I do wonder if one school signed up to work with the Ministry of Eco-Education and Linus was Wolsingham School in County Durham, which made headlines in mid-October for transforming the annual Red Nose Day ‘buy hot dinners for Africans’ event into a “Blue Nose Day” eco-event instead. School Commissars announced they would switch all the building’s heating off for a day and force kids to sit around in thermal underwear beneath their uniforms, thus “to help reduce our school’s carbon footprint and raise the importance of being more sustainable”. These plans were organised by the school’s “Climate Action Team”, whatever that is, but soon abandoned after outraged locals called the teachers “psychopaths” engaging in acts of “child abuse” within classroom-based “indoctrination camps”.

British exam boards are now every bit as bad as the schools. In December 2023, national examination regulator Ofqual released a completely unnecessary report revealing that a single GCSE exam paper has “the same carbon footprint as five washing machine cycles”. Closer examination of the data reveals only 10% of this footprint came from actually printing the papers themselves; around 50% came from students and staff travelling to the exam hall in cars, buses, rocket-ships, UFOs and helicopters, whilst around 30% came from keeping lights and heating on in the school building. In other words, about 80% of this carbon footprint would have occurred on any ordinary given school day anyway. Someone should produce a comprehensive investigation into how much carbon was needlessly emitted producing Ofqual’s report itself.

Once your kids move on to university, there will prove no escape from such remorseless Green brain-invasion. To mark her appointment, in September 2023 geologist Professor Dame Jane Francis, the newly minted President of the British Science Association, declared that all university courses, no matter what the subject, should be forced to include a compulsory climate change component in their first year. This would help ensure that “everybody, regardless of what they do in life, understand[s] the basics of the science of our planet”.

Examination Marx-Schemes

One of my favourite facts about life in Soviet Russia was that 25% of all medical students’ time was wasted on studying Marxism-Leninism, not actual medicine – a greater proportion of time than they spent practising actual surgery. It is similar in quasi-Communist China today; lessons on Marxism, Maoism and “the theory of socialism with Chinese characteristics” now occupy four lessons of a typical medical student’s timetable per week, as opposed to six of actual medicine, making them experts in kidney dialectics more than kidney dialysis.

To successfully gain a degree of any kind in Soviet Russia also required one to gain a simultaneous passing grade in a course of “Scientific Communism”, and this is currently making a comeback under the rule of Vladimir Putin, under the new name of “Russian Ideology”, or “Fundamentals of Russian Statehood”. Part of this new non-subject comes under the heading of “Envisioning a Future”, which mainly means imagining an imperialistic, anti-Western geopolitical future for Russia, but some of its designers would also like it to include a compulsory scientific component specifically relating to climate change, just as Labour is planning to introduce here in the U.K.

The difference is that, over in Putinland, climate change is increasingly viewed in a positive, not a negative, light. One of the contributors to Putin’s current ongoing curriculum review is nationalist sci-fi writer Sergey Pereslegin, who believes global warming is great. In a 2020 Russian media op-ed, Pereslegin explained how, as a currently semi-frozen land, global warming (which he views as a natural cyclical phenomenon) would act as “a kind of good for Russia”, because, overall, “a milder climate does not worsen, but improves the situation on Earth”. As Pereslegin put it:

Global warming increases the moisture of territories and increases the fertility of land, as well as their suitability for agriculture. It is possible that our country with more than 1.2 million square kilometres of arable land can become an agrarian superpower/ … Yes, some of the territories will be below sea level, but something like this happened more than once [before]. … You can raise them, or fence them with dams. … People have already faced the need for such solutions – this is not the first cooling and not the first warming. In general, the serious development of civilisation began with the previous great warming … this is beneficial to everyone, including Russia as a northern country.

The only true danger of global warming, Pereselgin has warned, is that, in the rough spirit of Adam Adamant being thawed out from his conveniently cryogenic glacier in the old 1960s TV adventure series, the process will likewise reanimate the slumbering spirit of Chairman Mao’s 1960s and 70s Cultural Revolutionary extremist youth-movements: “As for [Greta] Thunberg, I call people like her the new Red Guards.”

Indeed they are, Sergey – and the West’s current, ideology-suffused education system is explicitly designed to keep on producing and unleashing them onto us like an entire army of unfrozen yetis, almasty, and Abominable Snowpersons.

Student Politics

In 2019, hairy hominids at the U.K.’s very own University of Sheffield had already gone down this same route, with hundreds of truly abominable students and academics melting out across the city centre to demand the embedding of a “sustainable curriculum” into every single course available, so as to address the “climate emergency”. Vice-Chancellor Koen Lamberts used the protests to announce smugly that “whether our students go on to become engineers, doctors, linguists or historians [or simply long-term unemployed], it doesn’t matter,” they will still need to know all about washing out yoghurt pots and which colour recycling bin all the future starved human corpses are meant to go in.

Even doctors need to undergo compulsory ideological indoctrination modules then, eh, Commissar Koen? We really are back in the old Soviet Union after all.

Predictably, the Red Guardian was impressed with this new guaranteed “learning entitlement”, acclaiming how, rather than discrete struggle sessions, every separate subject area, whether “maths, music or drama”, would henceforth have Greenness infected right throughout it, like algae in a stagnant pond, with each department compelled to “reimagine their curriculums through a sustainable lens”.

Music students, for example, could be taught how to “collaborate with scientists” before “using their skills in words and music to come up with more compelling ways to talk to the public about the global challenges we face”, like in Michael Jackson’s ‘Earth Song’, which I have never forgiven for keeping Pulp’s ‘Common People’ off the Christmas No. 1 spot way back in 1995 – an episode which now seems like some kind of uncanny prophecy of future allegory. Who will lead this innovative musical scientific re-education course, I wonder? Professor Brian Cox, formerly of D:Ream? Things Can Only Get Greener…

Educated Tastes

This is painted as all being in response to specific prior student demands, which is at least somewhat true – but only because these very same hysterical demands have already been systematically implanted within students’ heads beforehand by teachers, media and politicians from the very moment they popped out of Mother Nature’s womb. Such a propagandistic cybernetic feedback loop only becomes ever more self-reinforcing with each passing year-group.

Back in 2020, a teenage climate activist named Joe Brindle was quoted by the Guardian bragging about addressing the Left-wing National Education Union (NEU) and petitioning that all future U.K. teacher-training should “include mandatory lessons on sustainability”. But why? Because, said Joe, “It’s the right thing for students. Whatever job you go into – whether a farmer, a builder or a banker – you’re going to need to know about the climate crisis in the modern world.” Any job? What if you decide to become a rent-boy? You might have no other option than to go down that particular route should you happen to stumble blindly out of Sheffield University having thought you were signing up to become a brain-surgeon, but end up coming out a tree-surgeon by mistake.

On the other hand, of course, students fully inculcated in this drivel will indeed come out highly employable in a certain way – highly employable in the non-jobs at climate think-tanks, ESG funds, HR and DEI departments, etc. etc. That is to say, highly employable as non-productive, wealth-strangling, civilisational parasites who will systematically bleed the West dry of its wealth, productivity, stability, freedom, energy and well-being under the wholly false guise of saving it from a largely non-existent looming catastrophe.

Hidden Vices

That, after all, would seem to be the fine example set by Sheffield University’s Vice-Chancellor (with the emphasis on ‘Vice’) Koen Lamberts himself, whose place in post no doubt substantially rests upon him continuing to comply with the State-mandated belief in the ‘climate emergency’ any and all public employees now have to profess slavish allegiance towards in order to continue to hold any meaningful mid-ranking or high-up posts in the pubic sector. With impeccable timing, Lamberts was exposed whilst I was writing this very article as having spent over £16,000 of university funds on carbon-emitting flights around the world, even in spite of his 2019 boast of cultivating Greenness within every single curriculum area of his highly in-debt (to the tune of £50 million) institution.

In light of this carbon profligacy, students at Sheffield University might like to ponder this question: do they believe their Vice-Chancellor really, genuinely and truly believes the entire planet is imminently doomed due to the existence of his local power station and the dirty cars of the men and women who staff it, or is he more likely to be someone who realises his well-paid position is dependent upon compliantly mouthing every last shibboleth of his superiors in government, whether he actually subscribes to them or not, just like a typical member of the nomenklatura once had to do likewise in the old USSR in relation to similar unexamined scientific dogmas like Lysenkoism.

And all this isn’t only happening under the Pol Potty Green leadership of Chairman ‘Year Net Zero’ Miliband here in the U.K., either – it’s an ongoing global phenomenon, as we shall see next time.

Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.