's waste stream. The problem with bag banners is, Burnett added, "you only talk about the benefits of getting rid of it. You ignore the costs of the other option."

The other option is reusable bags. A 2011 U.K. Environment Agency study found that reusable cloth bags have to be used more than 131 times to have less of a greenhouse gas impact than once-used high-density polyethylene bags.

Now you see reusable bags everywhere. When my county's ban began, I had one reusable bag. Now I cannot count all the cloth bags I have stashed at work, in my car and at home. They don't look all that healthy, so I doubt I'll reuse them more than 100 times.

At least I know enough to wash reusable bags. Most consumers do not wash their sacks in hot water; they risk putting their groceries in a germ incubator.

To sum up: Single-use bag bans don't really reduce greenhouse gases; they encourage the use of cloth bags that can be hazardous to your health; and if you choose to opt out because it's healthier and more convenient, you get nickeled and dimed when you go shopping. City politicians love to come up with taxes that are supposed to discourage what they consider to be bad behavior -- buying Happy Meals, drinking soda, maybe, and, it seems, spending money in San Francisco stores.

Mayor Ed Lee once defended the city's bag ban: "The intent was never to nickel or dime anybody. But if it takes 10 cents to remind somebody that their habits are in their control, I think that's something we're willing to consider doing."

Amazing. In that spirit, I recommend charging the mayor a dime for every mile he travels during one of his many greenhouse gas-emitting trade trips to China. I guess it's OK to shop in China.

SOURCE




Luke Warming: Pan European Networks Interview With Benny Peiser

Pan European Networks speaks to the director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation about the findings and implications of the IPCC’s 2013 Report

The 2013 report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has argued that humans are the ‘dominant cause’ of global warming since the 1950s, and that without ‘substantial and sustained reductions of greenhouse gas emissions’, further warming and changes in all aspects of the climate system can be expected.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) is an all-party and non-party think tank and a registered educational charity which, while open-minded on the contested science of global warming, is deeply concerned about the costs and other implications of many of the policies currently being advocated.

Following the publication of the IPCC’s new report, Pan European Networks spoke to the GWPF’s director, Dr Benny Peiser, to discuss the findings and implications of the report.

Dr Peiser is the founder and editor (since 1997) of CCNet, a leading climate policy network, and a visiting fellow at the University of Buckingham, and after whom a 10km-wide asteroid, Minor Planet (7107) Peiser, was named in his honour by the International Astronomical Union, to discuss the findings and implications of the report.

Pan European Networks: How would you describe your own position the ‘climate debate’?

Benny Peiser: I am critical of the more hysterical sides of the debate, but I think that it is important to try and understand why the climate alarm exists. I have my own interpretation of the scientific data, and while I don’t see any significant signals that any of the big, looming disasters that some people have predicted are set to happen any time soon, I am not ruling them out, either.

I oppose the hysterical and apocalyptic tone that the debate seems to sometimes take on. This is bad for climate policy, and bad for society as a whole. Perhaps it is now time to add an element of calm and to restore a sense of reason, because a calm and balanced assessment of the entire situation seems to have been lacking in recent years.

PEN: This certainly seems to have been the case, with immediate disasters being predicted by some, while others make claims of corruption and of scientists tampering with data in order to fabricate fake warming trends.

BP: Absolutely, this happens on the other side of the debate as well, with some people arguing that climate change is a hoax. While those who deny that CO2 has had any effect on global warming are relatively few in number, they do exist, and they are often used as straw men by the media, while those raising reasonable questions and arguments are all but drowned out.

PEN: According to the IPCC’s new report, ‘substantial and sustained reductions of greenhouse gas emissions’ is required to contain future warming trends. Is this achievable?

BP: Firstly, I think that it should be asked whether the IPCC is the right body to prescribe which policies governments should approach, and that arises from the fact that there are, broadly speaking, two possible approaches to the issue of climate change: one, that decarbonisation is urgently needed, which is the central argument of the IPCC, and secondly that it is more cost effective to adapt to the effects of global warming, which in my view makes more sense, because while it is likely that the warming trend will continue at some point, the extent to which this will happen is, as yet, unknown.

In any case, the IPCC’s call for decarbonisation appears to be unrealistic. There is little doubt that, from a technological perspective, the significant reduction of greenhouse gases could be achieved, through, for instance, the construction of thousands of new nuclear power plants around the world, which produce real and reliable energy and do not therefore rely on a conventional back up.

Economically and politically speaking, this is wholly unrealistic. There is a very simple reason for this: quickly developing economies such as China and India simply cannot afford to radically change to significantly more expensive forms of energy production, such as renewables. Indeed, it is already evident that those countries that began down the renewables path are cutting back on subsidies and funding, and many are facing a public backlash.

In the UK, the big issue now is energy prices, and Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour Party, recently announced at his party’s conference that if he wins the general election he will freeze energy bills, while Germany is also facing significant problems as energy prices are rising rapidly.

There is thus a political and economic cost to decarbonisation policies of this type, and it is therefore necessary to be realistic about what is politically and economically viable.

PEN: Do you think, then, that Europe should look to an American-style shale gas revolution?

BP: Absolutely, because this is a very important but unexpected development in the debate, in that the renewable agenda was based on two primary assumptions: that we are facing rapid and dangerous warming, and that we are running out of conventional fossil fuels. On the basis of these two assumptions, the push for renewables seemed to make sense prima facie because it was feared that, as we run out of fossil fuels, their price will rise significantly. It was also thought that while renewables may be expensive now, at some point they will become competitive.

The shale revolution in the USA has changed this, and the irony here is that CO2 emissions in the USA have fallen significantly – faster than anywhere else in the world – because they are switching from coal to abundant and cheap shale gas.

Nevertheless, there does not appear to be any international political will to actually adopt what the IPCC is advocating; international negotiations have reached a deadlock, and there is no appetite for any form of a legally binding agreement. Even Europe is increasingly divided over energy and emissions policies, because Eastern European countries are reluctant to give up on cheap forms of energy, particularly cheap coal.

Substantial and sustained CO2 reductions, then, are not really achievable.

While some claim that there is a green industrial revolution in China and other emerging economies, one has to look very carefully at what they are actually doing. For instance, the Chinese are doing what could be termed ‘green washing’, in that they are trying to portray themselves as taking a green approach, but in reality they are actually planning to invest very little in the green energy sector (less than 5%) in the next 20 years, with much of this (80%) coming from hydroelectricity.

China has, of course, developed a huge solar industry, but this was mainly for export purposes. Now that they are facing tariffs in Europe and the USA, they have begun to use the panels on their own buildings.

However, China is also sitting on abundant deposits of shale gas, but they lack the infrastructure to extract it – the drilling and energy companies that abound in the USA – and while they may not be ready to offer contracts to the Americans, they may not have much choice if they want to tap into this resource at short notice.

Despite such potential developments, there is no real sense that we will see a stabilisation of CO2 content in the atmosphere any time soon. Things might change completely, of course, if we were to see a strong and manifest warming trend in the coming decades, because the debate might then be re-opened with a new vigour, but in the meantime it seems that most governments have now adopted a ‘wait and see’ approach and, as such, will not see the new IPCC report as an immediate issue.

PEN: How significant is the change of the equilibrium climate sensitivity figure to 1.5-4.5°C from the 2007 range of 2-4.5°C?

BP: A number of UK policy makers have made an interesting point about this, arguing that the IPCC’s reduction of climate sensitivity means that we have more time to get our policies right – and cost effectively so. Indeed while the change is minimal (it is really more of a cosmetic thing), it ties in to other research which has come to suggest that climate sensitivity might be less significant than originally feared, and therefore that more extreme scenarios are unlikely.

This alteration of the equilibrium climate sensitivity figure is therefore good news, and can also be seen as an indication of how the IPCC has begun to adopt a less alarmist tone in their latest report.

PEN: Much has been made of the apparent pause in the increase in temperatures in the period since 1998 by both the media and those members of the scientific community sceptical of climate change arguments. What are your thoughts on this?

BP: From both a scientific and a policy point of view, this is by far the biggest problem facing the IPCC, because this global temperature standstill was not predicted by climate scientists, or indeed their climate models, and the IPCC has admitted that they don’t really know what is causing it.

It is now widely understood that if this standstill in the increase of the global surface temperature continues for much longer, then the models used by the IPCC will have to be re-assessed. After all the new report has predicted that manifest warming will soon recommence and continue in the next 20 years.

PEN: Given the fact that this hiatus is currently unexplainable and presents an argument against significant warming trends, do you feel that this furthers the call for more to be spent on adaptive strategies?

BP: Trillions of euros and dollars have been invested in various climate policies, despite the fact that, even if global warming were to continue, the extent to which it will happen is unknown.

An argument I have been making for some time now is that there will always be flooding, heat waves, hurricanes and other extreme weather events, regardless of who is right and who is wrong on climate science, and by investing in resilience and adaptation, in making cities more prepared and communities more resilient, this will be an effective and cost effective investment no matter what.

With the publication of the new IPCC report, there is now more time for policies to evolve; we have more time to discuss what appropriate measures and investments need to be made.

PEN: Do you think, then, that the new report will influence policy?

BP: I don’t think that this report will have any significant policy effects – it has just confirmed the arguments that have been made since the IPCC’s first report in 1990, but its overall tone is more moderate. Thus, if it does have any influence at all it will likely be a moderating one.

Indeed, the fact that the UK’s Environment Minister, Owen Patterson, has said that moderate warming might be good for the world – something no politician would have said six years ago – is an indication of the more cautious tone of this new IPCC report when compared to its 2007 previous versions.

SOURCE





Bill Gates sees compromise as the path to truth

Bill sees through a glass darkly but he does see some things.  The idea that truth can be found by compromise is quite as mad as saying it can be found in consensus  -- JR

By Bill Gates

The year 1981 was a big one in my business life. It was the year Paul Allen and I incorporated Microsoft in our home state of Washington.

As it turns out, 1981 also had big implications for my current work in health, development, and the environment. Right when Paul and I were pulling all-nighters to get ready for the release of the MS-DOS operating system for the brand new IBM-PC, two rival professors with radically divergent perspectives were sealing a bet that the Chronicle of Higher Education called “the scholarly wager of the decade.”

This bet is the subject of Yale history professor Paul Sabin’s new book. The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth’s Future provides surprising insights for anyone involved in addressing the world’s “wicked problems.” Most of all, it gave me new perspective on why so many big challenges get bogged down in political battles rather than being focused on problem-solving.

So what was the bet? University of Illinois economist Julian Simon challenged Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich to put his money where his mouth was and wager up to $1,000 on whether the prices of five different metals would rise or fall over the next decade. Ehrlich and Simon saw the price of metals as a proxy for whether the world was hurtling toward apocalyptic scarcity (Ehrlich’s position) or was on the verge of creating greater abundance (Simon’s).

Ehrlich was the country’s, and perhaps the world’s, most prominent environmental Cassandra. He argued in books, articles, lectures, and popular television programs that a worldwide population explosion threatened humanity with “the most colossal catastrophe in history” and would result in hundreds of millions of deaths from starvation and dire shortages not just of food but all types of raw materials.

Simon, who passed away in 1998, was a population optimist. A disciple of conservative University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman, Simon believed the doomsayers’ models gave little or no credit to the power of efficient markets and innovative minds for developing substitutes for scarce resources and managing out of crises. He went so far as to claim that population growth should “thrill rather than frighten us.”

At the time of the bet, Simon was a relatively unknown scholar who loved using the eminent Ehrlich as a foil. In public, Ehrlich didn’t even acknowledge Simon by name. Nonetheless, Ehrlich rose to Simon’s bait. “It seemed a small price to pay to silence Julian Simon for ten years,” in the words of Sabin.

Who won the bet? Simon. Definitively. Even as the world population grew from 4.5 to 5.3 billion in the 1980s, the five minerals that were included in the bet—chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten—collectively dropped in price by almost half. Ehrlich begrudgingly made good on the bet. But to this day he still does not concede that his predictions of Mathusian horrors have been off the mark. Similarly, he does not acknowledge that the discipline of economics has anything of value to contribute to discussions of population or the environment.

Even though I had gone back in recent years to read Ehrlich’s Population Bomb (1968) and the Club of Rome’s intellectually aligned book Limits to Growth (1972), The Bet was a stark reminder to me of how apocalyptic a big part of the environmental movement has been.

Ehrlich claimed to have science on his side in all of his predictions, including how many people the Earth can feed. He stated as scientific fact that U.S. lifestyles were unsustainable, calling developed countries “overdeveloped countries.” Limits to Growth claimed the credibility of computer modeling to justify its predictions of apocalypse.

Simon was equally extreme in his rhetoric. He was as reflexively dismissive of the discipline of ecology as Ehrlich was of economics. And his sound bites provided great fodder for Ronald Reagan and other conservative politicians eager to push back on the pronouncements of environmental scientists. But history generally has been kinder to his predictions than those of Ehrlich.

We know now that Ehrlich was extremely wrong and that following his scientific certainties would have been terrible for the poor. He floated the concept of mandatory sterilizations. He pushed aggressively for draconian immigration policies that, if enacted, would have kept out much of the foreign talent that came into the U.S. over the past three decades and added greatly to the U.S. economy. Ehrlich and his fellow scientists criticized the Green Revolution’s agricultural innovations because, in his view, “we [will] have an even bigger population when the crash comes.”

On population, Ehrlich ignored the evidence that countries that developed economically dropped their birth rate. (The current view is that population will rise only modestly after hitting a bit over 9 billion by 2050.) Granted, population growth is a huge issue in some poor countries, where it creates locally some of the instability and scarcity that Ehrlich foresaw for the entire world. But fortunately, there is strong evidence that if we continue to produce innovative reproductive health tools and make them available to women who want them, and we keep pushing forward on economic growth, there will be fewer and fewer of these places in the decades ahead.

Matt Ridley’s book The Rational Optimist (2010) is probably the best statement today of the Simon case, and Ridley was more careful than Simon was in his claims. Even though I agree with a lot of the book, it too easily dismisses the need to address problems of the poorest, climate change, and the oceans.

The recent Economist special report on biodiversity makes a strong case that economic growth allows us to make environmental concerns a priority. It contrasts the environmental record of the rich countries with that of poor countries to say that economic growth is the best hope for environment protection. All of this suggests to me that we should be wary of broad attacks on economic growth. (The authors of the special report admit that it’s not focused on climate change and mostly leaves aside the mismanagement of the oceans, which is tragic problem that deserves more focus.)

I recommend The Bet to anyone wanting to understand the history of the divisive discussions we have today, especially the stalemate over climate change. Sabin makes a strong case that Ehrlich’s brand of science made it easy for conservative critics to caricature environmentalists as doom merchants and fear mongers who peddle dubious science as a means of advancing their big-government agenda.

And Simon is far from blameless. “Julian Simon and other critics of environmentalism … have taken far too much comfort from extravagant and flawed predictions of scarcity and doom,” writes Sabin. “By focusing solely and relentlessly on positive trends, Julian Simon made it more difficult to solve environmental problems.”

It’s a shame that extreme views get more attention and more of a following than nuanced views. We see this dynamic clearly when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does its best to be clear and impartial in conveying what is known on the key issues, but both liberals and conservatives make it hard for the public to understand the panel’s nuanced conclusions.

I wish there more people who took the middle ground and who were as prominent as Simon or Ehrlich. So here’s my question to you: What’s the best way to encourage scholars to combine the best insights from multiple disciplines? How can we elevate the status of scientists and spokespeople who refuse the lure of extremism and absolutism?

SOURCE






Australia: Two high school students take on teacher over climate and win standing ovation

A reader Russell writes in to tell me his Year 9 son Jordan and his friend, Tom, took on their teacher’s sacred belief in man-made global warming. Given no warning, and called insulting names in front of the class, they took up the challenge with gusto and stayed up til 1am that night to put the presentation together. Not surprisingly the teacher tried to pull out the next day, but the class would not let her.

One of the slides quotes Al Gore mocking “the tiny minority”, like the ones “who still believe that the moon landing was faked…”. Then it shows and quotes four Apollo Astronauts and Burt Rutan (the first private astronaut):

"The other week at school my eldest son (15) was challenged by his teacher to present to the class why he is a ”climate change denier”. He had to do this presentation the next day.

At the start of his class the next day he advised the teacher he was ready.  She told him she wasn’t interested now, maybe another day. His classmates started heckling her saying ”You Chicken Miss”. She eventually agreed and got another teacher to sit in as well. Before my son spoke she showed the class the promo to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. After his presentation the class gave him a standing ovation. There is a lot more to this story, the above overview sort of explains what occurred.

To start his talk he read out five quotes from the ”US Senate Minority Report” below, then his power point. She made him stop the Prof Carter video 3min into it, the Prof Ball podcast about 5min in and let the class watch the other 10min video all the way through."

May there be a thousand young rebels following in their footsteps, says Jo.

Russell explained his son and friends get a hard time at school, though it seems, give their teachers a pretty hard time in return:

“…They [the boys] question everything they being taught and who’s the messenger. They know the truth about  AGW, Sustainable Development, UNESCO,OECD, over population, open borders, media, communism, politics, the list goes on. One his mates sent the 10min video ”Agenda 21 for Dummies” reply all on the schools email, even the teachers received the link.”

“… there is some history with the boys and this teacher, she is a true socialist. One example of this is she told Jordan ‘His opinion is irrelevant, and only when you become an adult people will listen to what you have to say. Shut up, I am the TEACHER and you’re here to learn.’

I expect the teacher in question will not forget this lesson (though possibly she will interpret her mistake as being to let students speak).

Russell says that skepticism is alive and well in teenagers, despite them being raised on the climate dogma:

“Children are waking up to this hoax. I know of at least 50 kids in year 9 that realise this. I coach an under 15 rugby team and all 20 of them don’t believe in AGW, plus his large group of friends that attend different high schools in the area.

Sustainable Development has overtaken AGW. AGW is still pushed in the classroom but SD is across every subject.’

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

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