Videos that compare climate activists to Nazis, portray solar and wind energy as environmentally ruinous and claim that current global heating is part of natural long-term cycles will be made available to young schoolchildren in Florida, after the state approved their use in its public school curriculum.
Slickly-made animations by the Prager University Foundation, a conservative group that produces materials on science, history, gender and other topics widely criticized as distorting the truth, will be allowed to be shown to children in kindergarten to fifth grade after being adopted by Florida’s department of education.
Teachers who use the materials “will not be reprimanded, cannot be pushed back on about it, we are approved on the curriculum”, said Jill Simonian, director of outreach at PragerU Kids, the youth arm of the organization. “More states are following. Florida – I’m applauding. This is step in the right direction.”
But experts who have studied the videos and other PragerU output have warned that many of Florida’s 3 million public schoolchildren risk being exposed to a form of rightwing indoctrination that conforms to the worldview of the organization’s funders but bears little resemblance to reality.
“These videos target very young and impressionable kids with messages of support for fossil fuels and doubts over renewable energy resources – they are trying to grow the next generation of supporters for fossil fuels,” said Adrienne McCarthy, a researcher at Kansas State University who has studied the activities of PragerU.
“It’s propaganda 101. Equating people concerned about the climate change with Nazis can have long-term impacts on young, impressionable people. The beliefs PragerU are pushing forward overlap with far-right extremist beliefs. The fear is that they will bring this sort of extremist beliefs into mainstream society.”
Despite its name, Prager is not an academic institution and does not confer degrees. It is a rightwing advocacy group founded in 2009 that produces various materials, including magazines and videos, that have been criticized by experts for inaccurate portrayals of slavery and racism in the US. According to McCarthy, each of the animated PragerU videos costs $25,000 to produce.
The group, which has received substantial funding from Dan and Farris Wilks, two brothers who are petroleum industry businessmen, has also been accused of spreading denial of climate science.
Florida, whose governor Ron DeSantis has called climate change “leftwing stuff”, is the first state to adopt PragerU videos, although in several other states textbooks pushed by the fossil fuel industry have included references that either downplay or deny human-caused global heating.
In one of the videos allowed by Florida, a girl in Poland called Ania is shown questioning the need to transition away from coal, a key driver of the climate crisis, to renewables. Her parents tell her that the planet has heated up and cooled since prehistoric times, even without the burning of fossil fuels.
Ania clashes with friends who want swift action on the climate crisis and starts a blog in which she raises doubts about switching to renewable energy and frets as her community is plunged into destitution without coal. “Renewable energy sources don’t contribute much energy,” the video states. “Unlike coal, energy from the wind or sun is unreliable, expensive and difficult to store.”
The video concludes by raising the specter of Nazi Germany, with Ania’s grandfather praising her stand against people concerned about climate change by comparing it to the Warsaw uprising. “Through her family’s stories, Ania is realizing that fighting oppression is risky and that it always takes courage,” the voiceover states.
Other approved videos have similar themes, with one showing two children, Leo and Layla, being told by their scientist uncle, Will, about the supposed inadequacies of renewable energy. “Wind and solar just aren’t powerful enough to power the modern world, the energy from them isn’t dense or robust enough,” says Will, as a bird is shown falling dead from the sky after being hit by the blades of a wind turbine. “Windmills kill so many birds,” Will adds, mournfully.
A further video extols the benefits of plastics – which come from a byproduct of oil and gas production and are now found strewn in the air, the oceans, the mountains and even in the placentas of unborn babies – as being superior to killing animals for their body parts, with Leo commenting he prefers having a plastic bicycle helmet to wearing a turtle shell on his head. Leo Baekeland, the Belgian chemist known for the invention of Bakelite, is shown in the video declaring that “fossil fuels are cheap and plentiful, thank goodness!”
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Scientists have made clear that fossil fuels are the primary cause of global heating not seen before in human civilization that is fueling dangerous heatwaves, flooding and other impacts around the world.
The burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels is also responsible for millions of deaths a year from direct air pollution, while the cost of renewable energy has dropped so much in recent years that the International Energy Agency has said that solar power is now the cheapest electricity that has ever existed.
Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, said that the irony in the decision by DeSantis’s administration to allow the videos “is that this gambit would make Goebbels himself blush”.
“For here we have a politician who regularly trades in antisemitic and racist, misogynistic and homophobic tropes promoting agenda-driven disinformation in place of actual science to further the agenda of the fossil fuel interests funding him and his party,” Mann said of DeSantis.
The Florida department of education was contacted for comment but did not respond. Marissa Streit, chief executive of PragerU, said in the statement that the videos aimed to show alternative perspectives that learn from historical moments that led to tragedies.
“The purpose of our climate videos is to allow for real debate, create an opening for scientists who have been bullied and marginalized by tyrannical elites and legacy institutions,” Streit said.
“Only when allowing true science to take place via debate, questioning, and inquiry will we be able to see the type of innovation that our world need to resolve problems we face.”
This article was amended on 10 August 2023 to correct an error on the spelling of the word “bear”.