[✔️] November 17 , 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*November 17, 2021*/

/[  Asia action ]/
*Protesters disrupt the world’s largest coal port: ‘This is us 
responding to the climate crisis’*
By Rachel Pannett
Nov 17. 2021
Two young women scaled a huge coal handling machine shortly before dawn 
on Wednesday, disrupting operations at the world’s largest coal port for 
several hours to protest what they say is Australia’s lack of action on 
climate change.

Complete coverage from the COP26 U.N. climate summit
“My name is Hannah, and I am here abseiled off the world’s largest coal 
port,” 21-year-old Hannah Doole declared on a live-streamed video as she 
hovered high over massive piles of coal bound for export. “I’m here with 
my friend Zianna, and we’re stopping this coal terminal from loading all 
coal into ships and stopping all coal trains.”

Since officials met in Glasgow, Scotland, earlier this month to plot the 
planet’s path away from fossil fuels, Australia, the world’s 
second-biggest coal exporter, has showed little sign of changing course. 
Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Monday said the coal industry will be 
operating in the country for “decades to come.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/11/17/coal-protesters-shut-down-australia-port-abseil/ 


- -

/[ cough, cough coal ]/
*India temporarily shuts five coal-fired power plants around New Delhi*
-- India has temporarily shut down five coal-fired power plants around 
the capital New Delhi as part of its drive to combat air pollution, 
according to an order from the federal environment ministry panel on air 
pollution.
-- The Commission for Air Quality Management has also banned trucks 
carrying non-essential goods and stopped construction in Delhi and its 
neighboring cities.
-- Pollution levels surged to “severe” levels this month, with the Air 
Quality Index in Delhi going as high as 499 on a scale of 500, 
indicating healthy people were also at risk.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/17/india-temporarily-shuts-five-coal-fired-power-plants-around-new-delhi.html



/[ News Misdirection Malfeasance --   audio, transcript and book excerpt ]/
*'Miseducation': Journalist Katie Worth on climate education and 
corporate influences*
November 16, 2021  - 47min
Jonathan Chang and Meghna Chakrabarti
What are kids learning about climate change in schools?

Journalist Katie Worth pored over curriculum and visited classrooms 
across the country and found that students' climate education was often 
being hindered by corporate and political influences.

"We would like to think that schools are kind of some ideologically 
neutral place where kids just learn the facts about the world," Worth 
says. "And that's just not true."

Today, On Point: Corporate influence and climate change, in the classroom.

Guests
Katie Worth, reporter covering science, politics and their 
intersections. Author of "Miseducation: How Climate Change is Taught in 
America." (@katieworth)

Kristen Del Real, science teacher at Chico Junior High School in Chico, 
California.
Deb Morrison, learning scientist working in areas of climate and 
anti-oppression design based research at the University of Washington. 
(@educatordeb)
https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2021/11/16/miseducation-journalist-katie-worth-on-the-corporate-influences-on-climate-education

-- 

/[ Classic report from 2017 ]/
*Pipeline to the classroom: how big oil promotes fossil fuels to 
America's children*
Documents show how tightly woven group of pro-industry organizations 
target impressionable schoolchildren and teachers desperate for resources
by Jie Jenny Zou  15 June, 2007

Jennifer Merritt’s first graders at Jefferson elementary school in 
Pryor, Oklahoma, were in for a treat. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, 
the students gathered for story time with two special guests, Republican 
lawmakers Tom Gann and Marty Quinn.

Dressed in suits, the two men read aloud from “Petro Pete’s Big Bad 
Dream,” a parable in which a Bob the Builder-lookalike awakens to find 
his toothbrush, hard hat and even the tires on his bike missing.

Abandoned by the school bus, Pete walks to Petroville elementary in his 
pajamas.

“It sounds like you’re missing all of your petroleum by-products today!” 
Pete’s teacher, Mrs Rigwell, exclaims, extolling oil’s benefits to Pete 
and fellow students like Sammy Shale. Before long, Pete decides that 
“having no petroleum is like a nightmare!”

The tale is the latest in an illustrated series by the Oklahoma Energy 
Resources Board, a state agency funded by oil and gas producers. The 
board has spent upwards of $40m over the past two decades on providing 
education with a pro-industry bent, including hundreds of pages of 
curriculums, a speaker series and an after-school program – all at no 
cost to educators of children from kindergarten to high school...

A similar program in Ohio shows teachers how to “frack” Twinkies using 
straws to pump for cream to emulate shale drilling. A national program 
sponsored by companies including BP and Shell claims it’s too soon to 
tell if the earth is heating up, but “a little warming might be a good 
thing”.

Decades of documents reviewed by the Center for Public Integrity reveal 
a tightly woven network of organizations that works in concert with the 
oil and gas industry to paint a rosy picture of fossil fuels in 
America’s classrooms. Led by advertising and public-relations 
strategists, the groups have long plied the tools of their trade on 
impressionable children and teachers desperate for resources...

Proponents of programs like the one in Oklahoma say they help the oil 
and gas industry replenish its aging workforce by stirring early 
interest in science, technology, engineering and math. But some experts 
question the educational value and ethics of lessons touting an industry 
that plays a central role in climate change and air pollution.

Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change 
Communication, likened industry-sponsored curriculums that ignore 
climate science to advertising. “You’re exploiting that trusted 
relationship between the student and the teacher,” he said. Leiserowitz 
– whose research has focused on how culture, politics and psychology 
impact public perception of the environment – said fossil-fuel companies 
have a stake in perpetuating a message of oil dependency.

As early as the 1940s, the industry’s largest and most powerful lobby 
group targeted schoolchildren as a key element of its fledgling 
marketing strategy. By the 1960s, the American Petroleum Institute was 
looking to shake its reputation as a “monopoly which reaped excessive 
profits” and set out to cultivate a network of “thought leaders” that 
included educators, journalists, politicians and even clergy, according 
to an organizational history copyrighted by API in 1990.

The idea caught on. Hundreds of oil-and-gas-centric lesson plans are now 
available online, walking a blurry line between corporate sponsorship 
and promotion at a time when climate science has increasingly come under 
siege at the highest levels of government.

On 1 June, Donald Trump, flanked by EPA administrator – and former 
Oklahoma attorney general – Scott Pruitt, announced that the United 
States would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement.

Oklahoma is among a dozen states that have opted for watered-down 
versions of Next Generation Science Standards, a joint effort by states 
and educational organizations to revamp science teaching that has met 
with political backlash since 2013. The Oklahoma version strips 
provisions on evolution and the human causes of global warming. Along 
with Colorado, Kansas and Montana, Oklahoma legislators have also 
championed bills requiring educators teach “both sides” of those 
scientific concepts...
https://apps.publicintegrity.org/oil-education/

- -

/[ a little too much energy put into producing the content ]/
*‘We need oil. We need gas.’*
Brothers & Company, an advertising firm, explains how “Lab Time with 
Leo” was developed in this behind-the-scenes look. The firm is 
contracted by the Oklahoma Energy Resources Board to create both 
commercials and educational materials. Brothers & Company

Carla Schaeperkoetter, the energy resources board’s education director, 
is the creator of “Big Bad Dream” and “Lab Time with Leo”— a video 
series featuring a bowtie-wearing scientist not unlike Bill Nye the 
Science Guy. Instead of exploring fundamentals like the solar system, 
Leo delves into the nuances of oil refining, teaching kids as young as 8 
about “fractional distillation” and “residuals.”

Like her predecessor, Schaeperkoetter doesn’t have any teaching 
experience and isn’t a state employee. Board staff — including 
Schaeperkoetter — are consultants hired by a private foundation 
affiliated with the Oklahoma Independent Petroleum Association. The 
state trade group is listed as a partner of the Independent Petroleum 
Association of America, a lobbying organization that worked closely with 
API to roll back federal rules on fracking.

Schaeperkoetter’s name appears on curricula reassuring teachers that 
“companies are spending more dollars protecting the environment than 
drilling new wells.” A jump-rope rhyme reads, “We need oil. We need gas. 
Where are the oil products in our class?” And a high school guide asks 
students to create 30-second commercials on how “new technologies to 
find oil and natural gas will help America be energy independent.”

Charles W. Anderson — a professor at Michigan State University who 
studies environmental literacy and develops curricula — said the board 
materials are upfront about their pro-industry agenda but only tell 
“half the story” by omitting global issues like climate change in favor 
of niche oil knowledge. “The children of Oklahoma are getting a raw deal 
— they are getting educationally ineffective materials teaching content 
that will be of little use to them if they want to leave the state,” 
Anderson said.

Students also are being sold short in more immediate ways: an increasing 
number of Oklahoma districts are adopting four-day school weeks amid 
budget cuts due partly to tax breaks for the petroleum industry. “The 
state government of Oklahoma, in its wisdom, has decided that oil and 
gas companies should have a whole lot of money and schools should have 
hardly any money,” Anderson said. “That’s a social decision that values 
oil and gas extraction over the public good of public schools.”
[-- link lost--]



/[  shifts and changes in media battlefields  ] /
*The Far-Right’s Shift from Climate Denial to Ecofascism*
Thomas Perrett - 17 August 2021
As the climate emergency escalates, sparking a new migration crisis, 
ethno-nationalist forms of politics could undergo a revival, reports 
Thomas Perrett
https://bylinetimes.com/2021/08/17/the-far-rights-shift-from-climate-denial-to-ecofascism/


/[ Classic 1977 video lecture on scientific modeling - we are not in 
equilibrium ]/
*Systems: Overshoot and Collapse*
Aug 11, 2017
Donella Meadows
In this lecture given at Dartmouth College in the Spring of 1977, 
Donella Meadows uses two examples of socioecological systems to convey 
concepts of overshoot and collapse.
__
Youtube videos covered by CCBY license and uploaded with permission from 
the Rauner Special Collections Library at Dartmouth College.
//https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9g4-5-GKBc



[The news archive - looking back]
*On this day in the history of global warming November  17, 2010
*Outgoing Rep. Inglis Blasts GOP Skepticism on Global Warming
By LAUREN MORELLO of ClimateWire
Published: November 17, 2010

Outgoing Republican Rep. Bob Inglis (S.C.) broke with his party today 
and publicly vented his frustration about the apparent turn toward 
climate skepticism in the next Congress, when Republicans will take 
control of the House.

Inglis, who has served six terms in the House, was soundly defeated by a 
more conservative opponent in a Republican primary this year and has 
blamed the loss in part on his belief in climate science, which hurt him 
with voters. Inglis made his frustration clear this morning at a House 
Science subcommittee hearing on the science of climate change.

"To my free enterprise colleagues, whether you think it's all a bunch of 
hooey, what we talk about in this committee -- the Chinese don't, and 
they plan on eating our lunch in the next century, working on these 
problems," Inglis said. "We may press the pause button for a few years, 
but China is pressing the fast-forward button."

Inglis, ranking member of the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee, 
also took aim at "people who make a lot of money on talk radio and talk 
TV saying a lot of things. They slept at a Holiday Inn Express last 
night, and they're experts on climate change. They substitute their 
judgment for people who have Ph.D.s and work tirelessly" on climate change.

Inglis' remarks stood in stark contrast to those of 87-year-old Texas 
Republican Rep. Ralph Hall, the leading candidate to take the House 
Science and Technology gavel in the next Congress, who took a potshot at 
the White House's use of the term "global climate disruption" and said 
that "reasonable people have serious questions about our knowledge of 
the state of the science."

In light of those comments and pledges by other incoming committee 
chairmen to probe the science of climate change, Inglis had pointed 
advice for climate scientists.

"I encourage the scientists that are listening out there to get ready 
for the hearings that are coming up in the next Congress," he said. 
"Those will be difficult hearings for climate scientists. But I would 
encourage you to welcome those as fabulous opportunities to teach. Don't 
come here defensively. Say, 'I'm glad to have an opportunity to explain 
the science.'"

Inglis said that advice was informed by his experience on a 
congressional delegation to Antarctica a few years ago, where he 
encountered "master teacher" Donal Manahan, a marine biologist at the 
University of Southern California.

Correction: Inglis has said his belief in climate science was partly 
responsible for his defeat in the Republican primary; an earlier version 
incorrectly stated that he had voted for Democrats' cap-and-trade 
legislation.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/cwire/2010/11/17/17climatewire-outgoing-rep-inglis-blasts-gop-skepticism-on-51296.html


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