Obama’s EPA: In a Classroom Near You

by Christopher C. Horner

soviet children

Pavlik Morozov’s life exemplified the duty of all good Soviet citizens to become informers. Although his story didn’t end well (nor did that of his parents), the concept for which he will ever carry the banner lives on. For example, this week we read that the Obama administration’s Environmental Protection Agency is working with – surprise! – grant-receiving community organizer types to, ah, “educate” and send forth tens of thousands of little eco-pioneers to audit their parents’ adherence to preferred lifestyle decisions.

Our “enviro” crowd hopes to sniff out whether parents are being sufficiently green, via tactics reminiscent of the old reds.

The latest odious stunt by Big Green – whose ranks include enablers in Big Government standing to gain as much or more from imposition of Green Statism as any other vested interest – moves beyond their avowed goals of “getting them young” and engaging the young for their “pester power”. I detailed this growing use of children, and even enlisting them to report back on their parents, in my “Poisoning the Little Ones” chapter of “Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed”. 

There, I wrote of EPA’s escalating involvement in such projects springing up around the country whereby the organized left teams up its affiliate global warming indoctrination industry with the education establishment. Results have included assigning the writing of hate mail to “skeptics” as formal classroom work, and other fun activities like serving as props for environmental and even more outwardly political rallies. In California, certain school systems had asked the students to audit their parents, make certain lifestyle demands on them and report back how many complied.

Mere grades, not the Earth, hung in the balance, though the practice served as a very big red banner. And now, as with so much else wrong with the Golden State, it has come to Washington on its way out to the rest of us.

The model rolled out this week in a press release by the Environmental Protection Agency is breathtaking in its familiarity. First, in its announcement “EPA Promoting ‘Go Green’ in 6,000 Schools”, we learned that “[t]he U.S. Environmental Protection Agency kicked off events to ‘Change the World, Start with Energy Star,’ encouraging children and their families to fight climate change while saving energy and money.” Energy Star is of course the federal government’s project to push – apparently, even through creative marketing tie-ins – certain home appliances. Current administration favorite General Electric, for example, having failed to dump its appliance line in an attempt to restore profitability, would do well if enough parents were hectored to trade in the washer, drier, refrigerator, etc. that draws school-assigned ire of the little green men (and women).

It goes beyond helping companies sell newer and more expensive products. As part of its “Fall Tour to Help Americans Fight Climate Change and Save Money”, under EPA’s guidance, kids “in 60 locations are conducting energy check-ups at homes and in their communities and educating their peers and families about energy efficiency.”

In our society we expect children to learn values from their parents. Our people and their values drive our government. Apparently, however, we’ve had things backward.

Obama’s administration has chosen another social model, from another time: its Mother EPA inserts itself as parent to instill the state’s values in the children, and to have them not only to take it home but “audit” and essentially squeal on the uncooperative. There’s a larger cause to be served, after all. 

In the United Kingdom, when the state required children to view Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” as educational material, a parent, Stuart Dimmock, took Her Majesty’s Government to court, and won. The government was unable to support any of the eleven money claims on which the court heard three days of evidence. The High Court dismissed such “Change the World” global warming alarmism subtly, holding for example that Gore’s claims “arise in the context of alarmism and exaggeration in support of his political thesis”, are “distinctly alarmist” (re: Greenland melt and sea level rise) and that “there is a view to the contrary, i.e. (at least) the mainstream view”.

Employing the schools to indoctrinate on Big Green’s “global Salvationism” is reprehensible. The push-back to Big Green-Big Government Complex begins where they are behaving most egregiously, in the schools.


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Posted Sep 24th 2009 at 8:55 am in Culture, Environment, Obama, Politics | 60 Comments