Keeping West Virginia's Children Ignorant About Climate Change

Once again West Virginia Board of Education is trying to weaken the science standards when it comes to global warming.

This started in December of last year, when board member Wade Linger, who has said that, “[w]e need to look at all the theories about [climate change] rather than just the human changes in greenhouse gases,” and that he doesn’t believe that global warming is a “foregone conclusion,” had language inserted in the state’s science standards that portrayed climate change as something that is doubtful and debatable. His suggestion, that “and fall” followed the word “rise” in the sixth grade science standard, was adopted. Other changes included the following:

Original ninth grade science requirement: “Analyze geoscience data and the results from global climate models to make an evidence-based forecast of the current rate of global or regional climate change and associated future impacts to Earth systems.”

Adopted version: “Analyze geoscience data and the predictions made by computer climate models to assess their creditability [sic] for predicting future impacts on the Earth System.”

Original high school elective Environmental Science requirement: “Debate climate changes as it [sic] relates to greenhouse gases, human changes in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, and relevant laws and treaties.”

Adopted version: “Debate climate changes as it relates to natural forces such as Milankovitch cycles, greenhouse gases, human changes in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, and relevant laws and treaties.”

Other Board of Education members also expressed views that were skeptical about the reality of global warming. After the Charleston Gazette reported on the adopted changes, however, scientists, West Virginia residents, and educational and environmental activists pressured the Board of Education to correct the standards to be more in line with the accepted science on the subject. Linger’s changes to the standards were withdrawn. That was back in January.

            While not a word-for-word revamp of his original science standards changes, Linger’s latest move is very similar to the ones he proposed last December. We will see what sort of backlash this latest move generates.

            Members of the West Virginia Board of Education might simply be avid listeners to Rush Limbaugh and other AM radio folks who deny global warming. Or these changes to the curricula might be due to pressure from King Coal. The coal industry already has a big influence on the curricula of eastern Kentucky schools with their Coal Energy and Resource (CEDAR) program. This video below gives an idea of what CEDAR is all about. Watch it and try to tell me it is not indoctrination:

Those tons and tons of coal that are mined in Appalachia turn into tons and tons of CO2 when they are burned in power plants and factories. The coal industry knows this. They know that children who fully grasp this connection will not likely be supporters of their industry when they grow up. So it’s best to keep them in the dark on what the science says about coal and a warming world.

The Coal Industry Teaches the Teachers In Texas

In Texas the coal industry has a program to ensure that their agenda makes it to the classrooms of the Lone Star State. The industry sponsors “Coal Camp,” five days of workshops for Texas schoolteachers in which the coal industry schools the schoolteachers on the industry's message.

            What’s in it for the teachers? They can get credit to renew their teaching certificates. And the workshops are paid for—to the tune of about $100,000 a year— by the coal industry. The teachers pay nothing for coal camp.

In Appalachia they are far more direct with their message, going right to the classrooms and schoolchildren. But the effort of this program in Texas is probably the same, getting the next generation to accept the methods of extraction used by the industry to get coal out of the ground and into the power plants.

Any industry has the right to promote its business, but taking business, any business not just coal, into the classroom is wrong. After the three R’s, schools are to teach history, the sciences, and give kids a notion of critical thinking skills. The children will have plenty of time during their lives to absorb the promotion of the coal industry through their normal PR campaigns and their advertising, and all the coal companies are welcome to come into the schools on career day to attract the workers that they might need in the mines and in their offices. But the coal companies should leave the schoolchildren of Texas alone to do their math problems and learn their grammar.

Give Me the Child at Seven and I will Give You a Coal Industry Supporter: CEDAR in the Schools of Appalachia

The headline of the Logan Banner, the paper of record for Logan West Virginia, reads Logan Middle School first at CEDAR of Southern West Virginia. Beneath the proud headline the news story goes on to explain that a group of eight graders won a first place award at a “coal fair” for producing this rather clever video found here.
              CEDAR stands for Coal Education Development and Resource, a program developed by the coal industry 20 years ago and whose somewhat wordy goal is “to facilitate the increase of knowledge and understanding of the many benefits the Coal Industry provides in our daily lives by providing financial resources and coal education materials to implement its study in the school curriculum.” CEDAR started in Kentucky, but has since spread to other coal producing states.

The targeted curricula are K through 12. The financial resources are grants given to teachers. It’s basically dollars for school supplies, a seductive offer for many teachers in cash-strapped schools. The “coal education materials” are booklets, pamphlets, and DVDs with titles like “What Everyone Should Know About Coal” and “America’s Fuel.”

As you can see in this video, these fairs are not small. They may be some of the biggest things going on for weeks in some of the smaller communities of Appalachia.

Though some of their materials encourage teachers to “form an informed and unbiased opinion of the coal industry,” the goal of the coal industry’s pamphlets, posters, and DVDs is to instill in young minds a positive outlook of the coal industry, even using junk science to do so. One of the DVDs offered by the organization is called “The Greening of Planet Earth” that makes the assertion that “our world is deficient in carbon dioxide, and a doubling of atmospheric CO2 is very beneficial.” CEDAR reviews the teachers’ lesson plans of their curricula, particularly if the organization feels that lesson plans have unsupported bias against the coal industry. Could it be considered an unsupported bias against the coal industry to point out that CEDAR is completely wrong about the world having a deficit of CO2?

Bad science, aside, is CEDAR something that we want allowed in our schools? Or is the captive audience of a school classroom a place where any industry or business is allowed to hand out pamphlets and posters to schoolchildren? Even if you think that is perfectly fine for an industry to gain a large presence in schools, shouldn’t there be some sort of academic fairness doctrine that says that if you’re going to have a coal fair one week, you have to have an alternative energy fair the next week, or a fair that concentrates on environmental consequences of coal mining?
                Or maybe they could have a fair that encourages critical thinking, coal or no coal.