Peter Wilson:
A recent Wall Street Journal article expressed concern about low math and science standards in the Common Core curriculum, despite President Obama’s frequent speechifying about the importance of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education.
There are many possible explanations for this sorry state of affairs, but one factor that doesn’t add anything positive is the politicization of education, a culmination of fifty years of a “long march through the institutions” by leftists. Humanities and social sciences have been most corrupted, but STEM disciplines are being assaulted by a new agenda promoting “climate education” or “climate literacy.”
A report titled “Climate Literacy,” signed by President Obama’s science czar John Holdren, declares that “Climate Science Literacy is part of Science [STEM] Literacy.” The usual arguments are presented: 1) recent global warming “represents an extraordinary rapid rate of change compared to changes in the previous 10,000 years.” 2) Rising temperatures will lead to “rising global sea level and increasing frequency and intensity of heat waves, droughts, and floods.” 3) “human activities are now the primary cause of most of the ongoing increase in Earth’s globally averaged surface temperature.”
Many climate scientists disagree with these three propositions; at very least, they are partisan viewpoints with political implications that have no place in public education.
This campaign is being advanced by local, state and federal governments, by universities and various non-profits, and is aimed at K-16 — kindergarten through college.
Stanford University’s School of Earth Sciences has developed Climate Change Education curricula for middle school and high school, which begins with the following declaration: “Global climate change …is unequivocal, almost certainly is caused mostly by us, already is causing significant harm, and is growing rapidly.”
Environmental activist groups like the Sierra Club, the NRDC, and the National Wildlife Federation all push for climate education. Another organization, the National Center for Science Education, describes itself as the “premier institution dedicated to keeping evolution and climate change in the science classroom and to keeping creationism and climate change denial out.”
Not surprisingly, the largest promoter of climate literacy is the federal government, which has dozens of programs scattered throughout the bureaucracy. It’s worth taking a step back to look at the big picture of federal climate spending.
In 1990, President George H.W. Bush established the United States Global Change Research Program or USGCRP which “coordinates and integrates federal research on changes in the global environment and their implications for society.” USGCRP is a collaboration of 13 federal agencies, currently under the oversight of John Holdren.
Federal climate spending increased throughout the 1990s and then, “In February 2002, [President George W. Bush] created a new Cabinet-level management structure, the Committee on Climate Change Science and Technology Integration, to oversee the more than $3 billion annual investment in the combined federal climate change research and technology development programs” (Globalchange.gov). Total Federal Climate Change Expenditures, as reported to Congress every year, rose to $4.6 billion in 2003 and a decade later, expenditures have expanded five-fold to $22.6 billion (2013 Enacted Budget Authority). The 2014 proposed budgets total $21.4B.
For comparison, the 2012 budget of the Heartland Institute, one of the largest skeptical non-profits, funded in part by the Koch brothers, is $7.7 million.
Here’s a diagram from the House Committee on Energy and Commerce of where we are today:
