St. Gaia's Academy for Brainwashed Children

Another day, another example of children being indoctrinated by Green ideologues. This one is out of London, Ont., where John Paul II Secondary School has proclaimed itself "Canada's first self-sufficient, carbon neutral high school." JPII spent $9.7 million installing a geothermal heating and cooling system as well as 2,700 solar panels to provide electricity. According to the school, this will "reduce greenhouse gas emissions to near zero, and remove almost 277 tons of carbon every year."

I am, of course, skeptical of those numbers -- projects like this tend to be at least partially eye wash, running the place on solar panels until, you know, it rains, at which point they plug into the local power grid and keep the juice flowing just like everyone else. And then there is the fact that solar panels themselves require many times more mined materials to produce compared with machines that run on hydrocarbons. Plus they need to be replaced every 25 years or so, and are nearly impossible to recycle, often ending up in landfills where they leach chemicals into the ground.

But whatever -- it's the school's money! (Or, half of it is -- the rest comes from the government, that is to say, tax-payers). If you think of this as a giant science-fair experiment, equivalent to generating an electrical current by poking a bit of zinc and a piece of copper into a lemon, then it isn't so grating.

But what I find concerning is the way the students speak about the project -- "I've watched as the world has slowly deteriorated and I want so desperately to be part of something that I know will cause good change," said one. And another, "I believe that it's very important to be part of this project in order... to help our Mother Earth who is suffering right now," a creepily pagan image for a student at a purportedly Catholic school.

I don't mean to mock these kids. They're obviously just parroting what they've been told. And if their high school is anything like the one I attended, for every go-getter involved in a project like this, there are likely ten kids rolling their eyes or just happy to miss calculus to go to the solar panel ribbon-cutting.

Still, I can't help think of the poster child for eco-anxiety, Greta Thunberg, who has her parents and teachers around her to blame for her seemingly compromised psychological state. Sure she's famous -- maybe that's part of the problem -- but her worldview is extremely bleak. And, what's more, she's traded any semblance of a normal childhood to become an activist in a cause whose end goal -- net-zero carbon emissions within a few decades -- just isn't going to happen. It's a grift, and she is a victim more than a perpetrator.

Greta, and her confreres at John Paul II, would have been better off if they'd had a few sane adults around them to keep them on the straight and narrow.