Jo Nova

 Programming and “pre-bunking” our children to vote Green — Boosting profits for years to come!

Imagine the uproar if a coal company spent thousands of dollars to put lesson plans in schools to teach our children how to run activist lobby groups to get better subsidies and tax breaks for coal miners? Imagine these lessons even include instruction on how to fundraise, and ways to counter the anti-coal “misinformation and disinformation” ?

Indeed the ACCC banned the Commonwealth Bank’s Dollarmites program from Queensland schools because it contained “sophisticated marketing tactics”. But it wasn’t teaching children to write activist campaigns to lobby for tax breaks and subsidies for bankers.

Instead Mike Cannon Brookes, Mr $30 billion, has set up the Boundless Earth charity with a $15 to $30 million budget which generously sponsors a group called Cool org. They write “scripts for teachers” and tell the kiddies to walk to school or ride their bike while (as Tony Thomas reminds us) Mr Cannon-Brookes travels in his Bombardier Twin-jet.

It’s no tinker-toy project, already reaching 2.5 million Australian kids each year and 200,000 teachers. It’s a full on indoctrination unit.

This is the reason conservatives get wiped out in elections. One side have a multilevel war machine propaganda unit, staffed and funded with millions of dollars and the other side send their kids to those schools (and then pay for the schools with their taxes).

By Tony Thomas, Quadrant

The Cool.org charity, drafts the scripts for teachers. Cool CEO Thea Stinear claims that Cool “helps young people cut through the BS. It helps them spot what’s real. What could be more important in this day and age?” Jason Kimberley of the multi-millionaire Just Jeans family set up Cool in 2008, catering to pre-school, primary, secondary, private and public schools with endorsement by departmental and school authorities.[3]

Cool, in fact, runs a parallel universe within the school system. Well over 17 million kids to date have imbibed at least one Cool lesson, delivered by the nearly 200,000 teachers who have signed on to Cool. Believe it or not, 92% of Australian schools have delivered Cool materials to kids. I’ve been recording this Cool educational empire for years, here, here, here and here.

Their skill building includes seven units of learning on misinformation or disinformation. In Science Over Skepticism they investigate things that “influence the adoption of scientific knowledge” — like presumably learning that “The Science^TM”  is done by consensus…

Tony Thomas writes:

Cool douses kids from pre-school upwards in a waterfall of green-left woke-ism and renewables advocacy, purportedly “building a sustainable and just world for all.” As a Cool member, I see exactly what Cool offers teachers and kids, but much of the Cool materials are paywalled to outsiders. Education was captured by the left decades ago, and school and department authorities have no qualms about kids imbibing green activism from third-party providers.[5]

But frankly, I’m near-traumatised at how completely and ruthlessly such third parties are drafting schoolkids to the green crusade…

Australian teachers are overwhelmed with bureaucratic paperwork, and administrative tasks, so they’re relieved when a professional team offers to do up the lesson plan for them, and fits it all to the bureaucratized spaghetti mess that is the curriculum. It even shows how it meets UN Paris convention goals.

Cannon Brookes uses the kids to get to the parents too.

Cool doesn’t just feed kids its climate factoids, it wants kids to preach the green gospel to schoolmates, parents and the community.

One lesson for 10- to 11-year-old’s is headed, Designing a Media Campaign to Promote Clean Energy Facts.  Teachers’ job: “Share some of the following examples of accurate clean energy campaigns with your class. Where possible, encourage students to assess how their campaign could counter misinformation in the clean energy sector.”

Other kids are activated to do a “myth-busting” campaign against “deniers”. Another program teaches children how to fundraise — though Tony Thomas wonders if they should be teaching stranger danger, cash receipts and accounting as well. This is “cash raising” he says. Kids are instructed to hassle I mean, talk to shop owners, and car owners, or people on the local council….

By Year 9 and 10 the kids have graduated to designing advocacy campaigns to improve “clean energy policy” and presumably Mike’s profit margins.

Tony Thomas has been in under the membership hood and says the authors seem terrified that the kids might hear skeptical viewpoints, and so they “steered them away from the best sceptic websites like joannenova.com.au and WUWT,  which Cool labels as  not credible” (I think Thomas means they issue a generic warning against “blogs” rather than name us, but I shall have to clarify).

It’s full “Climate Denialist” reprogramming

The Cool Org education system teaches children to call people petty names, use ad hom reasoning, and run political campaigns!

“Climate Change Denial is on the Rise among teenagers”

Hence Cool gives kids entire lessons excoriating “Climate Denial” – Cool is either oblivious or supportive of the echo to Holocaust Denial.[2] It defines “Denial” as rejecting the notions that climate change exists (a straw man, given sceptics’ affection for geology) and that “Humans are causing the climate to change” despite alleged overwhelming scientific evidence (sceptics dispute only the severity,  as in purported “catastrophic” warming, and emphasise the benefits such as CO2 having greened the plant).

The Cool lesson for Year 10 continues,

In some cases, climate deniers actively spread disinformation about climate change to suit a personal or political agenda. This can have profound effects on how we address the challenges posed by climate change.

In the “Climate Literacy: Climate Change Denial And Disinformation” lesson, Students explore climate denialism and the myths often presented about climate change. They explore the facts that bust these myths, look at the implications of climate denialism on meeting the challenges of climate change, and create a communication piece to address climate disinformation.

The program does specifically mention John  Clauser, the Nobel prize winning skeptics who they say “spreads misinformation”.

What Tony Thomas hasn’t found yet, is any mention that Chinese and Indian emissions are at record highs and are still growing. Boy are those kids going to feel used and abused when they find out the truth.

Now I’m a free speech girl, I would not mind kids being exposed to all their arguments, as long as skeptics get equal access. The truth always wins (and it’s funnier… ) our job would be easy.

Tony Thomas has done a long investigation and two articles already on Quadrant with a third to come. Read it all there.

Tony’s latest book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95

 

Essay by Eric Worrall

From green hero to zero. The Guardian even threw in a big oil smear against their former climate hero.

How ‘out of touch’ Tony Blair became a serious threat to climate action

Even before his call for a net zero ‘reset’, there had been criticism of ex-PM’s lucrative links with fossil fuel nations

Fiona Harvey Environment editor Mon 5 May 2025 21.17 AEST

…

In late 2022, on the sidelines of the Cop27 UN climate conference, the former UK prime minister Tony Blair was holding high-level meetings with senior figures from politics and business. His role in the negotiations raised questions for some, who began to worry that, having been a respected elder statesman on the subject – one who as prime minister crafted the UK’s first real climate measures, and made it the priority for the UK presidency of the G8 group of countries in 2005 – he might now be becoming, in the words of one Whitehall insider, “a serious threat to sensible climate policy”.

…

[Tony Blair] “In developed countries, voters feel they’re being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle when they know that their impact on global emissions is minimal,” he wrote. “Political leaders by and large know that the debate has become irrational. But they’re terrified of saying so, for fear of being accused of being ‘climate deniers’.”

…

Immediately after resigning as prime minister, Blair took up an international role as Middle East peace envoy, a position he would keep until 2015. He also moved quickly to forge lucrative partnerships for his thinktank and his former commercial consultancy, Tony Blair Associates, landing a multimillion-pound deal advising the Saudi Arabian government on modernising the country, even continuing after the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. He facilitated deals with the Chinese for PetroSaudi and TBI was paid millions for consultancy to the United Arab Emirates government in the mid-2010s.

…

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/may/05/tony-blair-serious-threat-climate-policy-out-of-touch

Blair didn’t criticise Net Zero as a goal, what he said is the economic fallout from racing to Net Zero too quickly might turn people against climate action.

The playbook for the attack on Tony Blair appears to follow the usual unimaginative green innuendo of being paid off by big oil.

If a green starts from the assumption that radical green action is the only rational policy, then from that perspective anyone who criticises even the most ridiculous green ideas must either be ignorant and stupid, or they must be a selfish corrupt villain who is endangering our children’s future for short term greed. It’s not even worth considering ideas which challenge the green movement on the merits of the ideas, because by definition they cannot have any merits – because deep greens unshakeably believe that radical green action is the only rational policy.

Is burning organic matter really saving the planet?

Lars Schernikau: Energy Economist, Commodity Trader, Author (recent book “The Unpopular Truth… about Electricity and the Future of Energy”)

Details inc Blog at www.unpopular-truth.com

Is biomass really the climate hero it claims to be?
We’ve been told it is clean, renewable, and part of the solution. But dig a little deeper, and the picture gets a little murkier.

Governments are pouring subsidies into biomass projects, and energy companies are branding it as a climate win. But when you zoom out and look at the full lifecycle…from harvesting through transport to emissions, biomass starts to look a lot less like a solution, and much more like a loophole.

Could it be that, burning wood and waste for energy might be more about clever accounting than actual carbon cuts? Let´s find out…

A blast from the past

Before fossil fuels became the flavour of the month, we relied on firewood, crop waste, and other forms of biomass to power our lives. Now, with the push for cleaner energy sources, biomass is back on the menu and being marketed as a “green” alternative. But the return of this “ancient” solution raises a critical question: are we actually helping the environment, or just shifting the damage?

Figure 1: Estimates for global biomass energy and sectoral breakdown, Schernikau based on various sources available in the blog

The biomass boom

Today, biomass accounts for a significant slice of the renewable energy pie. Wood pellets shipped across oceans, food waste turned into fuel, and even whole forests chopped down in the name of sustainability. Among others, Finland and Sweden are leaning hard into biomass, showcasing it as a reliable and renewable source of electricity.

On the surface, it sounds like a great idea to use organic material we otherwise would have thrown away anyway, burn it for power, and call it a win for the climate. But like most things in energy policy, the reality is messier and much more complex.

Green on paper, dirty in practice?

Biomass gets a lot of mileage out of being labelled as “carbon neutral”. The idea that any CO₂ released when it’s burned is offset by the carbon the plants absorbed while growing sounds tidy, right?

Except… it’s not that simple.

Burning wood produces more CO₂ per unit of energy than coal. And those trees? They don’t grow back overnight. It can take decades, even centuries, for regrowth to rebalance the carbon books…if it ever does. Then throw in the emissions from harvesting, processing, and transporting the biomass across continents, and the green credentials start to look a little shaky.

Figure 1: Does replacing coal with wood lower CO₂ emissions? Source: IOP Science 

What’s the real cost?

Beyond the whole carbon math, biomass has other consequences. Forests cleared for fuel mean lost habitats and biodiversity… and air quality near biomass plants often takes a hit as well.

There’s also the policy angle…subsidies and carbon accounting tricks can make biomass look greener than it really is. Some critics argue that the incentivizing of practices that aren’t sustainable in the long run is taking place, just because they tick the right regulatory boxes.

This isn’t about dissing biomass

To be clear…the idea of turning waste into energy isn’t inherently bad. Done effectively, on a small scale, using truly renewable inputs, biomass can play a role in the clean energy mix. But like most things, scale matters. Context matters. And honesty matters.

Curious to know more?

I put together a quick breakdown of what’s really going on with biomass, and why it might not be as sustainable as it looks. If you’ve ever felt like some parts of the climate conversation just don’t add up, this one’s for you. The full blog post digs deeper into the numbers, the policy loopholes, and the real-world impact of the biomass obsession. If you’ve ever wondered how “green” green energy really is, this one’s worth the read.

-> How “Green” Does Biomass Make the World?