NASA's "Climate Kids" webpage offers fun environment-related educational activities, films, and video games for children in kindergarten. It also warns children that the world is undergoing cataclysmic warming, sea levels are rising, global ice coverage is diminishing, and their future may very well be doomed.
Climate Kids proclaims that the cost of fossil fuels is "pollution, the destruction of landscapes and natural habitats, oil spills in the ocean, and nasty fracking chemicals in the ground," while the "biggest problem of all" is global warming. The website separately shows an image of what it says may soon occur to the United States' Eastern Seaboard: a calamitous sea level rise covering entire cities, including New Orleans and Miami. The website fails to include a timeline for such an event.
NOAA Education Portal, which is managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is another government-managed webpage that, like NASA's Climate Kids, includes a curriculum with catastrophic language about global warming. Courses linked on the portal, for example, encourage students to foster negative emotions about the state of the environment into taking action.
The online resources appear to be a peg in the Biden-Harris administration's broader strategy of aiming climate messaging at younger generations, even as those age groups report high levels of "climate anxiety," a phenomenon acknowledged by the administration. When the White House this year unveiled its American Climate Corps federal work program, AmeriCorps CEO Michael Smith said the program was "an opportunity to turn anxiety into action."
The Climate Kids webpage was created in 2012 under the Obama administration, according to archival data, and remained live during the Trump administration. NASA's website didn't include direct links to the page until recently, however, additional archival data show. Under the Biden-Harris administration, the agency's website now links the Climate Kids page in its "Interactives" section, created in 2023, and its multimedia section, which linked to its STEM page during the Trump administration.
NOAA's educational resources and webpages on climate-change-related youth mental health were created during the Biden-Harris administration beginning in 2022.
NASA's and NOAA's climate webpages for children are now the subject of a probe spearheaded by Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) in his capacity as ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee, the Washington Free Beacon has learned. Cruz penned letters Thursday to NASA administrator Bill Nelson and NOAA administrator Richard Spinrad, demanding information about their efforts to stoke climate anxiety and "manufacture support" for "radical environmentalist activism."
"The Biden-Harris administration marked Earth Day this year by touting its efforts to combat 'the climate crisis,' including its quixotic quest for net-zero emissions, the formation of a multi-billion-dollar American Climate Corps, and the restriction of federal oil and gas leases," Cruz wrote in the letters, which were reviewed by the Free Beacon.
"Young people are absorbing the rhetoric; they report high levels of anxiety about climate change and are adapting their behavior in radical ways, including by foregoing children," he continued. "Is this anxiety based on science or sensationalism? The evidence points to the latter."
Cruz accused the two agencies of producing "faux-educational materials that fuel climate alarmism" to generate support for the Biden-Harris administration's climate agenda. He noted that such fear-mongering is contributing to increasing rates of "eco-anxiety," as described by the American Psychological Association, which defines the condition as a "chronic fear of environmental doom." Generation Z Americans, those born in the early 2000s, are experiencing the condition in large numbers.
In the letter to Nelson, Cruz pointed to how the NASA Climate Kids webpage includes imagery showing coastal cities fully submerged by the rising sea level. Cruz added that such a scenario wouldn't happen for hundreds of years, if ever, according to the most updated analyses.
Cruz further points to an episode of the 2013 program Climate Tales, posted on the website, which features a talking polar bear whose habitat will be destroyed thanks to global warming.
The NASA webpage also says that "maybe we should all think about down-sizing to a tiny house" and that "you don't really need a lawn at all," stating that there is still time to abandon fossil fuels.
"Our country's approach to climate change should be driven by science, not the woke zeitgeist," the Texas Republican wrote to Nelson.
In his letter to Spinrad, Cruz noted how NOAA continues to promote Climate Literacy: The Essential Principles of Climate Science, an interagency guide for teaching students about the climate that was first published in 2009. The guide has been boosted by NOAA's social media accounts as recently as May and is featured on Climate.gov, NOAA's website devoted to disseminating climate information.
Additional Climate.gov materials include a 2024 mental-health-focused lesson plan that guides teachers on setting up a "safe space" to "facilitate a group reflection around healing and coping." The lesson plan promotes a "climate emotions wheel" designed in 2022 by Finnish "eco-theologian" Panu Pihkala.
NOAA's partner organization, the Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network, which designed some of the courses in the curriculum, suggests that teachers embrace students' negative emotions triggered by climate change because "those who experience negative emotions about climate change are more likely to engage in climate action." Teachers should encourage students to "work through their grief."
The predictions NOAA has shared with students through the portal, meanwhile, haven't panned out. The portal links to a 2012 video warning kids that melting ice caps could create an "inescapable death spiral," leaving no ice in the Arctic Ocean by 2022. The portal hosting that video appears to have been created in 2023.
The Arctic ice minimum extent has increased by 29 percent, or nearly 1 million square kilometers, since 2012 when that video was produced, according to NASA's own data.
In addition to the Biden-Harris administration's American Climate Corps, NOAA launched the Young Changemakers Fellowship, a one-year program for high school students to address an environmental issue in their community.
"Right on cue, the Biden-Harris administration is now providing outlets for the climate anxiety it has stoked," Cruz said in his letter to Spinrad.
Since taking office in 2021, the administration has pursued an aggressive agenda to curb greenhouse gas emissions, targeting gas-powered vehicles, fossil-fuel power plants, fossil-fuel production and infrastructure, and residential natural gas appliances. Those policies are generally more popular among younger Americans.
According to a 2023 Pew Research study, about half of Americans aged 18-29 say that oil, coal, and natural gas—which still generate the vast majority of the power consumed in the United States—should be entirely phased out. Just 20 percent of those older than 65 believe the same.
In a statement to the Free Beacon, NASA spokeswoman Jennifer Dooren confirmed the agency had received Cruz's letter and would respond directly.
NOAA did not respond to a request for comment.