A is for Apple.
B is for Boy.
C is for Chemtrails
At least this is what one American father found while paging through his child's science book. SmT was astonished to find seventh graders being taught about chemtrails. And geoengineeering their home planet.
Anyone with questions about the "spray programs" he now says, "should perhaps just ask their kids."
The chemtrails section is found in the Centre Point Learning Science I Essential Interactions science book. Under "Solutions for Global Warming", section 5.19 features a photo of a big multi-engine jet sporting a familiar orange/red paint scheme.
The caption reads: "Figure 1- Jet engines running on richer fuel would add particles to the atmosphere to create a sunscreen".
The logo on the plane says: "Particle Air".
"I kid you not," SmT insists. "Why did I spend all of that time doing research when I could have just asked my kids?"
Helping habituate children to a life under lethal sunshine and "protective" spray planes, this trippy textbook urges young readers to "Use Sun Block". But its authors are referring to a sunscreen spread across the sky.
"Could we deliberately add particles to the atmosphere?" asks the text, before helpfully suggesting that "Burning coal adds soot to the air."
You might be old enough to recoil at such a notion. But in a country where down is up and wrong is right, your kids could be learning that what used to be bad and a bummer is a now good thing!
RUNNING ON EMPTY
"Be real interesting to see the politics of the folks putting this out." SmT suggests.
In the current White House, those politics are as "crude" as invading oil-rich Iraq over a bogus nuclear threat - while permitting Pakistan to export atom bomb materials to terrorist organizations in return for the chance at an election-boosting capture of Osama bin Laden by US forces in the Hindu Kush later this month. [New Yorker Mar1/04]
Why shouldn't the same petrol politics produce textbooks for children inheriting a nightmare? Led by a piggish petroleum president, with most major nations cutting back, US oil consumption is rising as steeply as supplies of cheap crude are collapsing.
The coal connection is this: In order to briefly "stretch the glide" of the fast-looming end of cheap oil that will utterly transform life as we know it, America's unelected oil president recently revoked pollution regulations on more than 2,000 of the nation's biggest polluting coal-fired power plants.
Ironically, this move - like so many others made by an oil-addled White House - will only hasten an Earthwreck as shattering to all onboard as a lurching square-rigger striking a rocky reef. Except our spaceship is surrounded by the cold, irradiated vacuum of deep space.
It turns out that a single 150-megawatt coal-burning power plant produces more emissions than 300,000 cars. Termed an "Extreme Human health Hazard" by the EPA, microscopic coal particles also rot lungs, stop hearts, kill lakes, choke cities - and stunt the lives of school kids with deadly sulphuric acid rain. [AP Aug27/03; LA Times Aug28/03]
Airborne soot also blocks sunlight, lowering greenhouse temperatures. Volcanic eruptions like Krakatoa and Pinatubo - and globe-circling soot from 1,000 burning oil wells during Desert Storm - belched enough sulphur into the stratosphere to cause a plunge in world temperatures, temporarily slowing global warming.
World scientists looking at deliberately putting megatons more sulphur into a closed, recirculating atmosphere already smoggy enough to depresses orbiting astronauts, decided that a sulphur sunscreen is not a swift idea.
But not this Jr. High science text. "Creating either kind of sunscreen would be cheap," it tells young readers. As if "cheap" is the only consideration.
Even this claim is bogus. SmT says he looked, but the section on the downstream costs associated with the health and environmental effects of massive coal pollution - or the 10 million tons of a chemical sunscreen suggested by the late Edward Teller - "seemed to have been left out."