Lies My Teacher Told Me

imported 35 percent of its petroleum, while in 2005 we imported 58 percent.

To expect textbooks published around 1990 to treat global warming might
not be fair. In Atlantic Monthly in 2006, Gregg Easterbrook noted that it had
not been proven:

Fifteen years ago, a thoughtful person looking at global-

warming studies might have focused on the uncertainty; at that

time the National Academy of Sciences itself emphasized

uncertainty. Today a thoughtful person who looks at recent

science, including recent National Academy of Sciences

statements, must deduce there is a danger.

Easterbrook described himself as “skeptical,” then “gradually persuaded by
the evidence. Inuits living in the Arctic strongly agree; they warn that the entire
ecosystem there is in collapse. Every year between 1997 and 2005 was one of

the ten hottest ever recorded; 2005 set a record.”^46

So how do today’s textbooks treat what may be the most important single
issue of our time? Here is every word on the subject in all six textbooks,
except for a passage at the very end of Pageant that we will analyze at the end
of this chapter:

At the outset of the 21st century, developments like global

warming served dramatic notice that planet earth was the

biggest ecological system of them all—one that did not

recognize national boundaries. Yet while Americans took pride

in the efforts they had made to clean up their own turf, who

were they, having long since consumed much of their own

timberlands, to tell the Brazilians that they should not cut down

the Amazon rain forest?

—The American Pageant

Although no one is sure what causes global warming, a United

Nations report warned that air pollution could be a factor.

—The American Journey

Here Pageant implies that Third World countries form the bulk of the problem,
although the United States contributes almost 25 percent of all CO 2 emissions,