Treehuggers axe Scholastic energy curriculum

I’m not using the term “treehugger” facetiously, for once. The liberals in question use it to describe themselves. Here’s what happened.

Scholastic dared present factual information in an education curriculum about American energy production, called the United States of Energy. Because it didn’t go all in for the green agenda (it said nice things about coal, for instance) it didn’t mesh with the leftist worldview. Soon it became vilified and came under attack by the usual radical environmentalist suspects (TreeHugger, Greenpeace and Sierra Club, for instance) and media liberals at Mother Jones, the New York Times (which coined the term “Big Coal” to hammer the American Coal Foundation, which helped fund the curriculum), and Rethinking Schools. The left wing Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood seems to have driven the entire campaign. These groups hunt in packs, and they all seem to have been mouthing from the same set of talking points, about “pushing coal in the classroom” and so forth.

These groups ripped Scholastic from several directions and got yet another liberal propaganda campaign tucked into our schools, one that fits the left’s agenda of ditching fossil fuels before we have the technology to replace them, and command average Americans’ choices and lives down to the kindergarten level.

This is the latest in the left’s campaign against fossil fuels, claiming that providing children any information on coal is commercial indoctrination, worthy of an all out ideological war. But the original lesson packet wasn’t limited to coal, and also included general information on nuclear, hydroelectric power, wind, natural gas and solar energy.

Now, Scholastic seems intent to focus on promoting environmental activism through children by promoting the book The Down-to-Earth-Guide to Global Warming, which was written by Al Gore’s co-producer of An Inconvenient Truth, Laurie David. When the Goracle gets his due, the left has won. The left’s Luddite diktats have replaced what they denounced as the coal industry’s advocacy.

This isn’t the first time that the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood has attacked capitalism either, they make a habit of it. They have gone after American Idol, Disney and Ronald McDonald in the past.