Welcome back to Drill. I'm Amy westerveldt our series with Arthur has come to a close. I'm going to miss Darna nor co hosting with me. But we do have one more thing to bring you today, and that is the complete interview that we did with Katie Worth. Her book mis Education, about the sorry state of climate education in US schools, is coming out November sixteenth, so in just a little over a week. If you're interested in getting that book, we'll stick a link in the show notes.
Katie had a bunch of really interesting things to share from her research, which we were able to include in a couple of episodes, but we thought that you might want to hear the whole interview that's coming up right after this quick break.
So I was thinking it'd be good to have you start by just talking a little bit about what got you interested in this particular subject in the first place.
So I got interested. Let's see, a few years ago, my colleague Michelle Meiser and I went to the Marshall Islands because we were doing a story about climate change and children, and we wanted to go somewhere where the effects were already very visible because we were doing a film we wanted to capture it, and so while we were there, we talked to all these kids and we were really struck by how much they knew about climate change, Like they were more conversant in the causes and effects
of climate change than like most adults that I know, I know little kids. So the deal with the Marshall Islands is that they can move Marshal Ease. Folks can move to the US without a visa because we have a military base on their island as part of the negotiated agreement. So there's a very large Marshal Lease community
in Arkansas. Of all, one of the kids that we were talking to in the Marshall Islands his family was considering moving to the States, and so the question came up, well, okay, well what would he learn if he moved to the States about climate change? What are American kids learning about climate change? So that was sort of an open question, and there'd been some reporting on it, but not a great deal. And so that's kind of how I started digging into the question.
That's so interesting. Would love to have you walk through this example of the school that you visited in Arkansas when there was surprisingly an energy company person there.
We went to Springdale, Arkansas to visited some schools there because of this connection to the Marshall Islands, because there's
such a large Marshal leased community in Springdale. And so I went and visited a few different schools and one of them was a middle school, and I started talking to the science teachers and in Walks this lobbyist for the oil and gas industry, and she is a representative actually of Arkansas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners, which is Arkansas's oil industry organization basically, and she was there to talk to the seventh grade and she had a whole
PowerPoint presentation and her entire job was to go school to school and give a presentation about the fossil fuel industry to middle schoolers. Mostly occasionally she would visit like an elementary school or a high school, but spoke to a lot of fifth graders and seventh graders.
Wow, okay, And there's this one line that you have in the book that this person was talking about to where she says, so when you consider energy, you have some real thinking to do. And then she talks about like you don't want to stop building homes.
Yeah, So she was there. I mean, a lot of what she was talking about was kind of legitimate information, like you know, how oil is taken from the ground and the machinery that does that, and kind of the geology of it all. But then she got into talking about carbon emissions, and she didn't really explain what carbon I mimisas were, she didn't explain why they might be
a problem. She said that it would be a problem, but she didn't explain anything about global warming or climate change, but instead immediately launched into this list of all the problems that exist with all of the different fuels, so like solar, if it's cloudy, you don't get energy, and wind mills kill birds and so on, And then she talks about how important fossil fuels are to the world and how they've lifted people out of poverty and if we kind of stop using fossil fuels, we'll leave a
whole bunch of people in poverty, according to her, which is not supported by evidence, but you know, that was the narrative that she was telling, and she had this line, so she was talking about how when you're considering energy, you have to do some thinking about your value. She says, first of all, you need to decide your standard of value. You need to decide is human life the most important? Humans getting healthier, wealthier, happier, living longer, or is pristine
nature more important? Do you want to quit building new houses, stop getting stuff out of the ground. Do we want to leave it exactly as it is? Because that would be difficult. Thankfully we don't have to choose in this country. We are working in a happy medium at this point.
So wow, it's such a happy medium.
I actually later on today have to evacuate because of the wildfires around me.
Happy medium to hear that it's fine.
I'm curious to hear just you know what you thought when you heard this, and whether any like whether that class's teacher or any of the kids like, had any kind of pushback to what she was saying.
None of the kids asked any questions. The only question I remember them asking was how much it might be able to make if they worked for the industry, like worked for the oil and gas industry, And she said it might be one hundred thousand dollars, and they were just like whoa. And that you know, they didn't ask any questions. She also, you know that part wasn't set up for questions. She just kind of railed through this like do we want Christine nature? Do we want humans
to prosper? Which one would you choose? Thankfully we don't have to choose. Let's move on, you know. So there was like this this kind of major question raise and then resolved immediately, and then she moved on and the teacher was very deferential to her, So of course the students were too.
That's so interesting.
So actually I wanted to ask you about whether you, in the course of reporting this book, got a sense of how US schools became so kind of susceptible to industry influence.
I remember talking to one person who was like, look, I barely have three minutes in the day to pee.
So if somebody sends me this lesson plan and it's like really well produced and looks very professional, I might use it, you know, and it's relevant to my students, you know, like it's not really on teachers, you know, it shouldn't necessarily be on teachers to make sure, you know, to like I mean, well maybe it should, obviously they should check their sources and so on, but like, these are things that are meant to look professional, and they
usually do some of them are like outright climate denial, but then there's a lot of materials that are much subtler, and you wouldn't necessarily catch if you weren't like really
looking for it. So, for example, there's an organization called the National Energy Education Development Project the NEED, and they have their whole purpose is to create educational materials about energy, which seems like a good thing, you know, and they talk about energy conservation, They talk about every all kinds of energy, including some renewables, which like in theory, sounds
like a good thing. But they are sponsored by all of these energy companies and some of them are you know, wind or solar companies, but most of them are fossil fuel companies, and that's how they get the vast majority
of their budget. And so they told me that they aren't influenced by their sponsors, But then if you actually look at the materials they produce, it's really industry friendly and so like, for example, they have these packets of activities and lessons for different age groups about all the different energy sources, and there's like fourteen pages of information and activities about petroleum. Nowhere in those materials is carbon
dioxide mentioned. Climate change isn't mentioned, and the only ron mental impacts They do talk about environmental impact, but what they talk about is water pollution or air pollution. And then they say, yeah, then here here, I'm going to quote this directly, so that there's a paragraph about all the great things that petroleum products do for us, but that there's a trade off because there can be you know,
some oil or water pollution. And then there's a paragraph that reads, the petroleum industry works hard to protect the environment. Gasoline and diesel fuel have been changed to burn cleaner, and oil companies work to make sure that they drill and transport oil as safely as possible. Wow, So what's that saying is like, don't worry about it because the petroleum industry cares so much about it and they're working really hard to protect the environment, and so everything's fine.
You know, it's this problem, but they're.
Taking care of it. And basically every non renewable resource discussed in these materials presents it that way, and you know, like everything's taken care of. Yes, there's problems, you might have heard about them, but don't worry. It's all it's
all being taken care of. And that has this effect of leaving children with the feeling like it almost inoculates them, so when when they hear about an oil spill, they're like, oh, yeah, I learned about that, but like, fortunately there's ways to take care of it, and like there's no discussion of regulation,
there's no discussion of climate change. It's just like, here is this product that does so many things for us, and fortunately the people who make it are really concerned about doing it in a way that's safe.
Yeah. So me and Darna have been focusing on kind of on the social science side, not necessarily how it influences social science curricula, although we have found some of them too, but the way that like the industry's materials and sort of influence and education has served to kind of narrow the spectrum of possible solutions that were even sort of allowed to consider.
Yeah.
I'm curious if you find that to hold up in what you've seen too.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's the end goal of all of this, is to stemy action on climate change, so that the trillions of dollars worth of fossil fuels that are underground can be removed before the regulation happens and sold and turned into profit right, So that's their goal, and it was laid out in that victory memo. They said that the goal was to stop the Kyoto Protocol from being implemented and to ward off future efforts like Kyoto. And you know they've.
Actually accomplished yeah, victory indeed. Yes.
And what we found, what I found in my recording was that, you know, they've managed to turn climate change into a political issue in science classes and in schools, and like, you know, ideally we would like to think of science as you know, it's this scientific process, it's unimpeachable, and that you're going to go to school and you're going to learn something about how the world works and
not as this political thing. But this particular issue is very political, and it shows up in this political way all over the place in schools. So an academic standard is the state's expectation of what a student will learn in each class. So like a history standard might say that, like in tenth grade you learn about the Great Depression
and the New Deal or whatever. They have their science standards as well, and in some science standards they talk a great deal about climate change, but in other states it's absent totally. You know, kids don't learn anything about climate change in school, and you know, and one would say that climate change is, you know, the defining issue of this century, but in thirty States climate change doesn't show up in any civics class standards.
What's crazy about that to me though, too, is that this year, and unfortunately is not coming out until March twenty twenty two or something, is the first time that they're having social scientists and political scientists do a working group of political scientists and social scientists to do a report on like that aspect of acting on climate for the IECC. And I'm just like, how how is it like twenty twenty one and we're just now being like, oh, actually, there's this whole other comonent.
I mean, it's like it does show up in science class, but you know, ultimately, you don't necessarily have to understand the exact mechanism of climate change to understand that it's a big problem that we need to solve and that we need to prepare for right and that it's going to define our century. So you know, it should show up.
It should show up in classes from kindergarten to through college in obviously and developmentally appropriate ways and you know, kids should be asked to think about what action, if any, is appropriate and kind of what solutions might exist, which is not a science question so much as it is a social science question.
Right, right, right.
What was like the most surprising thing that you found in researching the book or the thing that's really stuck with you.
Well, it surprised me to learn that as many as as a third of science teachers tell students the climate change is likely natural, and that about a quarter of children leave school thinking that it might be natural and basically not believing that climate change is happening, even as they're emerging into a world where it is happening in their communities often. And you know that that didn't happen accidentally. You know that wasn't just that wasn't just caused by
kind of chance or accident. It was caused by this really intentional campaign that was at times in a certain way, is really targeted at children. And you know, of course, like the adult world affects children, but then there's almost this other level where if you're trying to spread disinformation to adults and it spread and it kind of trickles down to children.
That's.
That's kind of to be expected, but that there was this actual people thinking how can we get children on.
Our side, how can we get.
This disinformation into the hands of children and into the minds of children, And then they succeeded.
That's it for this time. Thanks for listening. We are working on bringing you the next couple of segments in our Gas season season six, The Bridge to Nowhere. We'll be bringing you those over the next few months, along with some additional bonus episodes along the way. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss any of it. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.