Doomed Planet

Making Kids Shrill, Scared and Stupid

Oh my goodness! Australian schoolkids by the million are being saturated with actor and climate hysteric  Damon Gameau’s ridiculous climate-zealotry film 2040. [1]

“By the million”? I’m scrupulous with facts and Gameau’s actual quote on a marketing video was “reaching as many as 948,400 students”. But the video was made a year or so back. Since then his total of “lesson plans downloaded” has almost doubled, from 23,684 to 42,696, by this week. So a million brainwashed kids looks like an under-estimate.

The video also says more than 550 schools have been “activated” by teachers to promote Gameau’s green brainwashing. Let’s update the school numbers by 50 per cent, which is the corresponding increase in “Action Plans” run by Gameau since he did the marketing video.[2] That suggests over 800 schools – and there’s only 9000 schools in all of Australia.

For The Greens, schools are the bulk store for its recruits. No wonder, since kids in class are swamped with greenwash that teachers download from Cool Australia[3] [4], Scootle, an alphabet soup of green lobbies like WWF, ACF, AYCC (Youth Climate Coalition, which runs the kids’ climate strikes), the AAS (Academy of Science), the Tim Flannery-led Climate Council, Greenpeace and, I suspect, here and there, Extinction Rebellion. All lessons scrupulously tied to federal and state curricula under the Trojan horse of “Sustainability” mandated as one of three “cross-curriculum priorities”.

Speaking of Tim Flannery, the Academy’s Fellow has been paired with Gameau on climate gabfests. Gameau has also shared platforms with Extinction Rebellion co-founder and ibogaine drug-tripper Gail Bradbrook and he comes recommended by would-be revolutionary Noam Chomsky and the bonkers climateer Christiana “Tinkerbell” Figueres, who led the Paris climate schemozzle in 2015. Another panegyric for 2040 is from the SMH’s kookiest columnist Elizabeth Farrelly, famed for charging her peons $25 a month to build fences and dig holes on her Southern Highlands hobby farmlet. Her take on 2040: “Engaging persuasive and urgent. It’s an exercise in what you might call muscular hope.”

Gameau, who gets around unshaven in jeans and old flannel shirts, is not only saving the planet but running a nice little earner out of his doco. A US blog-site called “Net worth post” puts his net worth at $US13 million (AUD 17 million). Maybe that’s nonsense[5] but he’s turned 2040 into an international industry. A US speakers’ bureau has him listed, and its clients’ charge-out is from $US5000 to $US200,000-plus. Local corporates can become a Gameau “Climate Guardian” for A$7500-$10,650 which entitles them to toolkits, marketing, film licence, virtual workshop, and guest appearance by a 2040 big-shot. In a raft of optional extras are a tailor-made PR movie about the corporate’s “climate action journey” and a “Tailored C-Suite Engagement” with guru Damon himself. (I had to look up “C-Suite”. It means only for executives with titles starting with C for Chief). You can become a Gameau cut-price “Climate Advocate” for $3900. He claims personally to have a low carbon footprint, although he criss-crossed the globe by air making his film about low emissions. IMDB says the film itself grossed $US1,363,654 worldwide but I don’t know how current that figure is.

The premise of his film fantasy is that he time travels to 2040 and discovers that all his green solutions have been a brilliant success. He helps his real-life four-year-old daughter, Velvet, to navigate through climate perils to 2040’s nirvana. The movie closes with rapturous music and vision of youngsters of all colors and creeds dancing through a forest to celebrate low CO2 levels. One 20-something gal in a white frock grows from her shoulder-blades giant butterfly wings that actually flap. This must be the cheesiest movie clip ever made or even imaginable.[6] He doesn’t actually tell kids, “Vote Green”, but calls for strong new political leadership. “Wouldn’t it be terrific if new leaders emerge who could navigate us to a better 2040,” he says. Hint, hint, nudge, nudge.

Somehow Australian schoolkids (as distinct from Singaporean kids) no longer just learn stuff; they’re incited to change the world green-wards.[7] Political activism is now mandated by the curriculum. A typical Cool/2040’s lesson opens with a “Thought starter: “What excites you about the future” and kids are then exhorted to discuss the merits of “Carbon sequestration” and “Sustainability”. Never mind that carbon sequestration is just another ruinously expensive and futuristic “solution” to harmless CO2 emissions, and “Sustainability” is an undefinable feel-goodism.[8] Kids obviously will parrot that “the environment” is their future concern (notwithstanding that our air has never been purer and we’re putting out up to five colored bins weekly). Kids must then scrawl on their workpads answers to “What is one possible solution” and “Who is responsible for this solution and why?” Thus kids who have trouble solving 9×13=?, are coached to guide our planetary destinies. The 2040 “Factsheet”, by the way, finishes by telling kids to send letters to politicians and join the school-strike manipulators Youth Climate Coalition. They are also to run around ordering adults to cut their emissions. It’s the strangest “Factsheet” ever compiled by homo sapiens.

Education authorities bemoan that curricula are crowded with extraneous content. But they have endorsed prodigious school time being spent on 32 lessons about a woke fantasy film. Dig this 2040 lesson plan of 70 minutes –and this is before kids waste another 92 minutes seeing the film:

Work through this resource material in the following sequence:

10 minutes – Part A: Activating Prior Knowledge – OPTIONAL
20 minutes – Part B: Concerns For The Future – Barometer Activity
15 minutes – Part C: Thinking About The Solutions
25 minutes – Reflection

 The lesson templates would do credit to Soviet-era indoctrination. Boggle your mind on these:

Part C: Testing Out Tone

 Step 1. You are now going to create a climate change message for school students younger than you. You might want to warn students about some of the dangers relating to climate change, give them actions to take, or include other information that you find important or interesting. It’s up to you. You simply need to create three messages with three different intended tones. [For whom? Six-year-olds?]

Some intended tones you could use might be: angry, sad, positive, hopeful, anxious. Example –

Angry. “Adults are ruining the world that we have to grow up in. Act now!” TIP: Show your three messages to someone in your house. Ask them which message they think is the most effective, and why.”

Sample – I saw: – Huge wind turbines with beautiful green background.

Tone – Positive

This made me feel – That the future could be like that.

A further Soviet-style technique pits the majority in class against any child with non-conformist views, such as “My parents say zero CO2 by 2050 is total b/s”. (Dissent is encouraged over orthodox detail like whether we should give up meat or how soon the planet risks frying up). Kids are paired and one writes down the other’s ideas about renewables. Then the ideas are “shared” with the class.

Clarify any questions or key points raised by students, including the following:

# Sunlight – The sun is always shining somewhere. Renewable! [In reality, Unreliable!]

# Coal – Coal is formed from the remains of ancient organisms and can take millions of years to develop. Non-renewable!

Given Victoria alone has supply of brown coal till about AD2400, running out of it isn’t urgent.

The teaching materials claim, “Most forms of renewable energy generally have a much lower environmental impact.” Sure, take a squiz at any wind farm stretching to the horizon, and scores of thousands more would be needed for “zero” emissions. I have found no mention of where electricity is to come from at night during a wind drought, although I find stray and misleading references to batteries.[9] Frankly, if teachers want to teach kids about electricity grid optimisation, let the teachers first swot up via electrical engineering textbooks (Caution, teachers: maths are involved).

The brain- and green-washing is having serious impacts on kids’ positive attitude to life and mental health. Hardly surprising when teachers confront kids with rubbish like:

In the IPCC’s most pessimistic scenario, where the population booms, technology stagnates, and emissions keep rising, the atmosphere gets to a startling 2,000 ppm by about 2250. That gives us an atmosphere last seen during the Jurassic when dinosaurs roamed, and causes an apocalyptic temperature rise of perhaps 9 degrees C (16°F)… If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted… CO2 will need to be reduced… to at most 350 ppm,” Columbia University climate guru James Hansen has said. We sailed past that target in about 1990, and it will take a gargantuan effort to turn back the clock.

Kids are even told air travel must cease:

Flights need to stop, or at the very least, be reserved only for emergency situations.

Similarly,

You can take a positive step right now and Pledge to never buy another gas powered vehicle again and get the “Last Gas Car” bumper sticker.

Gameau says he had climate scientists fact-check his masterpiece. They’re all obviously crap at maths. Gameau in the film quotes that “Governments spend $10 million a minute subsidising fossil fuels.” That would be $A5.3 trillion a year. Australia’s total GDP is only $2 trillion.

The Cool/2040 crowd also spruiks WWF’s insane “Earth Hour” which sees kids and adults turn off lights for an hour to virtue-signal for the planet. It’s a pity the lessons don’t include info about the 800 million  peasants without electricity, and the life-threatening discomforts involved. Instead, and incredibly, 2040 promotes Bangla Desh as the energy model the rest of the world should emulate. Remember, maybe a million schoolkids in 500-1000 schools are being bombarded with these dark green fantasies.

The zealots throw science and truth out the window. They lie to kids that CO2 caused episodic warmings in the paleo-climate when ice cores show that warming preceded CO2 rises. They lie that warming causes droughts, even after Professor Andy Pitman has contradicted that. The warmist materials cite the 2011 Texas drought to prove their point – never mind that Texans lately have been freezing and flooded.

Even more ludicrous is the teachers’ notion that 11-year-olds can do field experiments demonstrating climate-change inter-relationships of food, transport and energy. “Develop a plan for research (what would happen and why this approach has been chosen). Use the Experiment Proposal Template provided by your teacher to record your ideas.” Someone should submit that Template for a Nobel.

Gameau is more catspaw for the Greens than even a rudimentary authority on global warming.

Interviewer: How much did you know about the specifics of climate change prior to making the film?

Gameau: Absolutely nothing. I found myself struggling to connect with it.

He claims he did homework for eight months before starting the shoots. This involved briefings from the usual pack of academic alarmist shills posing as “scientists” and offering their faux “solutions”. He’s candid that his forte remained the cinematic arts of emotion: “It’s really important that all artists get involved and disseminate the messages but also use evocative language that people can connect to.” His USP (unique selling proposition) is optimism, e.g. that growing and eating lots of seaweed will make life gay in 2040. He originally injected 45 minutes of politics into a three-hour filmic marathon – one can guess what partisan line he took. But luckily most – but far from all – of the politics fell on the cutting room floor. He still imagines Left and Right can unite to fight CO2. Perhaps, if one assumes Malcolm Turnbull represents the “Right”.

+Cool’s lessons on 2040 excoriate “climate deniers”. For example, kids can click on Cool’s link to Melbourne University’s Dennis Muller, who rants that the climate peril is worse than nuclear war. Muller says, “Media ‘impartiality’ on climate change is ethically misguided and downright dangerous.” Muller, who remarkably is Senior Research Fellow in the so-called Centre for Advancing Journalism, writes to laud our universities’ Conversation editor Misha Ketchell for his “zero tolerance” against any readers’ deviation from the party line on global warming. Ketchell was so troubled by commenters taking his academic catastropharians to task he banned comments on the site. Ironic, no? A ‘conversation’ in which only one party is allowed to be heard!

The green-brained Gameau has set up something called the Regeneration Group to help solve the “climate crisis”, adding, “We won’t tolerate posts or comments disputing the legitimacy of climate disruption.”

Because the Murdoch press hosts some sceptic and right-of-centre information (unlike Their ABC), kids’ lessons include anti-Murdoch propaganda. Says the class material:

Rupert Murdoch owns almost 70% of the newspapers that are read daily in Australia. He is the prominent ‘narrative gatekeeper’ in our country … 55% of stories that accepted the science contained incorrect facts or impacts.

Talking of “facts”, the Cool/2040 Factsheet[10] admits that recent warming is merely “believed” to be from human’s CO2 emissions, and that dire forecasts of warming are the mere product of “a range of models”. The fictive “facts” then arrive in legions. They include that sea ice in the Antarctic is “frequently at record lows” (record highs more like it) and that hotter weather is harming quality and availability of crops and foods. Not so. Recent bleaching supposedly harmed 93 per cent of the Barrier Reef. (Not so, but auditing that figure will get you fired, like Peter Ridd). Plants, fish and animals are scampering from the equator towards the poles. “Facts” include “Other impacts we might see…” such as species’ extinction, weather extremes[11] and worse diseases.

The doozy of all the Factsheet “Facts” is that “Sea-levels are expected to rise approximately 2.3 metres for each degree Celsius of temperature rise.” For starters, sea rise for the 20thC global warming of 1degC was about 20cm not 230cm. Second, the IPCC forecasts sea rise for the next century of under a metre. If Cool/2040 think we’re in for at least 3degC of warming by 2100, that implies 7m of sea rise, nearly twice the height of my townhouse. I fear for Tim Flannery’s waterfront mansion on the Hawkesbury

In a decade of googling Cool and other class materials, I have not once come across any reference to world-reputed sceptics like Anthony Watts, Joanne Nova or Ian Plimer. Rightists like Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones are sometimes cited but only as Aunt Sallies for kids to mock, while Gameau’s materials push kids to videos by “woke” oracles like “Bill Nye, the Science Guy”, a mechanical engineer turned actor-comedian-propagandist.

Gameau’s material for kids blithely advocates overturning Western civilisation:

Tackling climate change requires large-scale, systemic changes across all aspects of society. Simply aiming to reduce our C02 emissions is not enough: we need to rapidly decarbonise our planet. While this might sound challenging, the good news is we already have the knowledge and tools to do it…

Warmist dogma has been failing at federal elections for the past decade. The green-left’s strategy is to use schools as battering rams into office. I must say it’s “progressing” well.

Tony Thomas’s new book, Come To Think Of It – essays to tickle the brain, is available here as a book ($34.95) or an e-book ($14.95)

 

[1] A full account of barmy material in 2040 can be found here.

[2] 20,500 Action Plans when the video was made, today 29,652 Plans.

[3] Cool Australia operates in 8400 primary and secondary schools — 90 per cent of all schools. Nearly half our teachers use the lessons, downloading them 2.1 million of them in 2019.[i]

[4] herehere, here

[5] Another US celebrity site puts Gameau’s age at 62, noting that he is “still alive”. But considering he graduated from NIDA in 1999, around 40 seems nearer the mark.

[6] Australian actress, Davini Malcolm, plays a shaman in the film. She was born “Lindy” but received the name “Davini” from her Indian spiritual teacher, Osho, in 1994. She went on to help produce and write the 13-part children’s TV Series Teenie Weenie Greenies and do a film, Lotus Birth, of her experience having twins in the bath. The births were preceded by her partner, Peter, and their two boys around the piano singing what the DVD notes call their famous and delightful “fart song”.

[7] “Our units follow the narrative of the film encouraging students to discover information, identify and solve problems, students then make plans to take action.”

[8] Perhaps the most significant new weasel word to have emerged from the UN’s equivalent of the Ministry of Truth is “sustainable.” Commitment to sustainability is now mouthed by every politician, bureaucrat, marketing executive and media hack on Earth. It sounds so benign, so reasonable, but what it actually means is “bureaucratically controlled and NGO-enforced within a UN-based socialist agenda.” Like most aspects of socialism, it is based on incomprehension and/or hatred of the nature and function of market capitalism, not least because markets — which signal scarcity, reward economy and promote profitable innovation — are the only true source of sustainability.” – Peter Foster, Jan 5, 2021. 

[9] Gameau claims that somehow we will get solar household batteries “so cheap you are not even going to notice”. The cost of a battery system is currently between $2000 and $20,000, which are certainly numbers large enough to be noticed.

[10] Much Cool/2040 material is password protected so not linked here

[11] Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore bluntly states: “The fact is there is no hard evidence that any of these things have been or will be triggered by human-caused emissions of CO2. It is all conjecture based on the hypothesis that carbon dioxide controls temperature, which itself has never been determined as fact.”

13 thoughts on “Making Kids Shrill, Scared and Stupid

  • Elizabeth Beare says:

    None of this sheer indoctrination of schoolchildren will change while governments still give money and lots of lip service to the idiocy of ‘climate disasters’ etc. They legitimate the nonsense by giving it any credibility at all. It will just have to play out in economic terms until, like the predictions and lunacies of The Club of Rome in the 1960’s, reality turns up to rain on their parade. Sadly, it could take a full fifty to a hundred years before it is overtaken by other forms of new religions. Or by the rush to even more socialism, as economies go under and the usual prescription of more government money is applied; making matters worse until they are truly unbearable. Venezuela comes to mind. And everyone in such South American hellholes is now hell bent on getting to America for the new issue of free stuff just announced for the incoming hordes.

  • Harry Lee says:

    The main thing to note:
    There are no (NO!) visible -let alone effective- counter-moves to the utterly evil malignancy of the lie/hysteria that “humans cause climate change by burning fossil fuels”.
    The marxist people are using the Climate/CO2 lie/hysteria as part of their strategy to destroy free enterprise, freedom of speech, and the wealth of the striving productive classes.
    Now note:
    There is no counter-action by the Big-Wigs (investors, managers, non-marxist politicians) of the free enterprise system.
    They have given up on the social system and its denizens, and are now acting to ensure their survival.
    (Turnbull is but one shining example among the many tens of thousands of such people.)
    So:
    Unless a critical mass of Ordinary People of the non-Big Statist variety soon mobilise themselves, we will all pass into slavery -under the control of the cretinous, crushingly cruel Commissars of the Left.
    (The ALP, unions, Greens and all their allies in the public services, in the mainstream media, and in the education and legal systems seek full and final control over the lives of the striving productive classes. The Higher-Ups of the non-Left have already secured their own compounds. They have given up on the Ordinary People -understandably actually, when one considers the indolence, ignorance and ingratitude of many residents of Australia, these days. Over the decades, the Left has cleverly killed the concept of contributory citizenship.)

  • rod.stuart says:

    It was a HUGE mistake to allow government to invade the sphere of childhood learning.
    Had this mistake not been made, the private sector would have by now developed a wide variety of institutions, curricula, and mthods that would allow ready comparison and there fore selection of the process with the best outcome. This is just as it is with any good or service in a truly free enterprise society.
    Instead our developing generations are subjected to this indoctrination at the hands or green left and the teaachers’ unions.
    But since we have allowed the government to usurp the entire industry, it is a pity that that the same govermnment we elect does not step in to insist on the legitimate counter arguments to this tosh. But then, our elected knuckleheads do nothing about the lopsided Alinsky-Bolshevik Colective either.

  • Doubting Thomas says:

    I think it is beyond argument that the greatest influence on our governments’ climate policy has more to do with crony capitalism than the ravings of brain-damaged leftist. Similarly impractical fantasies like very fast rail schemes in low population density environments tend to raise their heads from time to time when the vested interests coalesce.

    Follow the money.

  • Ian MacKenzie says:

    Climate alarmism works for the Left by generating funds for academics and building support for big government to provide “solutions”. Climate alarmism works for the Right by generating a vast trough of subsidies. Against such vested interests, the parents of school children have no chance of any influence over the curriculum. Moreover, as taxpayers, they are paying for all the civil servants, academics and subsidies beneficiaries while those they pay are progressively destroying Australia’s cheap, reliable electricity system. It would seem that in Australian climate politics, to paraphrase Spock, the greed of the few outweighs the rights of the many.

  • Harry Lee says:

    The marxist-animated Left now commands the heights in all institutions that control the use of all Australian resources.
    And the marxist-animated Left wants full and final dumb-down of the Folk.
    And the marxist-controlled state schools and the universities are fast making sure of that.
    Add in the marxist-inspired efforts of the ABC, SBS and 90% of the mainstream media, and the AHRC, and much of the law industry, and most of the public services, and it’s Lights Out.
    It remains for the incoming ALP-union-Green Federal Govt to declare officially that Australia is a tributary province of China.

  • Helmond says:

    Tony, I think that your characterisation of teachers is harsh and unwarranted. Sure, most of them probably vote Labor or Greens, so I get your antipathy. And yes, the curriculum that they teach probably has a fair bit of climate change baloney in it, but rank and file teachers do what is reqired of them by the brass. Most of us are not high achievers and that’s just how it is. Me? Moderate.

    Will the school system cause pupils to become lifelong green activists? A few maybe, but for the most part if they ever really believed this stuff, their faith will erode as they get older. Like when they fly to Bali or buy a car or move into an air conditioned condo. After a while the only concession that they will make to climate change is buying a few so-called environmentally friendly products from time to time. Even if in primary school pupils are as green as Kermit the frog (and probably driving their parents nuts), you can bet the rent that they will still want to be driven to school in the family SUV.
    When we see a couple of thousands young climate activists taking to the streets, we might reflect on how many are not demonstrating. The answer is nearly every one. There is some biblical quote about on becoming an adult, one should put away childish things. Thankfully most of us do.

    Those Quadrant contributors and readers who think that teachers are crap should try to arrange a few visits to schools. Nothing like seeking a little evidence. They might be surprised.

  • Harry Lee says:

    Helmond, yes, teachers do what they must to have a job, if not a career.
    So they must join a certain culture of a certain kind of group-think.
    Used to be described as Just Following Orders.
    And it’s matter of the proportion of teachers who are greenist/marxist in their life orientation -not that it’s all or none.
    I do not blame teachers for going along with the marxist-greenist flow.
    Not when there is no critical mass of individuals in any walk or station of life willing to fight for a Proper Australia, in which the pursuit of excellence is the central aim-
    -instead of how to wreck the joint by promoting the parasitism of Identity and Grievance over the necessary acts of citizenship of Competence and Contribution.
    And not when the marxist forces that control the state education systems and the universities have ensured that competence is no match for affirmative action, and have declared the legitimacy of the handover of Australian sovereignty to China and any Muslims who wish to apply.
    Meanwhile, the Climate Fantasy Religion has taken root -for obvious reasons of lack of an alternative that makes the young -of all ages- feel good about themselves, with zero material effort.
    Note:
    1. What people believe to feel good about themselves and what they consume/depend on in terms of fossil fuels exist in separate compartments of their uneducable/untrainable minds.
    2. The greened-up kids will vote in a permanent marxist-ALP-union-Greenist government -long before they wake up to Reality.

  • norsaint says:

    These imbeciles should be prosecuted for child abuse.

  • Helmond says:

    norsaint
    I assume your imbeciles are teachers, but if we are seeing child abuse then surely parents are to blame in sending their children to school for climate change indoctrination.

    Prosecution wouldn’t work because the justice system is infested with bleeding hearts and Marxists, and besides the jails are already bursting at the seams.

    I get that climate change crusaders drive you nuts, but you can’t be serious about prosecution.

  • Peter Marriott says:

    Good piece Tony and put together beautifully with plenty of facts and good, drawing one in, syntax, at least it is to me. What to do about these foolish children….well, just wait I suppose, until they get a little older and wiser and just…grow out of it or come to a sticky end trying to put the nonsense into play, sort of like Nietzsche’s Ubermensches ?

  • Harry Lee says:

    Yes, our country has been taken over by an alliance of naive idealists (ie ignorant do-gooders), and scoopers-up of tax-payers funds-
    -all orchestrated from the shadows by malign/evil neo-marxists who seek to establish an unassailable Big State and confiscate the wealth created by the striving productive classes who establish and maintain heterosexual nuclear families.

    Meanwhile, too many people whose interests in grave peril, and whose efforts are required for the counter-revolution, are off in their own fantasies fueled by alcohol and other recreational drugs, and other various kinds of consumption.

    Time for nett-contributing anti-marxists and heterosexual family-makers to re-assess their priorities and come to grips with necessary sacrifices, as did the generations of Whites who founded Australia and gave so much in the World Wars.

  • DG says:

    It’s a pity that the ordinary person can’t read graphs, and doesn’t understand that correlation is not causation…but then, CO2 concentrations are not correlated with ‘global’ (whatever that is, given we only have sparse measurements of temperature over the whole globe) temperature movements, anyway, and never have been.

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