The scene opens with children at a playground, laughing and yelling as they swing and jump rope.  The camera zooms in on a dark-haired little girl, seven or eight years old, running her finger through a dirty puddle.  Suddenly, thunder tears through the sky, and a downpour sends the children screaming home.  Later that night, the girl watches TV, where she sees newsreels of melting snow, rushing floods, and weeping refugees.  She goes to bed, but her sleep is disturbed by a nightmare.  She is in a desert.  The earth cracks beneath her, and she runs from the gaping chasms, only to meet huge waves.  Her screaming awakens her father.  The next scene shows them at a computer looking up a website.  The little girl sees something on-screen that inspires her, and she grabs her father’s camcorder, runs up several flights of stairs to the roof of her apartment building, and stretches out her little arms to focus her dad’s camera on her face.  Her bright, dark eyes peer intently into the lens.  “Please help the world,” she lisps.

No, this is not a video shown to a group of second graders on Earth Day.  It was part of the opening ceremonies at the United Nation’s Climate Change Conference, held in Copenhagen last December—an event chock full of supposedly educated, intelligent, informed dignitaries.  The message is clear: Give us control of your carbon emissions, you selfish hedonist, or your children will die awful deaths in a world ruined by your Land Rover.

Such manipulation is typical of the climate-change movement, which both targets children and uses them to target adults.  On NPR’s December 16 Morning Edition, one of the subjects was Poplar Elementary in South London, where an organization called Eco-Schools is catechizing children in the religion of global disaster.  “Use the glass light, turn off radiators before opening windows,” the children chant.  The school makes use of ten-year-old “eco reps,” who serve on the school’s “eco council.”  A boy tells the reporter, “The eco reps make sure that everybody’s saving the electricity, saving energy.  And we have different monitors in our class.”  The show’s host asks the London correspondent what the adults in Britain think about recycling and other eco-friendly practices.  Well, he admits, it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks.  When he drinks a beer, his brain grinds away with “must put beer in recycling bin.”  For these children, recycling beer bottles will be automatic.

In the United States, children aren’t just spying on one another but keeping an eye on their parents as well, reported the New York Times on October 9.  Jennifer Ross of Dobbs Ferry, New York, tells the Times that her children outdo her in their efforts to save the earth.  They consider her bath at night “a wasteful indulgence.”  They are upset with her when she forgets the reusable shopping bags.  They nag her about buying a hybrid car.  “Kids have really turned into the little conscience sitting in the back seat,” said Julia Bovey of the Natural Resources Defense Council.  “Here’s this information about how we can help the environment, and kids are not able to rationalize it away the way that adults do.”  A more honest explanation of what’s at work might be that children will believe anything their teachers tell them, so environmentalists take advantage of their trust.

When I was a child, my mother forbade me to watch the cartoon Captain Planet.  I did anyway when she had her back turned.  I remember one episode in which one of the “Planeteers” said he wanted a large family.  The other Planeteers warned him that he was committing a crime against the already overpopulated earth.  The young man merely laughed, but then he had a dream of visiting an alien land drastically overrun by a race of talking rats.  When he awoke, the planet-killer had come around.  He announced that he would be limiting his family size to one, maybe two children.

My mother knew how propaganda works: If you want to get your message across, target the kids.  Bombard their unformed little brains with images and slogans galore, with Going Green and Eating Organic and Driving a Prius, until they become perfect little Huxleyans.  While you’re at it, get them to harass their wasteful parents, who seem to believe that the opinions their children absorb carry more weight than their own.  And to top it all off, use emotion-laden imagery of suffering children in advertisements and campaigns and at U.N. conferences.  Apparently adults have rather childlike intellects themselves these days.