The Brainwashing Of America's Children | Climate Town

crisis averted people see

until recently the classrooms

and libraries of America's Public Schools were full to the brim with suggestive

books written by special interest groups trying to brainwash

our kids the filth

that you've LED in our library protect

our children or get out of the way using

our schools for indoctrination

rather than education and

it does not work

thankfully we got rid of all of those and America's

school children can go back to reading the classics like

Petro Pete's big bad dream an

actual book you can find in public schools let's

give it a look see one

night Pete goes to sleep and has a horrible dream about all the fossil

fuels suddenly disappearing his comb his toothbrush

his bike tires gone

no but don't worry it's

got a happy ending we get 20 Pages explaining

why fossil fuels are the only choice for America and

why thinking we should give them up is

a sin that's the kind of books our kids should be reading

wholesome agenda list stories

that wait a minute

oil propaganda in school

oh my God you're trying to tell me that this series of children's books

in publicly funded schools was created by the fossil fuel industry to try to

groom kids into not questioning

America's use of fossil

interesting stuff and as much as I wish this phenomenon

was contained to the Petro

Peach extended Universe the

oil and gas industry

has spent millions of dollars trying to influence American school children and

this is not a

guess there is a massive paper trail of oil-funded

lesson plans and workbooks

they produce propaganda videos and pro fossil fuel cartoons

they take advantage of underfunded

schools and under-resourced teachers by donating misleading

materials to classrooms and

a whole gaggle of shady tactics

to push their agenda on

kids and of course these efforts to influence what children here in public schools

seem to be working a

study from 2016 found

that only 38 percent of students are taught that climate change is

linked to fossil fuels and while there are a lot of factors at play

the efforts of the fossil fuel industry are

clearly one of them oil

which has brought a better life to

all the people in the USA hi I'm Riley Williams a guy with a

climate science and policy degree who once played an entire season of middle school

basketball as a starting point guard and never scored a single point true

story and this is a video about the oil industry

influencing America's school children welcome

to climate town close

let go you ready you made

it okay so the fossil fuel industry has been trying to weasel its way

into America's public schools for

decades in their defense they're on the supply side of oil spills

gas leaks union busting

you know your classic PR problems

so they'll do anything to rehabilitate

their Public Image one of their oldest and best strategies

is to get Pro oil and gas messages in

front of children before

their brains develop enough for them to start asking uncomfortable

questions they call them

automobiles this is a cartoon from 1956

created by the American petroleum

Institute called destination Earth a

martian explorer who can travel through space becomes

very impressed with America's ability to drive cars

the source of their nourishment

was something called petroleum

another cartoon from 1973

produced by Amaco oil tries

to convince kids that any kind of government regulation

is bad when the mokans started producing again the environmentalists

were up in arms again we gotta talk about those taxes

you're charging but don't forget I've

got to pay our stockholders

a fair return I've

got to pay our stockholders

in 1985 Exxon partnered with Disney on

a Mickey and Goofy cartoon praising

the wonders of oil but not foreign oil

I'm talking about that good old American stuff you

know it kind of reminds me of when cigarette

companies used to make fun cartoons

until what is it that made him stop but in the late 1980s

when the public first started hearing sweet nothings

about this climate change thing the

fossil fuel industry got down to brass tacks

now remember companies like Exxon had already been studying climate change for years and

even employed some of the most advanced climate scientists in

the world in 1977

a now Infamous meeting took place between the

top Exxon leadership and

climate scientist Dr James Black where he tried to convey the severity of the

problem climate change represented

unfortunately some budget cuts and layoffs in the early 1980s

pivoted the company towards

a more denial oriented

strategy in an effort to and I quote reposition

global warming as a theory industry

groups were prepared to fight tooth and nail against climate

change well not against climate

change as much as against people learning

about climate change it actually got kind of confusing reading some of these oil

and gas memos because they kept saying things like they were hoping keeping

climate change becomes a non-issue

and I was like oh awesome same

same until I realized

we were not same

same and of course one of the industries ideas for making climate change a

non-issue was a direct Outreach

campaign about the uncertainties

of climate science aimed

directly at members of Congress State

officials industry leadership and

you guessed it school

teachers and students come

on down and remember this

is an uncertainty that they themselves

did not believe this is just them trying to feed the concept of Doubt

to the public and

Seed an anti-climate change bias

in America's school kids

now the system of Education in the U.S is mostly dictated on a state-by-state

basis so the oil industry

funded local groups to promote climate disinformation

if you're in Arkansas you

might get a visit from the director of Arkansas energy

rocks an oil industry

group that also offers fossil

fuel themed video games come

on you remember staying

up all night with your friends drinking

Mountain Dew Code Red and playing oil

and natural gas in your life colon

at the pump oh

those were the days or

maybe you're in Ohio where you're working on your crude oil word

search from the Ohio Natural Energy Institute

or maybe you're in Cambridge Massachusetts where

a father found a booklet called

natural gas your invisible

friend in his nine-year-old

son's backpack paid for by their local utility

eversource but nobody does it quite like Oklahoma and

their government organization the

Oklahoma energy resources board now

despite being technically part of the state government it

is fully funded by voluntary

contributions from fossil fuel companies and since they're founding in the 90s the oerb

is basically only cared about two things number

one delivering fossil fuel friendly educational

materials to children and

number two stopping those children from

around near oil wells luckily

number two is pretty easy

smart on and off the field that means no stupid things no smoking or

drinking or doing drugs

and no hanging out around oil wells

Jerry Emmett Dennis Bill coach Switzer

we've all been around oil wells this is a pump jack kind of looks

like a big horse I

guess that's why some kids are trying to ride them but if you got

caught on caught under about being paralyzed

because you'd be dead

done and dusted and

my God that whole video is worth a watch it starts out with two

full minutes of unrelated

football highlights followed by the kind of manic

editing that's usually reserved

for like an early 2000s

music video and now that kids are staying away from oil well sites it's

time to convince them to use oil and gas forever

and when it comes to infiltrating

schools with pro-industry propaganda

for children let's see what 50 million

dollars buys you first

and foremost yeah that's gonna buy you a nice sweaty curriculum

Oklahoma public schools are

so underfunded that some districts have gone down to a four day school week

because they couldn't afford to spring for the full five

luckily the oerb has the cash to step in and provide a curriculum called

little bits for your K through second graders you

know you're five to eight year olds it's

crammed full of important messages like

the important forms of energy are oil natural gas and coal and

U.S companies are spending more dollars protecting the environment than drilling

new wells and of course it teaches the students jump rope Rhymes until they

can repeat them from memory my

favorite rhyme is we

need oil we need gas

where are the oil products

in our class and

then I guess they'd like

point to stuff made of plastic and say

fun and let's not forget the Crown Jewel Petro

Pete AKA a sort of wish.com

Bob the Builder they created Petro Pete too among other things normalize

all the bad insane things the oil and gas industry

does like in the story boomerboro

home clean home a

community of animals is

understandably panicked when people with bulldozers

start destroying their home but

Petro Pete's dog convinces

them that the humans will fix everything

before they leave one of the animals very reasonably points out that

they sure haven't done that in the past and the dog says the

humans learned their lesson and now they don't leave behind a mess when they

drill for oil they

clean up after themselves

and then the other animals

just agree that the oil industry

is great and that's the takeaway kids

ages five through eight oil

companies would never hurt nature

and when you graduate past the

little bits curriculum the oerb

has a fantastic core energy program for high school students where you get to

apply what you learned with

fun assignments like make a commercial that explains why petroleum

is still the best source of energy today and

gives us the best chance at gaining energy Independence

which is a really great assignment because we all know how powerful a

good commercial can be yes

oil wells Jerry Emmett Dennis Raleigh

Bill coach Switzerland smart plant

smart do something safe like

tackle football smoke and drinking doing drugs

kind of looks like a big horse

You Don't Go Near my oil well cause

you'd be dead and

look I'm a guy who makes comedy

videos about climate change naturally

a lot of people ask me why

do you do that and

does anybody want that but it's

all worth it to have found this piece of propaganda

I now present lab

time with Follow Me Oh

oil and gas oh

oil and gas you're

all I want this

Christmas High Tech High

awesomeness get your Frack on it

is wild how high of a budget that show must have it's got sets

location changes an actual actor

that's not cheap obviously

the oerb saw how much kids loved Bill Nye the Science Guy it's

our plastic Earth surface

wave model of Science and

they wanted to have their own version that would be willing to say a

bunch of deeply misleading

about the oil and gas industry

America's natural gas and oil pipelines is the safest most efficient way

to move natural resources

it turns out a few million dollars worth of oil money can do exactly

that and lab time with Leo is exactly what you would expect Leo

covers a surprising number of extremely oil specific

topics from fracking to seismic

exploration to fractional distillation but some lessons just get straight to the point Americans

currently use millions of vehicles and machines that require petroleum

products to operate most

of them are nowhere near the ends of their normal lives so

replacing them would be expensive for

the time being oil

and natural gas Remain

the most feasible and

cost-effective source of energy and

this kind of propaganda

is all over the place oerb

materials are present in an estimated 98

percent of Oklahoma school

districts and they claim to have reached more than 3 million students they've

even pitched their strategies to other states like Montana Arkansas

North Dakota Wyoming and Texas

awesome and just to say it we know a lot of this information because

of the Intrepid reporting of Gia Jenny Zhao and Joe wurtz and their investigation

into fossil fuel miseducation

we put links to their stories in the bio so if you want a

ton more information on this I encourage you to check those out and

look trying to get in front of kids is

not unique to the oil and gas industry

marketing to Children is

all over the corporate world and

it makes sense if Mr Peanut is teaching you about digestion

maybe you're going to be more likely to ask your parents for peanuts as

a snack and I'm sure Dr Pepper is expecting someone from this 1970s

home economics class to

purchase Dr Pepper as an ingredient in

whatever the a teenage party is Steve

Jobs himself lobbied for a tax credit to cover the costs of donating Apple

Computers to schools which led to schools buying more Apple Computers

to fill out computer labs

which probably contributed to a generation of loyal

Apple consumers and thousands

of drawers full of white cables

that don't go to

and even though schools are governed on a state-by-state

basis the fossil fuel industry

is found a slick little way of hitting multiple States At Once by

changing the way climate change is written about in the physical textbooks

like in Texas where

an oil industry group called the Texas energy Council

sends representatives and trained volunteers to school board meetings to torpedo

climate Science Education in

the state's science standards

these State Standards determine the type of textbooks

Texas requests from the textbook companies

and since Texas just happens to be one of the biggest markets

in the country major

U.S textbook companies are heavily incentivized

to write their content to appeal to Texas schools

these books also get purchased by smaller States across

the country and pretty soon dozens

of states have the same diminished

climate Science Education because of the Texas state standards

and if you're a board member at the meetings

and you're trying to keep Texas students informed

of the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists

you might find that that's pretty

annoying so we've already voted to take out greenhouse

gases as we already talked about earlier

in the week now

we want to talk about taking

out ways to mitigate greenhouse

gases so let's call it what it is it's not about what our science

teachers are suggesting or

what the science Industry

is suggesting at this point we're

only making votes based on what oil and gas wants us to do our

permanent School fund is generally funded by oil and gas

true and all of us are probably going to get home using oil and

gas but no episode about intentionally

misleading kids would be complete without the Heartland Institute

aka the Michael Jordan of batch insane

science denial you may remember them from their work vehemently

denying the link between cigarettes

and cancer for big tobacco

but they've also built a diversified portfolio

that includes climate Denial in

2012 the budget for the Heartland Institute was leaked which includes a sizable line

item for a new education project they were working on and

a few years later they

Unleashed life scientists disagree

about global warming it's

basically uh greatest hits of old school climate denial talking points

it's been one week you're looking

we actually did a whole deep dive episode on why the sun cycle argument

is such on our podcast which

you can listen to after

you finish watching this video If

you feel like it now

smarter people than me have taken a bat to all the arguments

in this book but

I do want to give you one example just so you know the kind

of caliber that we're dealing with here this is the NASA Global temperature curve

for this nice little Earth of ours going back to the start of modern

temperature records you probably don't need me to tell you this but the temperature

line is going up

but like any good set of data it's vulnerable

it's weak why accept the

obvious conclusions when you can make it do whatever you want with

a little bit of

if we take this graph and then select this

specific High Point and

then chop out everything around it and

hey that's not as much warming as everyone is complaining

about and if even that's

too much well then you can just hunt around for a different data

set that maximizes that High Point and

whamo you got yourself a

flat line baby now this book was published in 2016.

so if you backtrack I

don't know precisely 18 years to include the very hot El Nino year of

1998 then you can make a claim like

this and if you're really lucky you might even be able to find someone

who's not that concerned about the truth who's willing to present your findings in

front of Congress but

who am I kidding where are you going to find someone with so little

self-respect there has been no significant

global warming for the past 18

years yeah it really is that

simple and that's just one of many many

repeatedly disproven arguments in

this quite boring book but

what it lacks in excitement or

accuracy it makes up for in

volume Heartland claims to have sent

000 copies of why scientists

disagree about global warming to science teachers around the country according

to them every single

science teacher in America received

a copy of this book and

that really seemed like a big story it was reported on extensively

in the news at the time and it was also one of the reasons

we wanted to cover this topic in the first place we

thought that this book that we got on eBay for

three dollars meaningfully promoted

climate Denial in American public

schools oh no but

as we researched more a different version of the story began to appear you

see while groups like The Heartland Institute

were once The Darlings of big oil and big tobacco which led to significance

support for years in

the more recent era their brand of blunt force climate denial seems to have

gotten too extreme even for Big Oil so when I said the Michael Jordan

of batch science denial

I was including the years he played for the Washington Wizards

as a 40 year old man oil companies

obviously appreciate what the Heartland Institute

is doing but it's no longer socially tenable for big companies to be associated

with such obvious as for the teachers who actually received

the books well there's no formal study but it kind of seems like they

saw through the too with very little evidence of them actually using these in

any classroom so if you're drinking something right now and you don't care about

your floor go ahead and pour a little out for the Heartland

we hardly knew you

influence of special interest groups on American public schools is

Gonna Take Years to undo and some states are going to do it faster

than others in 2020 working with the Texas Freedom

Network education fund the natural Center for Science Education

who's deputy director Glenn Branch helped us out with this episode assigned

grades to each State's science standards

based on the quality of their treatment of climate change and 27 States received

a B plus or better including

states with significant fossil fuel Industries

which is you know really nice to hear of

course there are a bunch of states with a D or Worse including

Pennsylvania Florida Ohio and

Texas but there's actually reason to be hopeful since those grades were published Indiana

adopted new state science standards

including more climate change content

which moved them from a d to among the top 10 states in the

country Pennsylvania stopped being such an F by simply replacing

state standards that hadn't been updated in

two decades and I can't believe

I need to say this but Science Education

should come from scientists

and Educators and not the oil and gas industry

remember those guys love

money they talk about it all

the time billions of dollars investing

our dollars 18.7 billion dollars for every dollar that we spend billion dollars in

free cash flow we had to generate a property I've

got to pay our stockholders

a fair return so

if they're spending millions

of dollars trying to get Pro fossil fuel information in

front of children it's

probably because they think it's a good investment in delaying the transition away from

oil and gas because

if they didn't think it was going to help them make more money why

would they possibly want

to make this oil and natural gas can be used to make thousands

of things we use in our homes schools

and businesses daily but

only you're killing me seriously

you are killing me which

brings us to the what we're gonna do about it section where

we are right now feels

pretty good huh well

we can start off by giving science teachers the tools they need to

actually teach the national Center for Science Education

and Penn State published

a survey of middle and high school teachers and discovered that less than half

of them had taken so much as a single lecture about climate

change how can we expect our

science Educators to teach a subject that

they themselves never had the opportunity

to learn luckily a handful of States including

Washington California Maine and New Jersey have

recently passed legislation allocating

funding specifically to help their Public School teachers get up to speed on climate

change states can also help out teachers without having to go through the legislature

by improving climate change education

requirements in the state science standards

this can be as easy as adopting the Next Generation science standards

series of Science Education improvements

developed by 26 States a handful of Science Education

groups and at least one Elite level web developer

with the kind of black hat hacking chops you need to make a drop

down menu for a drop down menu

and if you personally want to get out of my dreams and into the

car of doing something right now our friends at climate change makers have put

together a Playbook to help you contact your state and local school board representatives

and politely request fair treatment for climate change in your local schools curriculum because

to quote a modern day Abraham

Lincoln oil and gas propaganda

absolutely does not belong in our schools and just to remind you that change

really can happen remember that utility company from Massachusetts come

on you remember the one that made all those booklets

that were titled natural

gas your invisible friend well

they've recently seen some of the light and they've dropped out of the gas

Lobby to focus more on their path to decarbonization

there's still a massive gas utility

but it seems like public pressure can

actually lead to some movements

and in a world where public pressure is mostly being used to ban books

and fire teachers it would be really nice to see it used for something

that actually improved the lives of children

wow thank you very much for watching I really appreciate

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our podcast that's right I'm talking about the climate deniers Playbook it's me and

Daily Show writer slash my friend Nicole

conlon we look at Classic climate myths we talk about their origin who promotes

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that's it for real these

endings are getting way

too long I'll see you next time I've

got to pay our stockholders

a fair return I

have not tried marijuana

I have never used it at any time all right