We Can Lie to Our Kids to Prevent Them from Being Scared of Environmental Collapse, But Is that the Right, Honest, and Most Productive Thing to Do?

From ultra-right-wing religious fanatic Mike Huckabee writes:  Our kids are hearing that the Earth is doomed. Naturally, they’re scared—but they don’t need to be. It’s why (my) team created The Kids Guide to The Truth About Climate Change. It gives kids a close look at the facts behind climate change so they can feel safe.

“The Truth About Climate Change” claims to dispel the three myths from the screen cap here.

In fact:

1) Our kids are most certainly not “safe.”  That said, there are plenty of reasons to believe that our civilization can limit the damage associated with climate change if it acts rapidly and decisively.

2) The situation is, in reality, getting worse.  There are no climate scientists who aren’t in the pocket of Big Oil who refute this.

3) Ultimately, the cause is capitalism, insofar as it calls for a) infinite growth on a planet of finite size, an absurdity, and b) massive removal of laws that regulate environmentally destructive practices.  Those who understand this, and who care about the fate of life on Earth, are proponents of what is called “conscious capitalism,”  “democratic socialism,” etc.

For many different reasons, I favor being truthful with our children.  It’s said that “honesty is the best policy.”

But beyond that, it enables them to get involved early.  By the time kids are five, they’re old enough to understand that we all live on one planet, that this is our home, and that we need to take care of it.  By the time they reach nine or ten, they can grasp the basic concept of anthropogenic global warming, i.e., that human activity is changing the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere, creating an imbalance in the amount of heat that the Earth absorbs and reradiates back into space.

Do you think for a moment that people like Huckabee and the others who do the bidding of Big Oil honestly believe that climate change is a hoax?  That’s a sad joke.  The Christian zealots, and Huckabee may be among them, actively welcome the end of the Earth and the ensuing events laid out in the last book of the bible, Revelation.

The rest are “people” whose life work is directed at enriching themselves, all the while knowing that their wealth is gained at the cost of inflicting unprecedented suffering on billions of people.  They are the personification of evil.   Relative to theirs, Huckabee’s crime is a parking violation.