If you're reading this blog, there's a reasonable chance you've seen An Inconvenient Truth already. We could wish many more would too - especially students. The movie producers feel this way too - so much so that they recently made a generous offer to the U.S. National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) of 50,000 free copies of the DVD for classroom use.

Great! Yes? But, no [enter dark cloud to ruin the party mood]. The NSTA rejected the offer (duh?), citing a potential conflict of 'special interests', and that accepting the DVDs might place "unnecessary risk upon the [NSTA] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters." According to this Washington Post article, one of those supporters is the Exxon Mobil Corporation...

We recently posted a story on Global Learning, where consumer education was highlighted as being critical if global-cooling is ever to set in. The opening passage of that little story speaks about money seemingly making the world go around. This issue with the NSTA and Exxon is a prime example. The U.S. keeps church and state separated, and for good reason - but what about getting industry influences out of our educational system?

Kudos to the movie company for making such an offer, and giving evidence they really believe in what they're doing. I hope the NSTA gets a bit of pressure on this. It seems NSTA forum members aren't happy about it either, noting the hypocrisy of the NSTA distributing the oil-industry funded "Fuelless: You Can't be Cool Without Fuel" 'educational' video. People in the blogosphere are expressing shock and dismay at this, and rightly so.