Despite being an adjunct professor at NYU and investment manager focusing on energy (which judging by context clues likely means oil and gas), Paul Tice is a regular on the Wall Street Journal opinion page--apparently his gigs afford him plenty of time to write lazy op-eds. He has already denied the validity of the endangerment finding, and has spent years railing against colleges and public schools for teaching kids the facts of climate science.
It’s no surprise, then, that when the WSJ needed an op-ed attacking Friday’s kids’ climate strike, it turned to Tice. Unfortunately, the paper should’ve kept turning. The only thing weaker than the substance of Tice’s argument is the petty and shrill way he delivers it.
Titled “On Climate, the Kids Are All Wrong,” the pice quickly turns spiteful: the subhead calls the young people fighting for a livable climate “a band of ignorant brats.” Perhaps if one of these kids ends up in Tice’s class, they can ask him why he resorted to name calling.
The extended metaphor Tice uses to attack is a comparison to the Children’s Crusade of 1212. Per Tice, “divinely inspired young people” went to liberate the Holy Land, only to die or be sold into slavery along the way. The lesson he gleans is not that the forces that enslaved or let the kids die are inhumane, but that we should not trust children to tell us what’s right. And if you think an apocryphal legend from 800 years ago is a weak example for why children can’t be trusted, just you wait.
After explaining all the ways kids are kicking ass these days, Tice finally gets to his main point: “children are innocent, but innocence goes with inexperience, naivete, and unwisdom.” To illustrate his point about “unwisdom,” Tice ticks off three examples of how “children tend to make bad choices, which is why we don’t let them run things.”
They are, “following the Pied Piper into a medieval forest,” “sailing off with Pinocchio to Pleasure Island,” and “shoplifting candy from Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.” But the story of the Pied Piper is that the adults refused to pay him for ridding the town of rats, so he stole the children as punishment. Which if anything is a condemnation of parents who refuse to pay the cost of something (like carbon pollution, perhaps?) and leave it up to their children to settle the score.
And Pinocchio is, last we checked, an entirely fictional story. As is Willy Wonka, but even here Tice gets it wrong because the kids don’t steal the candy, Wonka invites them to eat it! And the poetic justice the children receive are reflections of how their parents have spoiled them, whereas the one good kid gets rewarded with the factory. So the lesson is to not spoil kids, not that they can’t be trusted!
In the real world, youth have led a number of effective protest movements that have made the world a better place. Think of the Vietnam War protests, Apartheid divestment, and Civil Rights counter sit-ins, for example. And then there are the youth-led movements that even the WSJ would approve of: the 1989 Velvet Revolution that toppled communism in Czechoslovakia, or Malala Yousafzai’s work on giving girls access to education. These are all examples of children demonstrating moral clarity and effective leadership.
Tice attacks children for “cutting class,” and calls them “ignorant brats,” but resorts to centuries-old or fictional examples to try and make his case. He fails to accurately describe the state of climate science, fails to recognize how youth social movements have shaped politics and culture, fails to provide factual evidence to support his claims, and even fails to comprehend the meaning of the fictional stories he cites.
In just one little piece, Tice manages to fail science, history, English, and social studies.
These kids seem fine. Clearly, Tice is the ignorant brat who needs to be schooled.
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