Christian Aid’s Blatant Climate Propaganda For Schools

By Paul Homewood

Someone sent me this teachers study aid being circulated around schools by Christian Aid.

Far from being an educational aid, it is little more than insidious propaganda aimed at young kids.

It is so full of inaccuracies, exaggerations and significant omissions that it is hard to know where to start!

But just a few notable items:

1) The front cover conflates “fumes” with “climate change”

2) They talk exclusively of emissions per capita. While this is relevant, much more so are total emissions. Would any child looking at this appreciate that the UK only accounts for 1% of the world’s CO2? Or that China’s emissions are nearly double the US?

Nor is there any mention of emission trends, which would show how rapidly emissions in China and India have been rising in the last decade or so.

3) There is one extremely dishonest section, which:

a) conflates GHG and pollution

b) accuses the UK of “harming the environment”

c) States that nearly every country has committed to reducing GHGs.

4) They repeat the extreme weather lie

5) They mention sea levels, but don’t provide any perspective, ie that seas have been rising steadily since the 19thC, and that the rate is around 7 inches/century. Or that at least part of this is due to natural warming since the ending of the Little Ice Age (which no doubt none of the pupils will ever have been told about.

6) They provide a puff for green energy tariffs, but don’t say that the school will only get green energy if it signs up for one. Or that green subsidies are costing their families hundreds of pounds a year.

Perhaps Christian Aid should be encouraging schools to turn off all mains supply of electricity and gas, and instead install a few solar panels and wind mills.

7) What you can do – there is a section offering suggestions about what individuals can do.

However worthy it might be to get individuals to take some responsibility, surely children should be told that nothing they do will make the slightest difference to the climate, even if every person in the country did the same.

Or are they afraid to acquaint kids with harsh reality?

8) Finally, there is actually no mention of the amount of warming seen in the last century or so.

If children were shown a graph of day to day temperature variations during the year, and then shown the tiny rise in average temperatures since 1900, they might actually decide that the whole thing is not worth getting paranoid about!

Surely any study aids provided to schools should show all of the relevant facts in a balanced way, so as to encourage pupils to analyse them and come to their own conclusions.

This package from Christian Aid fails to do that in any sense, and is little more than outright propaganda. How can headteachers allow it into their school? And is the D of E aware of it?