The Repertory Dance Theater in Salt Lake City will use its $25,000 grant to help kids understand the impacts of air pollution on the environment and their health. How, exactly? By conducting elementary-school arts programs with an environmental twist. They will include “innovative lectures, demonstrations and movement classes,” according to this month’s grant announcement.

This particular allocation is just a snippet of the Obama Administration’s multi-million-dollar “environmental justice” initiative, which aims to help low-income populations obtain the same degree of protection from health and environmental hazards as wealthy communities. Three similar grants were also awarded this month, two in Colorado and another in Utah.

So far the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has doled out north of $10 million to leftwing groups—including some dedicated to helping illegal immigrants—that teach black, Latino and indigenous folks how to recycle, reduce carbon emissions through “weatherization” and participate in “green jobs” training. The money will continue flowing in the coming year, according to EPA bulletins “seeking applicants for an additional $1 million in environmental justice small grants” to be awarded in 2012.

 “Community-based action and participation in environmental decision-making are critical to building healthy and sustainable communities,” EPA senior environmental justice advisor Lisa Garcia said this month. “By supporting local environmental justice projects in under-served communities, we are expanding the conversation on environmentalism and advancing environmental justice in communities across the nation.”

Let’s take a look at some of the groups that have cashed Uncle Sam’s environmental justice checks in the last year; a New Jersey nonprofit used its government cash to “educate and train” migrant farm workers from Mexico and Guatemala about “pesticide exposure” risks. A migrant farm workers’ group in Missouri spent it on a program to “increase awareness about the dangers of sun and heat exposure” in migrant communities.

Other community groups have used their money to teach residents of public housing about recycling, senior citizens about reducing their “carbon footprint,” inner city residents about “climate-change readiness” and students at a middle school with a “disparate economic and racial/ethnic composition” how to “identify and mitigate air pollution and solid waste disposal issues.” Here’s a detailed list of recipients and their mission.  

It’s all part of the president’s multi-billion-dollar initiative to bring “social equity” to long underserved populations throughout the U.S. Just a few months ago the administration proudly announced that three federal agencies (Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Department of Transportation (DOT) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had contributed to the cause by doling out more than $2.5 billion in “assistance” to help low-income communities with everything from affordable housing to transportation and environmental improvements.

The EPA leads the way with its costly crusade to help underserved populations obtain the same degree of protection from health and environmental hazards as their wealthy counterparts. Here’s how it works; the EPA gives money to leftwing groups—including some dedicated to helping illegal immigrants—that teach black, Latino and indigenous folks how to recycle, reduce carbon emissions through “weatherization” and participate in “green jobs” training.

In the last year the EPA has distributed north of $10 million for environmental justice causes and this month the agency announced that it will allocate an additional $1 million to the initiative with another $1 million to be awarded in 2012. Among the groups getting money is a New Jersey nonprofit that will “educate and train” migrant farm workers from Mexico and Guatemala about “pesticide exposure” risks.

In the past year the EPA grants have gone to similarly outrageous causes, like a $7 million study on how pollution, stress and social factors affect “poor and underserved communities” and  $6.2 million to train low-income residents for “green jobs” in Atlanta. Environmental justice grants have also gone to a migrant farm workers’ group in Missouri that taught migrants about the dangers of sun and heat exposure and to help the poor “evaluate toys and find out about toy recalls.”

Other community groups have used Uncle Sam’s check to teach residents of public housing about recycling, senior citizens about reducing their “carbon footprint,” inner city residents about “climate-change readiness” and students at a middle school with a “disparate economic and racial/ethnic composition” how to “identify and mitigate air pollution and solid waste disposal issues.”

This is no joke, though it may sound like one. It was just a few years ago that the CIA opened its top-secret global warming headquarters, the Center on Climate Change and National Security. No one really knows what goes in in the exclusive unit because it operates under a cloak of secrecy that rejects all public-records requests, despite President Obama’s promise to run a transparent government. What we do know is that the unit is led by “senior specialists.”

We also know that the center, launched in 2009, does not address the science of climate change but rather the national security impact of phenomena such as desertification, rising sea levels, population shifts and heightened competition for natural resources. When it opened the new division was touted as an important tool that would bring together in a single place expertise on an important national security topic; the effect environmental factors can have on political, economic and social stability overseas.

Evidently the CIA outfit is not getting the job done because the Defense Science Board (DSB), a decades-old committee appointed to provide the Pentagon with scientific and technical advice, says the U.S. intelligence community needs an organization that can assess the impacts of climate change on national security. This means creating a new climate information system database, a whole government approach to mitigating the effects of climate change and engaging with international leaders in identifying global solutions.

The nation’s Director of National Intelligence should establish a new group “to concentrate on the effects of climate change on political and economic developments and their implications for U.S. national security,” according to a report (“Trends and Implications of Climate Change for National and International Security”) issued recently by the DSB. “Climate change will only grow in concern for the United States and its security interests,” the DSB’s chairman writes in the report’s introduction, which is addressed to the nation’s Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisitions, Technology and Logistics.  

The changes in climate patterns and their impact on the physical environment can create profound effects on populations in parts of the world and present new challenges to global security and stability, the DSB asserts. “Failure to anticipate and mitigate these changes increases the threat of more failed states with the instabilities and potential for conflict inherent in such failures.” Sounds like serious stuff.

In the last few years the Obama Administration has been quite active in its campaign to enlighten Americans about the ills of global warming. A few months ago a group of esteemed scientists from several public universities warned that climate change will make food “dangerous” and add to the malnourishment of millions worldwide.

Before that separate government evaluations revealed that global warming causes mental illness and cancer and that it creates national security threats by spreading disease among people and animals. Authored by government scientists from various agencies, the mental illness/cancer report claims global warming is one of the “most visible environmental concerns of the 21st century” The separate national security assessment, made by intelligence and health officials, says climate change will destabilize developing nations as well as the U.S. economy and military.