Who run Bartertown? James Inhofe XII run Bartertown.
I would say that the Oklahoma House thinks climate change won't happen if they don't tell the kids it's happening, but that would still be giving them too much credit. Whatever the reason, a statehouse committee voted 10 to 1 this week to reject modernizing the state's "Academic Standards for Science", e.g. the science that's fought in Oklahoma schools, because the proposed modernization
ran afoul of the usual ideological provincialisms:
It's clear that the issue of climate change content was a central reason for the rejection. The Oklahoma science standards were, in significant part, based on the Next Generation Science Standards, which discuss climate change (and were rejected for that reason by the state of Wyoming earlier this year). And in legislative hearings, notes Climate Progress, Oklahoma Republican lawmaker Mark McCullough criticized the proposed Oklahoma science standards' references to "the climate" and "human impacts on the environment." McCullough suggested there has been "hyberbole relative to climate change" and asked if the standards "could potentially be utilized to inculcate into some pretty young impressionable minds … a fairly one-sided view as to that controversial subject, a subject that is very much in dispute among even the academics."
Curiously, only people who are not academics seem to believe the subject is "very much in dispute" among academics—perhaps a side-effect of not knowing what an "academic" is? (Bonus points for using
inculcate, though. My personal quest to make that the new conservative go-to word is making progress.)
Anyway, we mustn't inculcate impressionable minds by letting them know that they and their children are well and truly screwed and that we did it to them on purpose. As a plus, Oklahoma will likely be among the more uninhabitable states, as the climate warms, so the problem with Oklahoma politics will eventually solve itself.