In 2006, only 25 percent of white evangelicals disbelieved that climate change was occurring.Those who conceded the climate was changing but didn’t believe humans had caused that change grew even more precipitously.Meanwhile, the rest of the public moved in the opposite direction.The group specializes in adapting secular climate denial talking points for an evangelical audience. In 2010, Beisner appeared on Glenn Beck’s show on Fox News to promote a package of congregational resources called Resisting the Green Dragon that presents the environmental movement as one of the greatest deceptions of our day. Imagine an architect who designed buildings that collapsed if you leaned on the wall, he told Beck.We’d all say, that was not a wise architect, right? How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic into a Catastrophe.Ouachita Parish School Board’s matchmaking between the evolution and climate change controversies occurred at the start of the evangelical campaign against climate action. But there may have been another reason to bring climate denial into the creationism fold. Academic freedom policies have never been challenged in court, their vague language offering enough plausible deniability that such a challenge could be risky.To Barbara Forrest, it’s obvious that the two strands of activism came together through mutual interest.Barbara Forrest feels extraordinarily proud of her role in championing science education over the years.Just as antievolutionists like William Jennings Bryan and the Discovery Institute have presented themselves as crusaders for American morality, so does Forrest.To her, allowing creationism into science classrooms would foster a world where evidence and fact have no real weight.Forrest can expect more work to uphold her version of American morality ahead.The difference amounts to academic standards, a state’s expectation of the knowledge and skills learners will master in each grade and subject.Mundane as they are, standards represent a state’s greatest level of control over what children learn.That Oklahoma’s made no mention of recent climate change was not accidental.To the contrary, the absence had been engineered.Once upon a time, most states left it up to schools to decide what to teach kids about science.But mandatory statewide standards as we know them today weren’t born until the 1980s, when the Reagan administration, citing the widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system, created a national commission to study the problem and dispense advice.The commission recommended rigorous and measurable standards. States like Oklahoma put together panels of educators to consider what those standards should include.Oklahoma put its first science standards into place in 1993 and has revised them about every six years since.After that, they were on the radar of every education advocate.In the sciences, naturally, standards’ treatment of evolution became a keenly negotiated question.When Ohio adopted new science standards in 2002, they required students to describe how scientists continue to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory. The policy, praised by the Discovery 67Institute and pilloried by science educators, found a home in the standards of seven other states within a few years.In 2012, the National Research Council released the Framework for K–12 Science Education, which laid out this more holistic vision of what should happen in a science class.A team of educators then used it as the basis for the Next Generation Science Standards, a set of model standards for states looking for a paradigm shift.The model standards took an unapologetic approach to evolution, and they also embraced modern climate science.Some states had already begun to tiptoe toward covering global warming.By 2008, thirty states’ science standards mentioned some aspect of the phenomenon, though almost always in an elective class and rarely with detail or clarity.Reducing the level of climate change and reducing human vulnerability to whatever climate changes do occur depend on the understanding of climate science, engineering capabilities, and other kinds of knowledge, such as understanding of human behavior and on applying that knowledge wisely in decisions and activities.As soon as the model standards were published in April 2013, the educators who had helped write them went to their state capitols to advocate for them.Then came swift adoptions in Kansas, Maryland, and Vermont.The committee feared the legislature would scrap the entire proposal, so they preemptively forfeited the controversial bits.Even in elective Earth and environmental science classes, discussion of the phenomenon was pruned down.First stop, the Oklahoma Board of Education, where they met with approval.Second stop, the state legislature, where they met no such luck.On a blustery Monday in May 2014, the Oklahoma House Administrative Rules committee flared over the proposal.In early grades, children would be learning about weather and seasons, and how different parts of the world experience different climates.Could those lessons, Republican state Rep.Oklahoma’s House of Representatives took that recommendation, voting 55–31 on a resolution to reject.The proposal’s woes continued in the state Senate.Saying that global warming is the main concern, state senator Anthony Sykes tacked their rejection onto another bill, which passed.Fortunately, under the rules governing Oklahoma’s legislature, the standards could only be killed if the House and Senate voted to reject the same resolution.The two bodies had used two different pieces of legislation to do so, and their session ended before they could fix that procedural error.As more states bought into the Next Generation standards, more states battled them.When the standards survived an initial dispute in Iowa, conservative lawmakers proposed legislation to repeal them, which failed, and then to block their implementation, which also failed.In New Mexico, the education department removed material about evolution and climate change, presumably to avoid criticism, but instead faced so much disapproval that they changed it back.The most dogged fight took place in Idaho.In 2017, the committee came back with a modified version, but stood their ground on the inclusion of climate change.This time, the legislature blocked just the five standards that referred to climate change.In 2018, the educators remained stalwart that Idaho children should learn climate science, and brought back the climate standards a third time.Idaho’s House again voted to reject, but by then the issue had garnered national attention, and the state Senate caved to public pressure and allowed the climate standards to stand.The issue finally seemed to be at rest, but in 2019, Idaho’s House pulled an unprecedented political maneuver that brought the standards into question again.The state was forced to hold public hearings on the subject a fourth year in a row.The remaining six states stuck to their own standards.Because those six include populous states like Texas, Ohio, and Florida, they represent 29 percent of the nation’s student body.Teachers in states whose standards include anything about climate change spend significantly more time on the topic than those whose state standards avoid the subject.Lastly, we know that as lawmakers in some red states have worked to shrink what children learn about the climate crisis, lawmakers in some blue states have worked to expand it.I stared at it for a really long time, he told me.It got in my brain that there’s something going on with the earth that is important and requires my focus. From then on, his art focused exclusively on the earth and its impending crisis.After graduating, he felt limited by his medium, so he became a human ecologist, and then an Earth science teacher.I kept saying to them, ‘That’s just a distraction.We need to focus on the home planet.’ And they were like, ‘Moon!Mars!’ And I was like, ‘Home planet!’ And they said, ‘Moon!Climate is our bones.Climate is our mitochondria.It’s everywhere, he said.Niepold is known as such a zealous promoter of climate education that several weeks into the Biden administration, Special Envoy for Climate John Kerry nominated him to help lead America’s international collaborations associated with Article 12 of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.What’s Article 12, you might be wondering? he asked me by Zoom, literally bouncing at his standing desk with excitement.Article 12 says that signatories are to advance education, training, public awareness, public participation, public access to information, and international collaboration to accelerate the nation’s climate action. Frank Niepold has ascended from the nation’s most enthusiastic booster of climate education to perhaps its most powerful one.Since Niepold has now spent decades thinking about what it takes to give American students a useful education about the climate crisis, I asked him what he thought about the Next Generation Science Standards, which he played a role in developing as a community reviewer.They’re a massive improvement over what we had.And the number of students who happen to go through both classes might be, say, 20 percent.So it’s like Swiss cheese.The chance of missing things is significant.A Swiss cheese climate education damages our hope of addressing the crisis, since there are so many kids out there that just don’t have a clue what’s happening, he said.Their brilliance isn’t going to be involved in solving this thing. It also does a disservice to students’ career prospects, he said.Sectors like agriculture, transportation, and fuel production are undergoing a transformation, and they will need a labor force ready to take on those changes.This will create bountiful opportunities for young people who know enough to capitalize on them.I constantly hear stories of students who first learn about climate change in their third year in college.You mean to tell me this is real?’ Their education system let them down, Niepold said.To make a truly climate literate student body, he said, climate should be incorporated in developmentally appropriate ways throughout elementary school.It should be all over biology, chemistry, and physics standards, each of which has clear scientific connections to the phenomenon.And it shouldn’t just show up in science.Arts, language, history, civics, and economics teachers all have a role to play in preparing their students for the crisis the world is being transmogrified by, he said.A truly robust set of standards could make this happenBy no means is Niepold alone in this thinking.In 2018, lawmakers in Connecticut floated a bill that would require public schools to teach students about climate change.Democratic lawmakers in other states followed.In June 2020, New Jersey’s board of education inserted mention of climate change throughout science and social studies standards, along with health and physical education, computer science and design thinking, visual and performing arts, world languages, English language arts, and mathematics.This kind of progress fills people like Frank Niepold with hope.