Taken for a Ride

From Quadrant

Tony Thomas

Australian schools are about to ramp up Net Zero campaigning using the latest movie “Future Council” from dark-green activist Damon Gameau. I’m predicting this with confidence because teachers have drenched more than a million kids from primary classes upwards with Gameau’s previous movie/docos 2040 (2019) and Regenerating Australia (2022). All-up his offerings (at last week) have got to 1,534,783 kids and launched about 50,000 largely school-based “action plans”.

How does Gameau, 43, an ex-actor turned producer, achieve his startling reach into classrooms? It’s because all his far-left and environmental causes are taken up by Cool.org. Cool then delivers them as time-saving online lessons to Australia’s eager teachers.

I’ve been tracking Cool.org as a cuckoo-in-the-school-nest for a decade, here, here, here, here and here. Formerly Cool Australia, it claims teachers now deliver its all-topics material to 2.5 million schoolkids a year and have reached 92% of schools. The lesson kits are expertly mapped to the curriculum and fulfil the cross-curriculum priority of “sustainability.”[1]

As for promoting Gameau, Cool today offers teachers about 35 different lessons on his 2040 movie, and at least seven lessons on Regenerating Australia (37,000 students and 2637 Action Plans).

The plot of Gameau’s 2040 is set in a future where renewables triumph over fossil fuels, vegans thrive, and every green brain-snap has proved a winner. That includes replacement of capitalism with UK ‘renegade economist’ Kate Raworth’s vision of a “doughnut [circular] economy”. Regenerating Australia likewise is set in 2029, looking back at a decade

“that saw Australia transition to a fairer, cleaner, more regenerative economy that values Australia’s greatest assets – First Nations’ wisdom, our unique natural environment and our sense of community.”Now stand by for Future Council’s blitz into classrooms. Gameau spent last month on live Q&A’s at national pre-releases, and launched it officially on August 7. I took in his “inspiring and rollicking journey” at Yarraville’s olde-world Sun Theatre, along with 150 adoring parents and kids. It’s Gameau’s most ambitious venture yet and the audience, already green converts, went wild. Gameau and singer Ruby Rodgers from the film (she’s 15) took questions.

Note this Feedback from previews:

♦ nichollerussell: “I can’t wait to see it tonight, I’m bringing my 2 classes or 42 students who are in year 3/4.”

♦ “There’s a lot of darkness in the world right now but holy smokes, @future__council is pure light.”

♦ “I cried through most of the doco. Our natural world is breathtaking, so full of wonder, and these kids remind us just how easy it is to forget that. They are rightfully scared about the future and angry at us adults for not doing enough to ensure their future … If we’re willing to listen, they might just show us the way.”

♦ “Damon Gameau, you’ve done it again. Another film that knocked me off my feet yet left me feeling stronger, more hopeful, and more determined to fight for this planet and all who call it home.”Gameau did a global casting call two years back for kids aged 10-14 to star in a road-trip movie traversing eight countries in western Europe in a cute yellow bus. The kids’ brief was to harangue corporate chiefs about emissions and plastic litter. From 1300 applicants, Gameau selected a diverse group of eight, based on their climate-warrior ethos, perkiness and affinity for show biz.

Gameau emphasises that his bus ran on planet-friendly vegetable oil. He doesn’t mention the emissions from air-ferrying kids, plus a parent or guardian, to Europe. They came from places afar as Australia, Norfolk Island, Bali, Singapore and Uganda. As if the kids aren’t already brainwashed, he gets high-profile activists to gee them up.

His theme is that school strikes haven’t saved the planet, and kids are looking for practical ways to rescue their future and work off their climate angst. The film is his marketing vehicle for his real-world Future Councils of kids, mostly schools-based. He aims to set up them here and worldwide as advisory boards to help reform back-sliding corporates.

To make his bus trip look worthwhile, he has to big-up the so-called “climate crisis”. And here’s the rub: the poor little mites are traumatised by climate doom. Sure there’s a happy ending and the kids end the trip full of false hopes. That’s in line with psychs’ advice to scare them into activism, but not enough to paralyse them. Perhaps a bit sadistic?

Other reviewers, all but one, gloss over this issue. The exception is James Joyce, executive editor of Australian Community Media and ex-editor of the Canberra Times, who I found in North West Star (paywalled, sadly). Joyce, apparently acquiescent in net-zero, still does a deadly interview of Gameau.

Joyce: I started off feeling quite angry about what you were doing to these kids. I felt upset for them – that they were being asked to take all this on when they are just kids. By the end, there is some hope, inspiration, ideas and energy, which is great. But my first question is, are the kids alright?

Gameau replied that the kids are not OK because we’re not doing anywhere near enough. They’re the generation that has to live in a polluted world and the point of the film is to let their voices be heard. “We don’t want these children to have to understand the complexities of the system and geopolitics,” he replies. “What the children bring is this refreshing creativity, they also bring a bloody morality that’s really missing from the system right now.”

He said many leaders and big corporations are acting like psychopaths because that’s what the system allows: short-term thinking and maximum extraction. “And the children get to say ‘Hang on, where’s the humanity in all this?”

Joyce: Are you saying that it’s fantasy or defensive or denial from grown-ups to say: ‘Can the kids just please be allowed to be kids? Can’t they have their childhood and not have to worry about this stuff until maybe they have actual agency in their lives?’ Instead of being in tears at age 10, don’t they deserve their innocence, their chance to not have to worry?

Gameau said the crying 10-year-old in the film was actually frustrated by cleaning up beach plastic every weekend “and no one in her government or community is giving a shit like she does and she doesn’t understand”. (Gameau did not mention the film’s other kids who were depressed and pessimistic about a planetary apocalypse foisted on them by the climate crowd).

Gameau said he still speaks to the kids most weeks and they’re all doing well. None are obsessed with trying to fix the planet themselves. They’ve got lots of other interests. “But I’m with you. I think, gosh, it’d be great if kids didn’t have to go through this.”

Joyce: But my heart breaks for Skye [Welsh, about 12], who is so angry. At her age, doesn’t she deserve to not have that anger?

Gameau: Yeah, you’re right. She does. But she’s in a village, Fairbourne, that’s about to go under the water – the first one in the Western world because of climate.” He said it’s so real to her because she’s losing her home and getting fire in her belly over it. “We can’t ask her just to stop because she’s fighting for something bigger than we understand.

(Fairbourne’s watery grave by 2050 is just more worst-case climate baloney dished out by a green-left town council scared of lawsuits, and contrary to views of eminent scientists in those parts. Don’t take my word for it, it’s all spelt out in the local Cambrian News.)

Joyce: But when [Qld-born eco-activist] Clover Hogan tells the kids “eco-anxiety is a really healthy response” – that stabbed me. Is it healthy for a 10-year-old?

Gameau: If you’re not feeling some kind of emotion, where are you at? How disconnected are you actually with the living world? Let’s have a proper conversation because children are feeling things more deeply than maybe a few more adults should be.

Joyce: There’s an impulse to say ‘Just leave the kids alone, let them be kids, stop turning them all into Greta Thunberg’. I think we’d prefer for our kids to be like the boy from Norfolk Island [called Hiva] who just cherishes birds and wants to take photos of them.

Gameau: The kids in the film do come to realise that there are some really good humans who care about the planet and who have children and who are working in these massive corporations. So, perhaps the Greta [Thunberg] bolshie approach isn’t actually the only way to do this… We have to do things differently.As for the film itself, it opens with a glum Joaquin (from Holland), who looks about 12-14. He was born deaf but after a Cochlear implant can now speak several languages. He says, “I just hear nothing else, like complete death. When I think about the future, it’s not good. Yeah, it’s looking pretty dark. Companies not even trying to care about the planet. You know, I’m trying to live here too.”

Whichever adults dumped their climate paranoia on this kid should examine their consciences.

Gameau: Why do you all think that we’ve started this trip in a forest?

Joaquin: So we can see what would be lost if humanity continues like this.

Gameau: Very good answer.

Soon after, Aurvi, 11, from Singapore, says she wouldn’t even in her thoughts think of hurting someone. But she visited the Great Barrier Reef and all the beautiful corals and fish and turtles could one day be gone. (Again, climate zealots have blighted her joy by doom-mongering about the Reef. Just last month the Institute of Marine Science’s annual reef data showed coral cover at record highs for the past several years, recently returning to about the 40-year average – despite six supposedly cataclysmic bleachings in the past decade).[2]

Skye from Wales wrote to nature guru David Attenborough:

I’m 12 years old and I live very near the village of Fairbourne, destined to become the first climate refugees of the developed world. The entire village is built on a flood plain and due to rising sea levels, by 2050 it is due to completely flood.

As mentioned, this derives just from town councillors and activists doom-crying on their concocted worse-case scenarios.

Bird-loving boy Hiva from Norfolk Island seems as dejected as Skye. He says birds are the ambassadors for wild places. Then he found out about critically endangered, vulnerable birds. “I could bring back a book in 30 years’ time about the extinct birds of the world and then I could have to write a sad introduction about all the things that people have done. I love them so much and I want them to be here no matter what.” He would try to see less money going to the companies that destroy and really hurt birds.

The omission here is what suggests Gameau’s film is indoctrination not education. Why does Gameau not draw attention to the raptor-mincing ways of the wind turbines that he’d love to see dotting entire landscapes? There’s no wind turbines (yet) on Hiva’s Norfolk Island, but surely the kids on the bus notice a few during their trip through eight countries, and raise the bird issue?

Ruby Rodgers, from NSW, is the granddaughter of rocker Jimmy Barnes and her singing is often on the film’s soundtrack. She says, “How we are treating the planet right now, and humanity, is quite scary.” Lines in the soundtrack from her songs include,

“How can you tell me to keep on breathing? Tell me to keep believing while my home is being torn apart? Try not to give up, try to make a stand, ‘Coz I feel my future, Slippin’ from my hands.”Gameau’s film wheels out “experts” to calm the kids’ fears, like North-Queensland-born UK climate activist and Al Gore disciple Clover Hogan, now 24. At 16 she attended the UN’s Paris climate conference and at 19 she set up her “Force of Nature” entity to ally youngsters with decision-makers and jointly tackle the “climate deniers”.[3]

Via google I find she touts the gamut of green-left causes like anti-capitalism and open borders. To Hogan, a UK government decision to open 42 new oilfields is “a death sentence” for her generation. And she wants the media to stop asking mean questions about activists’ “hypocritical” air travel, and instead “challenge the rich and powerful”.

In the film one of the girls, about 14, asks her, “Like I’m not doing as much as everyone else and I just feel like there is so much pressure. It’s like, ‘Be doing more!’” But she doesn’t know what to do, and her voice cracks with emotion.

Clover tells her she is already doing so much. The sadness, anger, frustration is the internal alarm bell that something is really wrong, although people in power try to numb such feelings. “So eco-anxiety is a really healthy response, right? It is evidence that you care.” Hogan thus calms the girl, who wipes away a tear.

Marketing the film, Gameau over-sells how the kids confront corporate chiefs, because the only big companies that agreed to be censured by sub-teen greenies were Nestle and ING Bank, plus an online session with sportwear’s Decathlon. ING was in the tent already, having banned lending to coal companies and similar CO2 villains. The others, especially Coca-Cola and Pepsi, wisely turned down this alleged opportunity. Note that Gameau’s film continually mixes up the valid case against plastic litter, with net-zero agitation and foolish denunciation of “plastics” per se, vital ingredients of modern living.

Given the kids’ scripted questions, the execs were on a hiding to nothing:

♦ When your grandchildren grow up, do you think they’ll be proud that you helped finance global pollution?

♦ Why not try to sacrifice a tiny bit of the profits in exchange for long-term sustainability?

♦ What are you and your foundation doing to ensure climate justice?

♦ What would you prefer: to have a greener future, or to have a future that still has fossil fuels and bad gasses?

I don’t want to knock any kid’s sincerity and passion but it’s Gameau, not me, setting them up for crusading to classrooms. And the kids’ parent or guardian who came along for the ride were fine with their kids fronting Gameau’s polemic.

The kids’ tussle with Nestle’s PR global chief Rob Cameron in Switzerland is the film’s climax, supposedly illustrating Gameau’s “Future Council” of wise and righteous adolescents.

I can see how Nestle’s Cameron got seduced in. He’s been a green activist for 25 years and joined Nestle in 2020 from his CEO and managing partner role at global think tank SustainAbility. He runs Nestle’s ESG (‘environment, social, governance’) efforts and helps run its Net Zero Roadmap. About the time when Gameau’s troop monstered him, he became chair of the International Chamber of Commerce’s Global Commission on Environment and Energy.

The kids, doubtless geed-up by their adults, saw him as the culprit for plastic litter. Relaxed in his open-neck sky-blue shirt, he tried to explain that without high-tech packaging, Nestle foods would degrade, especially ageing on small-shop shelves in the tropics. He hinted that green-friendly packs might let in human-unfriendly bugs. Skye from Wales, congratulated later by Gameau for her ‘bad-ass’ speeches, was having have none of it. Channelling Greta Thunberg’s ‘How dare you!’, she read from her script:

I sat in front of a powerful leader and listened to your empty words and empty promises. Plastic is everywhere. It’s in our seas and our rivers, on our beaches and mountains, in our food and even in our blood. They proudly tell us that Smarties can be a completely sustainable paper tube, whilst you churn out over five billion plastic wrapped KitKats every single year. You’re the third biggest polluter on the planet. You are not a powerful leader. You are a disgrace.

She finished with a Thunberg-like glower and then a little grin, while Gameau’s score swells and he inserts a clip of Skye collecting plastic litter to show she’s a good kid. Serves silly Cameron right for trusting the movie project in the first place.

The lamestream-media reviews rhapsodise about Skye leaving Cameron “speechless”. In fact he recovered swiftly from brat-attack and his response was a model of kindness:

Sorry you think that. Truly. You’re right that the company has a lot of impact. And when it comes to great responsibility, I and other folk in the business all care passionately about the world we live in. I’m a father. We love our children. I don’t want to leave a [worse] world that my daughter grows up in. Companies [should] operate in an economy that knows its place within the wider ecosystem, we just lost sight of that.

Not all the film’s humour seems intentional – one of the boys says, “A lot of the time kids aren’t listened to by adults. I’ve had some really good ideas for them. It was more about my bedroom, but…”

Future Council , although days old, has already aged badly. The Net Zero quest is collapsing.[4]  China, India and the US have opted out and Western Europe is convulsed with doubts, not that teachers would ever let kids know. Once-green asset managers like BlackRock ($US10 trillion) and Vanguard ($US9 trillion) have quit the Net Zero club to realign with fossil fuels. BP has ditched the revised branding and renewables theme from 2000, namely “Beyond Petroleum”. The re-brand supported renewables but has trashed BP’s share price.

Facts and brainwashing aside, Gameau’s movie has plenty of charm with its exuberant storyline, family-friendly antics and great production values. Gameau has even allocated 75% of his producer’s profit share to the Future Council concept.

For all that, the movie has arisen from the ideological swamp to the left of the Greens, as evident in Gameau’s political musings on his Instagram posts. When (not if) this movie invades classrooms, conservative parents need to start their own climate protesting.

Tony Thomas’s latest book, Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep the other lot’s gone bonkers is available from Connor Court, $34.95

[1] Jason Kimberley of the Craig Kimberley rich-list family launched Cool in 2008.

[2] AIMS for alarmism’s sake takes pains not to show the GBR’s total recent coral cover, instead splitting it into separate graphs for the northern, central and southern reefs. Dr Peter Ridd has simply combined the data as shown here to reveal the reef’s true health.

[3] Clover Hogan was shocked to be invited to discuss “climate science” on a TV show, but “sharing the segment with a climate denier.” She upbraided the producer, who replied that since people like President Trump denied the science, the media had to reflect all views. Clover’s view was that the media should tell only “the truth” – adding, “Lives, policies, and the future of the planet depend on it.”

[4] As the International Energy Agency puts it, “Despite efforts to reduce these emissions, the trajectory of CO2 emissions globally remains far higher than what is needed to avoid the worst effects of climate change.”