Document leak reveals major corporate influence in plan to reverse teaching climate change

Someone at the Heartland Institute leaked internal documents which outline a plan to teach climate change skepticism in public schools – a plan with considerable corporate financial brawn.

The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based non-profit think tank, has been quietly funding leading skeptics of climate change and drafting proposals to implement the skepticism agenda in schools. Someone at the Institute leaked the documents outlining the agenda to the press and to climate change activists.

"The heart of the climate denial machine relies on huge corporate and foundation funding from U.S. businesses, including Microsoft, Koch Industries, Altria (parent company of Philip Morris) RJR Tobacco and more," reports the DeSmogBlog, which published the leaked documents on Tuesday.

The documents outline a plan to develop an alternate school curriculum for the teaching of climate change, stressing the uncertainty underlying scientific endeavors and the continuing debate about the issue. "The topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain -- two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science,” reads the document. To that end, the Heartland Institute’s plan aims to remedy the situation, a remediation outlined in the following excerpt”:

“Global Warming Curriculum for K-12 Schools

Many people lament the absence of educational material suitable for K-12 students on global warming that isn’t alarmist or overtly political. Heartland has tried to make material available to teachers, but has had only limited success. Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective. Moreover, material for classroom use must be carefully written to meet curriculum guidelines, and the amount of time teachers have for supplemental material is steadily shrinking due to the spread of standardized tests in K-12 education.

Dr. David Wojick has presented Heartland a proposal to produce a global warming curriculum or K-12 schools that appears to have great potential for success. Dr. Wojick is a consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the U.S. Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science. He has a Ph.D. in the philosophy of science and mathematical logic from the University of Pittsburgh and a B.S. in civil engineering from Carnegie Tech. He has been on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon and the staffs of the U.S. Office of Naval Research and the Naval Research Lab.

Dr. Wojick has conducted extensive research on environmental and science education for the Department of Energy. In the course of this research, he has identified what subjects and concepts teachers must teach, and in what order (year by year), in order to harmonize with national test requirements. He has contacts at virtually all the national organizations involved in producing, certifying, and promoting science curricula.

Dr. Wojick proposes to begin work on “modules” for grades 10-12 on climate change (“whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy”), climate models (“models are used to explore various hypotheses about how climate works. Their reliability is controversial”), and air pollution (“whether CO2 is a pollutant is controversial. It is the global food supply and natural emissions are 20 times higher than human emissions”).

Wojick would produce modules for Grades 7-9 on environmental impact (“environmental impact is often difficult to determine. For example there is a major controversy over whether or not humans are changing the weather”), for Grade 6 on water resources and weather systems, and so on.

We tentatively plan to pay Dr. Wojick $5,000 per module, about $25,000 a quarter, starting in the second quarter of 2012, for this work. The Anonymous Donor has pledged the first $100,000 for this project, and we will circulate a proposal to match and then expand upon that investment.”

Heartland Institute sponsors are the expected mix of corporate backers like major tobacco, pharmaceutical, mass communication and agribusiness companies, along with nominally “philanthropic” foundations like the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation.

A disturbing passage describes a plan to block the publication of unfavorable articles in the business press, which might include a partnership with Forbes.

The Heartland Institute is a conservative, but self-described libertarian public policy think tank which advocates free-market policies. The institute was founded in 1984. In the 1990s, the group worked with the tobacco company Philip Morris to question the science linking secondhand smoke to health risks, and to lobby against government public health reforms.

In addition to its unorthodox views on climate change and second-hand smoke, the institute argues that market reforms should be introduced into the public education system (i.e., privatize and de-regulate) in order to increase competition among said schools, and advocates for free-market reforms in healthcare, opposing any federal control over the healthcare industry.

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