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.”https://www.youtube.com/embed/p-rTQ443akE?feature=oembed
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.
Continue reading HERE https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2021/04/making-kids-shrill-scared-and-stupid/
via Climate Scepticism
April 3, 2021 at 04:10AM