Now Your Kids Get “Energy” Ed From the Chamber of Commerce

October 25th, 2010 by Susan Kraemer

Parents: you might want to check what kind of polluter-paid propaganda your kids are being exposed to in school, as part of their science curriculum. The Chamber of Commerce has now joined Exxon itself in supplying “Energy” education textbooks for middle school children.

The Chamber is distributing a teaching guide to classrooms across the country as part of its “Shedding Light on Energy” program with educational publisher Scholastic Inc, that is worded to arouse fear of government regulation of pollution from fossil fuels.

“What do you think could happen if one of our energy sources was suddenly unavailable (e.g., power plant maintenance, government curb on production, etc.)?” the guide asks.

Starting from the familiar fossil industry premise that all energy IS fossil energy, the Chamber scares kids that the lights are going out due to a government “curb on production” of “energy sources.”

Of course the lights won’t go out if coal plants are shut down or mountaintop removal is stopped by the EPA, or if there are pollution controls on gas refineries.

Switching from dirty energy sources to clean ones take years; during which time, utilities issue requests for proposals (RFPs) from other cleaner energy suppliers, from wind farms to (less polluting) gas power plants.

Worst case scenario, coal power plants can be converted quite quickly to run on natural gas, as has been the trend, as more and more states move to reduce carbon emissions with Renewable Energy Standards that limit carbon. Utilities are aware of plans that affect their future production, and plan for changes in electricity supply.

The US Chamber of Commerce gets the majority of all its funding from the fossil industry, both domestic and foreign, opposes climate and clean energy regulations, and funds climate deniers both as new candidates for the the House and Senate, as well as those already there. It is losing members who are not part of the fossil lobby, due to its dangerous position on climate changing fossil fuel dependence.

Now the Chamber is trying to create future generations of “useful idiot” voters to vote against their best interests.

Susan Kraemer@Twitter

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Tags: Chamber of Commerce, deniers, fossil-funding, Scholastic Inc, Shedding Light on Energy

About the Author

Susan Kraemer writes at CleanTechnica, CSP-Today, PV-Insider , SmartGridUpdate, and GreenProphet. She has also been published at Ecoseed, NRDC OnEarth, MatterNetwork, Celsius, EnergyNow, and Scientific American. As a former serial entrepreneur in product design, Susan brings an innovator's perspective on inventing a carbon-constrained civilization: If necessity is the mother of invention, solving climate change is the mother of all necessities! As a lover of history and sci-fi, she enjoys chronicling the strange future we are creating in these interesting times. Follow Susan on Twitter @dotcommodity.

http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/global_warming/ Scott A Mandia

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