We Can Lie to Our Kids to Prevent Them from Being Scared of Environmental Collapse, But Is that the Right, Honest, and Most Productive Thing to Do?
From ultra-right-wing religious fanatic Mike Huckabee writes: Our kids are hearing that the Earth is doomed. Naturally, they’re scared—but they don’t need to be. It’s why (my) team created The Kids Guide to The Truth About Climate Change. It gives kids a close look at the facts behind climate change so they can feel safe.
“The Truth About Climate Change” claims to dispel the three myths from the screen cap here.
In fact:
1) Our kids are most certainly not “safe.” That said, there are plenty of reasons to believe that our civilization can limit the damage associated with climate change if it acts rapidly and decisively.
2) The situation is, in reality, getting worse. There are no climate scientists who aren’t in the pocket of Big Oil who refute this.
3) Ultimately, the cause is capitalism, insofar as it calls for a) infinite growth on a planet of finite size, an absurdity, and b) massive removal of laws that regulate environmentally destructive practices. Those who understand this, and who care about the fate of life on Earth, are proponents of what is called “conscious capitalism,” “democratic socialism,” etc.
For many different reasons, I favor being truthful with our children. It’s said that “honesty is the best policy.”
But beyond that, it enables them to get involved early. By the time kids are five, they’re old enough to understand that we all live on one planet, that this is our home, and that we need to take care of it. By the time they reach nine or ten, they can grasp the basic concept of anthropogenic global warming, i.e., that human activity is changing the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere, creating an imbalance in the amount of heat that the Earth absorbs and reradiates back into space.
Do you think for a moment that people like Huckabee and the others who do the bidding of Big Oil honestly believe that climate change is a hoax? That’s a sad joke. The Christian zealots, and Huckabee may be among them, actively welcome the end of the Earth and the ensuing events laid out in the last book of the bible, Revelation.
The rest are “people” whose life work is directed at enriching themselves, all the while knowing that their wealth is gained at the cost of inflicting unprecedented suffering on billions of people. They are the personification of evil. Relative to theirs, Huckabee’s crime is a parking violation.
I have to admit, if I lived in a place in which most people held these beliefs, I probably would move.
Huge voter turnout is precisely what’s needed here, and, fortunately, it’s bound to happen.
From this:
This raises the question: In the case of a civil war, in which armed Trump supporters participate in an insurrection several orders of magnitude larger than that of January 6th, can law enforcement be counted on to uphold the law and defend the nation against the rioters, or will they simply join the riot? The answer isn’t at all clear.
One of the most sickening symptoms of the decline of the U.S. educational system is the quality of the people we elect to make the laws that govern our lives.
Here’s 
I was speaking with a woman yesterday who has spent a lot of time in the Netherlands and says she still can’t believe how a country’s people and its government can work together so harmoniously and productively. The distinction between the Dutch and the Americans, she says, is particularly pronounced when it comes to transportation; all European nations are well on their way to expelling fossil fuels from their society.
Newsflash: Those who believe they have destroyed entire foundations of science that have been put into place over the millennia by doing “their own research online” are a million miles away from admitting any possibility that they could be wrong.
I just met some of the people who built the transponder that SpaceX will launch into orbit around the Earth tomorrow morning, enabling, for the first time, the tracking of all aircraft around the world, even over water. Readers may recall that we still don’t know what happened to international passenger flight Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 that disappeared somewhere into the Southern India Ocean in 2014.
As anyone could have predicted, Republicans are lining up behind the fight to ensure that the world suffers the most severe effects of climate change. The reasoning is simple: Democrats accept the findings of science, and therefore, the GOP must reject them.
