Florida kids will now be taught PragerU’s climate denialism amid record heat

In the aftermath of Hurricane Ian in Sept 2022, 2.5 million children missed school in Florida. Five schools were damaged, and three were destroyed as the category four hurricane hit the sunshine state from the west side – something that rarely happens. Over 168,000 children were kept out of the classroom for weeks, with some missing as many as 100 school days.

The losses for children were huge, while scientists and environmentalists said this was an example of climate change in action.

And yet, as the unwelcomed anniversary of Hurricane Ian approaches, many of Florida’s school kids - who have endured one of the hottest summers on record and have been swimming in coastal waters over 100 degrees - will now be taught that climate change is not real.

The baffling juxtaposition, which education and environmental experts claim is the equivalent of teaching children that fire doesn’t exist as it engulfs their classrooms, is being brought to Florida’s K-5 schools by the right-wing non-profit group PragerU with the explicit blessing of Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state’s board of education.

The same duo has pushed anti-progressive politics in recent months that targeted the LGBTQ community, abortion rights, gun control, Black history, book bans, and gender identity while also trying to bully Disney away from its support of liberal issues.

PragerU’s sleek and highly produced educational videos, presented in a series of cartoons, delicately infer that climate activists are like Nazis, wind and solar power pollute the earth, and that record global temperatures are merely cyclical and have nothing to do with human actions.

While environmental advocates and educators work hard to show the true extent of climate change, hoping it will alter human behavior, PragerU’s arrival in one of the country’s largest public school systems is undoubtedly a major blow to the movement.

Raymer Maguire, director of policy and campaigns at the Cleo Institute, a women-led environmental education and advocacy group in Florida, told Reckon that teaching climate denialism could have a detrimental impact on Florida’s students going forward.

“By teaching future generations blatant lies and propaganda and that climate denialism that is in direct contradiction to scientific fact,” he said. “We are setting up our future generations to not have the tools and the education they need to tackle what is arguably the greatest crisis that they’re going to face in their lifetime.”

Maguire also noted that offering different points of view to children was perfectly reasonable, provided they were rooted in scientific fact and good faith, which he says PragerU is not doing.

“What they’re doing is completely denying the nearly universally accepted scientific fact that humans burning carbon is resulting in us having the climate impact that we feel today,” he added.

A bad time for climate denial education

The videos come at a tricky time in Florida’s environmental history. Alongside record-breaking heat in and out of the water this summer, the state is arguably the ground zero of climate change in the United States.

The sunshine state is expected to experience more rain and flash floods, detrimental coastal flooding by 2050, and more frequent and violent hurricanes. And on top of that, increased water temperature means a greater risk of waterborne bacteria and the death and total loss of precious corals and the ecosystems they protect. The 2020 Atlantic Hurricane season, for example, broke records for the most tropical depressions and named storms. While subsequent years have been quieter, the overall decade-to-decade trend is that major hurricanes are becoming more common as our oceans become warmer. Warm water is fuel for hurricanes.

That places people, homes, and aging infrastructure at greater risk, one of the reasons that insurance companies are fleeing Florida and other climate-vulnerable states.

Despite all the evidence, PragerU claims it’s merely to do with the earth’s natural cycles.

“The climate is always changing,” said the conservative company’s CEO, Marissa Streit, echoing a classic climate-denial rallying cry that rejects fossil fuels as the cause of accelerated climate change.

While scientists have widely accepted that the planet goes through drastic changes in its temperature and has done throughout history long before Homo sapiens arrived 350,000 years ago, the recent changes to temperature and weather are more than can be attributed to cycles alone.

“Although the earth experiences natural cycles of heating and cooling, these cycles have been exacerbated by human activities, including the use of fossil fuels not only in the extraction and production but for transportation and production of plastics as well,” said Mary Gutierrez, director of Earth Ethics, a Florida-based environmental advocacy group. “These are not just opinions but scientifically based, peer-reviewed reports. It is a huge setback for Florida, a state heavily impacted by climate change.”

Read More: Extreme heat is contaminating our waters. Here’s what it all means and how you can stay safe

What does PragerU actually teach?

PragerU’s climate videos often echo the climate science and policy views of fossil fuel companies that challenge renewable energies like solar and wind while greenwashing the harm they cause.

In one video, a young Polish schoolgirl becomes concerned about climate change after being taught about the dangers of fossil fuels at school. When she gets home, her parents explain that the planet has always cooled and warmed as part of a natural cycle long before humans began burning fossil fuels. They also tell her that climate action is only worthwhile once China and India cut their emissions since they are apparently the biggest polluters while suggesting that renewable energy is unreliable and too expensive.

When Ania returns to school, she repeats what her parents have told her to her teacher and classmates. She is shunned. However, her mood improves after her grandfather tells her about life under the Nazis before and during World War II. Ania feels empowered because her grandfather explains that fighting tyranny “always takes courage.”

A second video shows a child in Africa with a narrator explaining how wind and solar energy batteries eventually break down and become “hazardous waste.” It also attacks renewable energy by explaining how risky it is “to rely on things like wind and sunlight, which are not constant.”

In addition to climate denial videos, PragerU has content that promotes archaic versions of femininity, explicitly telling girls to smile and be less angry as they prepare for the role of a wife and mother. Another shows Frederick Douglass criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement and justifying the existence of slavery. One controversial video claims that “slavery was not invented by white people,” while another denies the existence of gender dysphoria.

Examples of extremism throughout the website vary from subtle to direct. One PragerU presenter, for example, said that “everyone who died in the Holocaust chose to die before they were ever born.

”Does anyone really want the videos?

Although the climate-denial curriculum has yet to be introduced in classrooms, some of Florida’s counties have already ruled it out. At least three of the state’s ten largest counties have said they will not show the videos in their schools.”I believe this should not be utilized, so I asked the chief academic officer if it would be used in Pinellas County schools, and I was informed that the district has no plans of adding these resources to [the] curriculum,” said Pinellas County school board member Caprice Edmond to local news.

Florida Dept. of Education spokesperson Cassie Palelis said in a statement that the PragerU material “aligns to Florida’s revised civics and government standards” and “is no different than many other resources, which can be used as supplemental materials in Florida schools at district discretion.”In addition to Pinellas County, Polk, Pasco, and Hillsborough schools have no plans of introducing climate denialism.

Referring to the immediate response from some counties that they wouldn’t show the material, Maguire of the Cleo Institute said it had been encouraging to see.

“We are mobilizing our members and organizers across the state to speak with their local school board members,” he said. “Because the activist, the voters, the people on the ground, can help to help grow the momentum to reject this on a county-wide level across the state. And I just think it’s an inspiring thing that this is being done at the local level, which obviously carries a little bit of personal and political risk for the folks that are doing it.”He added: “But they’re taking these bold steps to reject this curriculum, which has no place in our schools.”

While the cartoons are primarily aimed at children, they are also subtly aimed at the parents who want their climate denial views expressed more widely in schools, according to Streit, who said that parents are not being heard and the climate change message was effectively a form of gaslighting.”

We’re hoping that this product will better explain to everyone what we want to see in our children’s schools,” she said. Florida is the first state to approve videos from PragerU but isn’t the only state to shy away from teaching the truth. School science curriculum in Texas now requires that schools teach positive lessons about fossil fuels.

However, not all parents agree with the videos or that they are being gaslit by the established science community.

“These [Prager] kids videos are the antithesis to critical thinking, “said Miami-Dade County parent Gregory Gonzalez, who said that he and his wife began researching them last week. “We welcome a range of opinions on any issue, but the views are extremist. Comparing people trying to clean up pollution to Nazis is lazy and manipulative.”