Recently this site and a host of media outlets – from the Houston Chronice, LA Times, UK’s The Guardian, and the prestigious science journal Nature – have reported on the Galveston Bay censorship controversy involving the Texas Commission for Environmental Quality versus the Houston Advanced Research Center and Prof. John Anderson of Rice University. Well now enters a San Antonio 5th grade science teacher to lead a petition drive to get the agency to release the full text, and not merely cherry-picked elements that do not reference climate change or sea-level rise
The petition is the brainchild of Mobi Warren and is hosted here at Change.org. Recently Warren explained to a Chronicle reporter “I was very disturbed that what clearly seems to be censorship around climate change was taking place. I felt moved to do this. I think we are in such an anti-science climate in Texas.”
The petition goes on further to point out a complaint stated by Anderson himself in an October NPR interview, wherein he emphasized, “the travesty here is that this chapter was actually written for teachers. They’re my target audience, and this to me is just an outward attempt to keep scientific information, scientific fact, from getting into classrooms.”
For an agency already under so many questions for its lack of response to its current responsibilities, it seems odd that it wants to the route of denying science so as not to take action on future problems. Or worse yet, not helping educate the generation who will be left to deal with those challenges.
A full copy of the TCEQ edits is in the embedded PDF below.
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