Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) hints that litigation is shimmering on the increasingly hot horizon of Florida school children who recently had climate change denial inserted into their education curriculums.
In his comments slamming Florida’s Ron DeSantis-approved move to add climate denying videos from Prager University Foundation to the state’s education materials, Whitehouse alludes to the recent court decision in Montana where a judge ruled that the state “violated the state constitutional rights of 16 young people by promoting the use of fossil fuels and ignoring the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, which cause global warming and climate change.”
Sharing an article from Reckon, an Advance-owned publication “born out of the South,” Whitehouse decries the “degraded depths to which the fossil fuel industry will go” to promote what he characterizes as its unethical and dangerous climate change denialism. The Senator wonders aloud if legal action against the denialism seeded in the curriculum is far behind.
The degraded depths to which the fossil fuel industry will go never fail to astound me. False propaganda to schoolchildren? Maybe an honest courtroom will sort this out, like in Montana.
— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) August 16, 2023
https://t.co/QdUztwHi9G
Whitehouse wrote: “False propaganda to schoolchildren? Maybe an honest courtroom will sort this out, like in Montana.”
Whitehouse envisions a judiciary responsive to youth’s legal claims on its own future — from climate issues to education and more — as a potential check on propaganda enabled by Florida’s Governor and Board of Education.
Whitehouse had a range of choices when it came to media sources to share on the subject, and might have considered the Orlando Sentinel article that reports unambiguously: “The Florida Department of Education recently approved the K-5 curriculum created by Prager University Foundation (PragerU), a big-oil-funded conservative group known for producing biased content littered with misinformation and climate denialism.”
DeSantis is already facing a lawsuit from a plaintiff that has a lot of backing among America’s youth demographic — Disney.
