United States | News & Politics

It didn't quite the Redditor as an expert. That was an opinion section. The quoted expert in the article was the Kansas university researcher.

You (and @blewit) could just click where it says 'The Guardian and read the source article if you don't think a reddit or is a good source (which it isn't, which is why you can read supporting articles they link.....). Here's a decent portion of the guardian article is below, but it's clear that PragerU is pushing objectively false propaganda to children, both downplaying the impact that current policies have on the environment and (to no one's surprise) comparing the people who rightly fight against climate change to Nazis (instead of the people attempting to eradicate trans people like the Nazis actually did):

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.”

...

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!”