The world’s two largest textbook publishers are pushing back against the Texas Board of Education’s efforts to include climate denial in its public school curriculum.
Last week, Pearson Education deleted a passage in a fifth-grade social studies textbook that cast doubt on the human causes of climate change. Days later, McGraw-Hill cut a statement in a sixth-grade text that claimed “scientists agree that the Earth’s climates are changing. Not all individuals, however, agree on the causes of these changes.”
Under intense pressure from the National Center for Science Education and the Texas Freedom Network, McGraw-Hill also dropped an exercise that asked students to analyze “two different points of view” on climate change—one from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the other from the fossil fuel-funded Heartland Institute, which produced a billboard two years ago comparing climate scientists to Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.