Democrats Want ‘Climate Literacy’ In Schools As Actual Literacy Slips
The Democratic Party is pushing to increase “literacy” on climate change-related material in America’s schools while students are performing poorly with respect to actual literacy.
The party’s education platform mentions the importance of “climate literacy” for American K-12 students several times, emphasizing the purported need for students to be able to understand and interpret information relating to climate change. Meanwhile, the average reading score for both fourth and eighth grade students in 2022 had fallen by three points relative to 2019, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
“We will equip students with the knowledge and skills to understand complex scientific issues, counter the rising tide of denialism by promoting environmental and climate literacy, and reverse the Trump Administration’s cuts to the National Environmental Education Act,” the platform states. (RELATED: Even Democrats Aren’t Sold On Pushing Gender Ideology In Schools, Polls Show)
Less than 50% of all fourth grade students were able to read at or above the standard for proficiency in 2022, with only 17% of black students and 21% of Latino pupils meeting the mark, according to the NAEP.
The U.S. is seeing “staggering numbers of children, especially children of color and children from low-income backgrounds, without fundamental literacy skills,” Allison Socol, the vice president of policy, practice and research for the Education Trust, wrote earlier this year.
NAEP data “consistently” demonstrates that about two in every three American students cannot read proficiently, and about 40% of all students are effectively non-readers, according to an analysis published by Scientific American in September 2023.
Notably, the Democratic platform mentions conventional literacy just once, while “climate literacy” is mentioned on two occasions. The word “writing” or its cognates do not appear at all in the platform.
The emphasis on “climate literacy” aligns with a broader push by Democrats to make education more climate-friendly, even as many American students are struggling in the classroom.
For example, the Biden-Harris administration is spending big to replace existing school bus fleets with electric models in order to bring down emissions and fight climate change. While Vice President Kamala Harris has promoted the program as beneficial for students, it could end up lining the pockets of Chinese manufacturers and is potentially susceptible to waste, fraud and abuse, according to reports by the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office of the Inspector General.
In June, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) — a labor organization that is closely allied with the Democratic Party — issued a list of climate-related demands as a part of their contract negotiations with the city, even though educational achievement statistics for the city’s schools are lackluster, according to the Illinois Policy Institute. CTU’s demands included calling for the removal of all lead pipes in school buildings, the replacement of windows that do not open, and the creation of a “climate champion” position at each school to organize climate-related activities.
In 2022, Democratic Washington Gov. Jay Inslee’s Department of Health released a five-part climate curriculum for students that suggested it may be best for students to rely on “emotions” rather than “rational thinking” when engaging with climate change-related subject matter.
Moreover, pandemic-era school shutdowns — a policy pushed widely by Democrats at the time — have also resulted in significant learning loss that is continuing to disrupt educational outcomes, The New York Times found in March.
https://dailycaller.com/2024/09/22/dems-climate-literacy-schools-literacy-slips/
*********************************************California’s High Energy Prices Will Be Coming to YOUR City if Kamala Harris Gets Elected
The “Green New Deal” and “Net Zero” policies in California promoted by Kamala Harris have led to increasingly high costs of living, housing, and transportation. This, coupled with an increase in crime, smash-and-grab robberies, homelessness, pollution, and congestion, has caused many tax-paying residents and companies to exodus from California to more affordable cities and states.
California’s net move-out number of residents in 2022 alone was more than 343,000 people that left California — the highest exodus of any state in the U.S.
The California Policy Institute counted more than 237 businesses that have left the state since 2005. Among these businesses were eleven Fortune 1000 companies, inclusive of AT&T, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Exxon Mobil, and Chevron.
Kamala Harris continues to support California’s tax-and-spend, overreaching, and economy-crushing policies and their threats to America’s energy, agricultural, economic, employment, living standards, and national security future.
Kamala Harris has a long relationship with California. She became the San Francisco district attorney in 2004 and served two terms in that role from 2004 to 2010. In 2010, she succeeded Jerry Brown as California Attorney General. She was sworn into the role in January 2011 and served until 2017, when she joined the U.S. Senate after being elected in 2016.
Kamala has supported the closure of coal, natural gas, and nuclear electricity generating plants that provided continuous, uninterruptible, reliable, and dispatchable electricity in favor of renewables that generate intermittent, unreliable, and non-dispatchable electricity.
With her continued advocacy of California policies, California now imports more electric power than any other US state, more than twice the amount in Virginia. The imported electricity from adjoining states is mostly from emission-generating coal-fired or natural gas power plants, the same types of power plants that California has been shuttering.
Further, she has supported the ban on fracking and continually decreased the states’ in-state oil production. With her support for eliminating oil production in the State, ever since she became Attorney General, California has increased crude oil imports from 5 percent in 1992 to more than 60 percent of total consumption from foreign countries.
With Kamala’s advocacy of California energy policies, the State has become a national security risk for the entire country. The State’s 9 international airports, 41 military airports, and 3 of the largest shipping terminals in the nation are growing their dependency on foreign crude oil to support the demands of the State and the country.
Kamala continues to support California’s banning the sale of gasoline cars after 2035. To make the huge 1,000 lb. Tesla EV batteries comprised of exotic minerals and metals mined in developing countries; she is shockingly advocating that Californians continue “financially supporting” developing countries like China and Africa, with inferior or non-existent labor laws and environmental regulations, to continue humanity atrocities against their people with yellow, brown, and black skin, and the environmental degradation in those developing countries, for the exotic minerals and metals to make EV batteries, JUST so California can go “green”!
Now, she is campaigning for the presidency of the United States to “clone” California’s electricity and crude oil energy policies for the entire country.
Kamala remains oblivious that people use CONTINUOUS and UNINTERRUPTIBLE electricity for safety, security, and life support that wind and solar CANNOT provide for computers, communications, airports, air traffic control, hospitals, telemetry, data centers, AI (artificial intelligence), and cloud storage.
Without an oil “replacement” to support the supply chain of the products demanded by society that are now made from fossil fuels, she would ELIMINATE Electricity, Transportation, and Communications, as they are all made from the thousands of products made from fossil fuels.
Not only are aircraft, merchant ships, and space exploration equipment constructed from the same products made from fossil fuels, eradicating the world of crude oil usage would ground the 20,000 commercial aircraft, and ground more than 50,000 military aircraft, and the 23,000 private planes in the world, leave the 50,000 merchant ships and 33 million pleasure boats tied up at docks, and discontinue the military and space programs!
Those few wealthy countries attempting to go “green” seem oblivious that at least 80 percent of humanity, or more than six billion in this world, are living on less than $10 a day, and billions have little to no access to electricity. Today, politicians in a few wealthy countries are pursuing the most expensive ways to generate intermittent electricity.
Meanwhile, many countries, including India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, China, and the ASEAN countries, focus on the availability of cost-effective, dispatchable baseload electricity for the growth of energy-intensive industries that can drive economic progress and improve living standards. These countries have their baseload electricity provided primarily through coal-fired, natural gas, and nuclear power stations to support their rapid industrialization and economic growth. That is partly why they are the highest economic growth economies in the world.
America’s investments in unreliable and unproven renewable electricity sources like wind and solar should be reconsidered. They are ill-suited to meet long-term economic demands, particularly in the mining, manufacturing, AI, data center, and agricultural sectors.
A stable and secure supply of crude oil to meet the demands of citizens and businesses, as well as continuous, uninterruptible, dispatchable electricity, are both non-negotiable requirements for sustainable economic growth, not just for California but for the entire country.
The good news for Californians is that Gavin Newsom is terming out as Governor of the State. The bad news for America is that if Kamala gets elected president, she can nominate her “buddy” Gavin Newsom as Secretary of Energy for the country. God Bless America to live with similar energy polices of California.
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NOAA’s U.S. Temperature Data Demonstrate that Population Growth UHIs & Measurement Inadequacies Drive Average Temperature – Not Climate Change
Editor’s Note: The media regularly reports on temperature extremes, whether it is local, statewide, or global. They are especially guilty of hyping supposed “hottest” days, months, years, or decades. Climate Realism has covered the false or misleading hottest year claims across dozens of articles, for example here, here, and here, are prime examples of the hottest ever hype that Climate Realism has debunked. When it comes to climate, the mainstream media often only report on the average global temperature rather than look at or track to high temperature and low temperature datasets. As Larry Hamlin describes below, the media completely misses a good part of the temperature story because they ignore these parts of the temperature record, which tell a far less alarming story about climate. Worse than that, now the media has been relying on climate models rather than actual data to determine their “hottest ever” claims.
Guest essay by Larry Hamlin:
NOAA’s U.S. contiguous U.S. summer (June through August) measured minimum and maximum temperatures trends over the period 1895 through 2024 (shown below from NOAA’s Climate at a Glance Times series data website) show clear and distinct differing temperature trend increasing growth compared to the calculated average temperature trend outcome.
The minimum temperature trend outcomes after 1985 climb significantly faster than do the maximum measured temperature trend outcomes. U.S. population data shows an increase of about 100 million during the 1980 to 2023 period.
Since the average temperature is not a measured value but instead the calculated mathematical average of the minimum and maximum measured temperatures {(TMax + TMin)/2} the average temperature calculated trend outcome is controlled and dominated by the much larger increase occurring in the minimum measured temperature trend versus the maximum measured temperature trend.
This differing trend distinction can be more clearly seen in the graphs below where the NOAA Climate at a Glance website time period interval is broken into the time intervals from 1895 to 1950 and 1950 to 2024
Dr. Spencer also provided another study which displayed in graphical form the UHI impacts of U.S. and Global wide temperatures during the period June 1850 through June 2023 as shown below and found here.
In addition to large population growth UHIs acting as a prime driver of rising calculated Tavg temperature outcomes, these temperature measurements are also being significantly impacted by NOAA’s improper siting of thousands of temperature measurement stations.
These thousands of improperly sited temperature measurement devices do not meet NOAA/NWS siting standards and are located far too close to artificial heat sinks that falsely increase both maximum and minimum temperature measurements
As noted in this report (page 18) the year 2019 Oak Ridge National Laboratory measurement station data accuracy experiment showed that flawed station siting temperature measurement impact outcomes were much greater during the evening periods (heat sink contributions to minimum temperatures were a factor of 3 larger than maximum day temperature contributions) versus during the day.
NOAA bases its evaluation of U.S. and global average temperature anomaly value changes over time by using and comparing the calculated Tavg values over time.
As indicted by the temperature measurement graphs and studies noted above NOAA’s contiguous U.S. calculated Tavg increasing trend values since about 1985 are clearly driven upward by station measurement siting flaws and UHI Tmin outcomes versus Tmax measured outcomes.
This results in NOAA’s calculated Tavg assessments of increasing temperature anomalies over time being a flawed and exaggerated claim driven by NOAA’s measurement siting inadequacies and population growth driven UHI impacts – and not “climate change”.
This outcome is also applicable to NOAA’s global wide calculated Tavg temperature anomaly increasing trend assessments as well.
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Tally Of US Wind & Solar Rejections Hits 735
You won’t read much about this in major media outlets, but nearly every week, local communities across the US are rejecting or restricting solar and wind projects. The latest rejection occurred a few days ago in Center, Nebraska, when the Knox County Board of Supervisors voted 6 to 1 to deny a conditional-use permit for a proposed solar project. According to an article by Mark Mahoney of the Yankton Daily Press & Dakotan, the board’s decision “drew applause from most of a nearly full courtroom at the county courthouse.”
The denial of the project in Knox County marks the 58th rejection or restriction of solar energy in the US this year. In addition, as can be seen in the Renewable Rejection Database, which I have just updated, there have also been 35 rejections of wind energy. Thus, since 2015, there have been 735 rejections or restrictions of wind and solar energy in the US.
To be clear, outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, and National Public Radio have published a handful of articles in recent years about land-use conflicts over alt-energy in rural America. And to its credit, the Times has covered some of the conflicts in upstate New York. But that coverage routinely ignores the scale and frequency of the rejections and the conflicts. These rejections don’t fit the narrative that’s promoted by climate activists, academics at elite universities, and their myriad allies in the media about “clean,” “green,” and “renewable” energy. The Times has not written a single article about the longest-running legal battle over wind energy in American history: the Osage Nation’s 13-year legal fight with Enel. Last December, a federal court judge in Tulsa determined that the Italian company violated the tribe’s sovereignty when it built a 150-megawatt wind project in Osage County without getting permission to mine the tribe’s mineral estate. For more on that case, see my December 23, 2023, article.
Although big media outlets seldom cover these conflicts, the facts — and the numbers — are undeniable. Rural landowners and homeowners from Maine to Hawaii are fighting to protect the integrity of their neighborhoods. They don’t want their landscapes and viewsheds destroyed by oceans of solar panels and forests of 600-foot-high wind turbines. They are also rightly concerned about the diminution of their property values and the noise pollution that comes with these projects.
Furthermore, the latest rejections of wind and solar provide only a partial snapshot of the resistance across rural America to alt-energy projects. I am being contacted almost weekly by people across the country who are fighting wind projects, solar projects, battery facilities, or high-voltage transmission lines. In Arkansas, local residents are fighting the Nimbus Wind project. In Shasta County, California, locals have been fighting the Fountain Wind project for years. In Wisconsin, Christiana residents, including John Barnes and Roxann Engelstad, pictured above, are fighting the Koshkonong Solar project.
Last month, in Oklahoma, Jim Shaw, a conservative Republican and political novice from Chandler, defeated a four-term incumbent, Kevin Wallace, by nearly 10 percentage points to become Oklahoma’s House Representative for District 32. Wind-energy developers have been targeting Shaw’s district. A few weeks ago, Shaw told me that one of the main reasons he beat Wallace is that he ran on an anti-wind platform.
How deep is the resistance to Big Wind? Entire states are now opposing wind projects. Last year, the Idaho House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution stating its opposition to the proposed Lava Ridge wind project. That 1,200-megawatt facility is proposed to be built near the southern Idaho town of Dietrich. Idaho residents are objecting because the project will infringe on the Minidoka National Historic Site, which commemorates the incarceration of thousands of Japanese American citizens during World War II.
Lava Ridge is being pushed by New York City-based LS Power. The privately held company wants to install 241 turbines on 104,000 acres of federal land. Opposition to the wind project is coming from across the political spectrum. In August, Twin Falls County Commissioner Jack Johnson told a state legislative committee, “This is the one thing I think that Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, conservationists – I haven’t met anybody from any group that has expressed an interest in wanting these on our public lands...Everybody that we have engaged, that has engaged us, is against these being on our public lands.”
https://robertbryce.substack.com/p/tally-of-us-wind-and-solar-rejections
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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