By: Ana Y.
Climate change protest Photo by Markus Spiske, via Unsplash.
On June 1st, 2017, the United States President, Donald Trump, announced that he planned to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement. The news struck the country – as well as the world – with fear. A withdrawal from the agreement meant that there would likely be no plan in place against climate change from the U.S.. Paired with the Trump administration’s ignorance towards key climate scientists by taking no action, nor condemning corporations emitting immense amounts of fossil fuels and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, leaving the agreement means that there is virtually no hope against preventing the irreversible effects of climate change on the planet.
Nearly a year and a half before the declaration, countries from around the world agreed to adapt in order to combat climate change at the United Nations climate conference. The Paris Agreement is an accord that is the first of its kind – all nations would be required to invest in creating the proper conditions for a sustainable future (United Nations Climate Change, 2020). Its goal is to prevent the global temperature rise to higher than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Countries began signing the agreement on Earth Day 2016 and it was set in stone on November 4th of the same year after it had received signatures from enough countries adding up to emit 55% of global emissions.
Though the United States had originally been one of the countries to sign the agreement, the new leadership that was elected four days after the policy was put in place found opposition with it. President Donald Trump argued that if the country was persistent with the accord, there would be, “negative effects on job growth … manufacturing, and ... dramatic declines in the coal mining, natural gas, steel, and cement industries” (Rafferty, 2020). Though Trump was correct in stating there would be declines in coal mining, natural gas, steel, and cement industries, adhering to the Paris Agreement and investing in renewable energy actually would lead to massive job growth percentages. From 2016 to 2017 alone, job growth in the solar and wind sectors grew 24.5 and 16 percent, respectively (Environmental Defense Fund, 2018). Along with this, remaining in the agreement would be an investment opportunity worth $23 trillion through 2030 – nearly five times the size of the country’s annual budget (Kann, 2020).
Over the past three years since the U.S. announced its intention to withdraw, the country saw negligible climate change action. The years the president’s administration spent in office were “ranked among the top five hottest years on record.” The Arctic saw next-level melting of ice-caps, the length and intensity of wildfires greatly increased, and the U.S. experienced three of the costliest hurricanes in its history in the span of a single year, however this only the tip of the iceberg (Harvey, 2020).
Three years after Trump announced his intention to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, the country officially exited on November 4th, 2020 (Kann, 2020). The news was announced one day after the start of the country’s general election – a period marking the end of the president’s four year term and the vote for new representation by the American people.
The seriousness of the complete withdrawal from the agreement would lead to the increase of record-breaking severe storms, as well as persistent issues such as global warming, seeing massive increases. In a strong sense, the fate of the planet relies on the results of the now three-day long U.S. general election. The incumbent president is facing a likely defeat – his challenger, former-vice president Joseph Biden has a three state lead in the vote. With the race competing until one candidate receives 270 electoral votes, the wait between states being called is a nail-biter. The favored candidate to win the presidency, Biden, has announced he pledges to rejoin the agreement as soon as he is inaugurated on January 20th (Kann, 2020).
However, as the current state of the presidency remains up in the air, re-entering is not a sure next-move. And even with re-entering, the U.S. faces challenges with its climate action credibility due to withdrawing from other climate agreements in the past, such as the Kyoto Protocol (Kann, 2020).
With climate change being an issue pressing the fate of humanity more than ever, we need all citizens to recognize its impact. If every person becomes informed on the severity of this unprecedented issue, we could see much more adamant action from citizens upon the government in the form of protests or even electing officials who will enact reform. However, in the United States, environmental education is something that individual schools or school districts decide upon implementing into their curriculums – it is not mandated in any form on a national level (McGinn, 2020).
As a high school senior, I’ve found climate change to be my greatest fear and challenge. My sophomore year of high school, I took AP Environmental Science and began learning about the intricacies of the environment. Through the class, I learned about how existential the threat presented really is and the severity of the current level greenhouse gas emissions. In short, I became informed and wanted to be a part of the action in any way that I could. My greatest fear is that I will not be able to live a full life experiencing what this world has to offer because it could be cut short by the detriment of the environment.
Three months after completing the class, I began my high school’s first sustainability club – a community sculpted to teach others about how to be sustainable, as well its importance. At first, our goal was to stay local and teach students at our school about the dangers presented by climate change. Yet, unexpectedly, our world was turned upside down in March 2020 when the World Health Organization announced the COVID-19 pandemic. Our school year was put on a brief hiatus until announcing the continuation of online school via Google Meets. From there, we began holding meetings again, virtually of course.
Despite the difference in learning that was presented, I realized that I could use the situation to my advantage – with the prospect of virtual environmental education. Due to measures put in place to prevent the pandemic from becoming more widespread, virtual engagement was the only opportunity that most humans really had to interact with each other this past spring. Along with my former club co-president, I developed an eighteen lesson sustainable education program for elementary school students that we titled “Lane Tech Sustainability Club’s Virtual Environmental Education.” Our lessons included Aquaponics, Ocean Acidification, Deforestation, Factory Farming, Overfishing, Greenhouse Gassons, Rising Sea Levels, Melting Glaciers, Energy Resources (Renewable and Nonrenewable), Habitat Destruction, Displacement Due to Natural Disasters, Species Extinction, Educating Females, Family Planning, Reducing Food Waste, Plant-Rich Diets, Prospects of Colonizing Other Planets, and the Modern Day Climate Movement and Past Colonization. For the program we had applications for students who wanted to be involved in assisting creating them. We then created videos ranging from 15-30 minutes long on each topic, along with newsletters supplementing them with articles, activities, and an FAQ.
Ultimately, we found the virtual environmental education program to be a success, and decided we wanted to further our reach on a global level. This past summer, my former club co-president (he moved to Florida) and I created a 501(c)(3) with the IRS titled Climate Haven. Climate Haven is a website where people from around the world can sign up to take courses on a multitude of subjects pertaining to the science and social aspects of climate change. We created courses by enlisting the help of environmental enthusiasts from our high school who have an adept background in the field and were willing to do in-depth research on a specific topic.
Currently, the website has been continuously edited throughout the past several months before uploading a final version onto the internet. With the goal in mind of launching the program within the next week or so, I feel thrilled to be a part of creating a knowledgeable next generation of climate activists. My next step is to implement the much needed curriculum changes on a national level.
Discussion Questions:
How can we implement an environmental curriculum into our science and social studies classes?
Would massive education reforms mean a more progressive society?