We must not dwell too long on private misfortune nor ought we to speculate on Mr. Dale Vince’s alleged lavish lifestyle of fast cars, quaffing Dom Perignon, designer clothes, yachts and private jet travel. Mrs Vince is in a divorce court giving details of conspicuous consumption, with her ex suggesting he has been inspired by the “concept” of lower consumption since the 1980s. Such is the disputatious way with these trying family battles, it is good manners to stay silent. Except perhaps to note that Mr. Vince has made his fortune from collecting over £110 million in taxpayer windmill subsidies and has been making a bit of a virtue of late about everyone cutting down on consumption to save the planet. Nobody it seems is safe from his proselytising. While Vince runs his onshore wind farms, children as young as seven are being educated in the technology of the past by his foundation-funded Ministry of Eco Education (MEE). Fed a diet of climate and ecological catastrophe, the children are also being encouraged to build their own model wind turbines.
At this age, children probably don’t understand what electricity is and a primer explaining the difference between an amp and a volt might be more useful. Or perhaps just learning to read and count properly. Times change, but probably not very much. When your correspondent was seven, the nuns at his Catholic primary school were very excited by something called the Second Vatican Council and scrapbooks were kept about something that in truth meant nothing to Dartford schoolchildren. I have it in mind that slightly older pupils were making models of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Get them young and you get them for life, as the Jesuits say. Meanwhile, any doubts about the existence of the Almighty would have been met with condign punishment similar in some ways to Vince’s recent suggestion that “climate denial” should be illegal.
Whether or not Vince has been glugging vintage shampoo and shopping at chic clothing emporiums, his Ministry of Eco Education is one of the finest moral fashion accessories money can buy. It recently said its ambition was to insert its curriculum into 1,000 schools with green messaging on transport, nature and society.
Its stories seem designed to scare the living daylights out of anyone lacking the intellectual ability and wider education to question the climate Armageddon presented. All seven year-olds in fact. They would not, for instance, be able to challenge the claim made by MEE that around the world “diversity is being annihilated at a terrifying rate”. Population sizes of thousands of species of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles are claimed by MEE to have fallen by 60% since the 1970s. No source is provided for this imprecise claim, but variations of it are common in alarmist circles. Some of the evidence suggests otherwise. A bedrock scare repeated endlessly in the mainstream is that 69% of vertebrates across the planet have declined since 1970. The figures are provided by the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London. However, a group of Canadian biologists recently revealed that the figure was a statistical freak. They pointed out that the estimate was driven by 2.4% of wildlife populations, adding: “If these extremely declining populations are excluded, the global trend switches to an increase.”
According to a paper on MEE’s website identifying the foundations of its eco curriculum, the Earth’s environment is breaking down with warmer temperatures wreaking havoc causing an increase in ‘extreme’ weather and leading to a sixth mass extinction. It can of course be argued that slightly warmer temperatures bouncing back from a recent colder period have been almost entirely beneficial for life on Earth. Food supplies have risen and famine is at bay in many parts of the world, carbon dioxide has significantly ‘greened’ the planet, mass extinction scares are the product of computer models, most ‘extreme’ weather events are not becoming more frequent or more severe and there is barely a scintilla of evidence to suggest humans have a hand in their frequency or ferocity. On this latter point, even the IPCC confirms, at least for now, this interpretation of the science. Presumably, such reassurance is not to be encouraged in the classroom – indeed it seems that according to Vince any ‘denial’ of climate science that is thought to be ‘settled’ should be against the law.
While primary schools seem to be the main target of MEE, there are hopes to extend it to the secondary sector, while the material is also said to be suitable for home educators. A recent MEE presentation highlighted the work of an MEE London-based home educator who was using MEE materials entitled ‘The future of electricity’. Those great unreliables wind and solar had pride of place, but given that windmills first started operating in Britain in the reign of Henry II (1154-89), perhaps the materials should be called “The past of electricity’. Children as young as seven are encouraged to build their own wind turbines using Lego and the blades should turn when placed near a fan. Children are keen on animals, so it is just as well they are not told that wind turbines around the globe kill millions of bats every year. The giant turbines being planned to blanket Britain should make a good start on the next mass extinction. Blades almost as high as the London Shard will efficiently sweep the countryside of tonnes of wildlife from the smallest fry to the largest eagle. If the blades don’t get the bigger birds, the vast number of new high-capacity electric cables and pylons probably will.
What happens to the children’s toy windmills when the fan are switched off would be a good question for them to ask, although it might get a similar response to innocents in a former age inquiring of Sister Agnes if God actually existed.
Day-to-day running of MEE seems to be in the charge of Paul Turner. who styles himself a “Radical Geographer Paul” on his website. Among his noted activities is “teaching climate breakdown” along with providing material asking “who owns England” and “should land be returned to the masses”. He claims to be inspired by the radical theatre collective called Three Acres and a Cow. The show’s cast includes a Kohenet Hebrew Priestess and a “radical queer Christian activist” who these days spends most of his time “gardening with asylum seekers”.
Turner’s site also links to the Radical Geographers’ Handbook, which provides a definition of radical geography. It is said to recognise the need for a “reclamation of geography from its imperialist past, showing how geographical knowledge and thinking could play a key role in radical, social, political and environmental activism”.
How school geography has come on from rocks, contours and map reading! Apparently, useful observational and practical skills are not nearly as interesting for some teachers as converting young children into parent-nagging activists. Let loose in schools, the radical geographer is charged to declare a climate and ecological emergency, sell his or her car and walk everywhere (not you Dale) and “teach what you love and not to the exam”.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Brainwashing and indoctrination. Teaching children political dogma is against the Education Act.
All part of the fascist total state agenda.
As the article says, from ‘rocks’ to ‘plant-food destroys everything’….Taught right after trans-gendered/cis-gendered class. At least the ‘geography teacher’ hopefully has their clothes on (soon optional).
For the record I was taught Globaloney-Ice Ageing in ‘geography’…..so 40 years of this crap.
I recall getting the acid rain stuff in geography (for which there was some decent evidence), but not the AGW crap. Started High School in 1990.
The acid rain zealots. It is curious that the rain zealots are quiet these days.
Experiment:
1-When it rains go outside, capture the rain in a clean, uncorrupted glass bottle. Label with date/time.
2-Capture tap water in a clean bottle, at the precisely the same time, label with date/time.
Do the chemical analysis at home and compare. Or send it to a local state financed lab for analysis.
The results will shock you into buying a home filtration system for drinkable water. Water, whether air borne or recycled, is riven with toxic elements and plastics (even toxins from quackcines and drugs issue from people’s urine and waste).
You can repeat for bottled water or drinks as well.
Turner’s site also links to the Radical Geographers’ Handbook, which provides a definition of radical geography. It is said to recognise the need for a “reclamation of geography from its imperialist past, showing how geographical knowledge and thinking could play a key role in radical, social, political and environmental activism”.
As a geography graduate from the early 1980s, the radicalisation of geography was already well underway and Marxist influences were widespread. In historical geography, we learned all about patriarchal societies, in economic geography we learned about government funding and its beneficial influence on the environment – contrasting with the harms caused by capitalism.
In social geography, I studied gypsies and travellers and how maligned they were. A key tome was written by our lecturer who used to live in a traveller’s camp. As an aside, 30 years later, he received a suspended sentence for child pornography charges.
In meteorology and climatology, we were taught about climate change and the impact it would have on the world population. Of course, in those days, data was unequivocally showing how temperatures had been falling for 30 years and that we were therefore heading for a new ice age.
I hated my degree course (which was reflected in my grade) and found most of the human geography modules to be useless, Marxist bollocks. The Marxist capture of education started a long time ago.
Spot on. The main course book for the social geography module where we studied travellers was all about marginalised minorities and how they were oppressed by mainstream society – pure cultural Marxism.
Spot on…I once met a bloke back in the 80’s who worked for the Greater London Education Authority….he went on holiday to Russia and boasted openly of bring Communism into education.
Loons and radicals like this guy have no influence on anyone, no matter how rich and successful, without the coercive power of the state to back them up.
So to me the problem isn’t people with unwelcome ideas who would like to change the world, the problem is a state that (a) is too powerful and (b) allows itself to be ideologically captured that forces these ideas on me and that I would otherwise be able to ignore.
Shrink the state and the power of these people evaporates, regardless of their wealth and their ideas.
The OBJECTIVE———–Using the UN as a platform to sell a global environment crisis and the global governance agenda. This is a Political Agenda using “Official Science” to indoctrinate us all including the very young in schools into the idea that there is a climate crisis and that the only way this can be halted is by One World Government via the UN controlling every aspect of our lives since the cause of this manufactured crisis is the CO2 that we all we emit in everything we do. —–CO2 is the globalists dream gas. It allows them to put policies in place they otherwise could only have dreamt of.
Yes indeed. Indoctrinating the young and impressionable into the various cults and accepting as fact all the agendas being thrust upon us all over the shop. But who’s doing the indoctrinating with this ‘climate crisis’ hogwash? Well a quick look on the linked MEE site shows us that it’s both women AND men on board with brainwashing the kids. I mean, who knew?
Unless featured Headmaster, Nick Moss, is really a biological woman cosplaying a man.
Perhaps he should spend less time brainwashing kids and more time being a positive role model for the boys….
Every Institution is captured by the Climate Scam, and they mostly don’t know they are actually involved in a scam. Schools are no different, and the same thing happens there as with all other Institutions, Government Body’s, Media and NGO’s with a top down enforcement that filters its way down through every organisation till all are onboard with the doctrine.
Shows the importance of teaching your own children what is worth listening to and what is nonsense. Education begins at home.
Most of the people who take no active interest in their kids’ education are unlikely to care about the climate “crisis” in any case, but much of the aspirational middle classes are more likely to buy into it so as to conform to fashionable dogma.
More pragmatic types and those who have realised that the official line is bunk need to ensure their kids ignore it (although they may be forced to “go through the motions”) so it is not perpetuated and dies the death it deserves.
The grandiose name of this organisation – The Ministry of Eco Education – is in itself extremely revealing.
Ministries are of course usually senior Government Departments, so we have a built-in implication of absolute rule and authority over the poor youthful targets of its indoctrinatory agenda.
‘Education’, on the other hand, should centrally mean teaching to think for yourself, so overall we have an almost comically obviously Orwellian title such as ‘The Ministry for Peace.’
Isn’t Dale Vince’s attire in danger of being viewed as cultural appropriation? Not a good look during these days of cultural sensitivity as per the DS article on the Saracen’s Head.
Good luck to his wife in court.
I wonder what our Dale did before he found Nut Zero…..3 card monty on Oxford street, maybe….
He was a ‘new age traveller’ if memory serves…
I wonder if there’s a case for a windfall tax on all those who have benefitted greatly from Eco-‘scams’
I think there’s more of a case for more than a tax, perhaps the best thing would be to let his ex-wife take him to the cleaners.
Nothing says Narcissist Fashion Victim like the black and white table cloth of the Pro Palestine Poseur. How long has Vince been a Hamas supporter?
Dale Vince, the Torquemada of Pope Milliband’s Climate Inquisition.
Pseud of the climate cult!
Anyone noticed that Vince and Starmer appear to be mirror images of each other?
Have they ever been seen in the same room together? I think we should be told.
This is brainwashing. It is abuse of children and should be illegal.