If the Legislature is serious about micromanaging the Department of Education to produce better learning outcomes, perhaps they’ll follow Italy’s lead and require our public schools to teach kids how to save the planet:
Italy will next year become the world’s first country to make it compulsory for schoolchildren to study climate change and sustainable development, Education Minister Lorenzo Fioramonti said.
…In an interview in his Rome office on Monday, Fioramonti said all state schools would dedicate 33 hours per year, almost one hour per school week, to climate change issues from the start of the next academic year in September.
Many traditional subjects, such as geography, mathematics and physics, would also be studied from the perspective of sustainable development, said the minister, a former economics professor at South Africa’s Pretoria University.
“The entire ministry is being changed to make sustainability and climate the center of the education model,” Fioramonti told Reuters in the interview conducted in fluent English.
“I want to make the Italian education system the first education system that puts the environment and society at the core of everything we learn in school” [Gavin Jones, “Italy to Make Climate Change Study Compulsory in Schools,” Reuters, 2019.11.05].
A logical action from a country that is a skinny peninsula. But knowing our Legislature, some knucklehead in Pierre will take Italy’s action as a call to propose a bill banning teachers from talking about climate dysphoria. The weather is fine! It’s just a little rain! It’s God’s will!
In arguably related news, the Keystone Pipeline is pumping no oil today, as the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration has ordered TC Energy/TransCanada to keep the Keystone Pipeline turned off until it can fully repair and account for its latest big leak, up in North Dakota.
The order, sent by the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration on Tuesday, Nov. 5, states that continued operation of the affected pipeline segment would be “hazardous to life, property and the environment without immediate corrective actions.”
“After evaluating the foregoing preliminary findings of fact, I find that the continued operation of the affected segment without corrective measures is or would be hazardous to life, property and the environment,” PHMSA’s associate administrator for pipeline safety, Alan Mayberry, wrote in the order [Sydney Mook, “Feds Order Keystone Pipeline Shut Until Corrective Actions Taken,” Grand Forks Herald, 2019.11.06].
That tar sands oil isn’t flowing, yet I still have all the power I need to run my laptop and furnace. Imagine that. We must not need either the existing Keystone 1 pipeline or its proposed big black snake brother XL across West River.
Oh, and we turn off the Keystone 1 pipeline, and it gets colder. Climate change solved! (That line will most certainly not be in the Italian curriculum… but the South Dakotans backing the Keystone pipelines could certainly use some more education about the impacts of continued addiction to fossil fuels.)
Is America really a Democracy? Perhaps not. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/07/is-america-a-democracy-if-so-why-does-it-deny-millions-the-vote
In South Dakota, we don’t have the right to challenge the crooks in Pierre for a vote for Medicaid Expansion or anything else. They take the referendums and wipe their fannies with them and then do as they please. That ain’t Democracy. It looks to me like Italy has a Democracy as they allow their people to vote and they care enough about their environment to actually do something, we leave like whinny little brats.
Italy is rarely on the leading edge of anything not directly related to art. This is a very good action on their part. I won’t be surprised to see other EU nations quickly follow.
I believe that the topic is a big part of science classes in blue states. Red states? You know. 🙄
That power for your laptop and furnace sure seems to be available whenever you want it, 24-7. You can thank renewables, natural gas, and coal for that, but particularly the engineers that put it all together.
I fully agree that climate change is a problem. So far it has not been enough of a problem to do what is necessary to solve climate change while delivering the energy we all want. Let’s produce all the clean energy we want.
Sioux Falls Climate Change students could learn that transportation is a major emitter of greenhouse gases and that “on demand” transit lacks the capacity to reduce the city’s carbon footprint. There’s a place for on-demand (Paratransit, of course, and other supplementary purposes), but Sioux Falls needs to ramp up its fixed-route system, rather than moving to on-demand, if we ever hope to increase ridership sufficiently to reduce vehicle miles. We need this ramping up now. As millions of students voiced this fall, “The earth is on fire.”
About 25% of Sioux Falls’ electricity already comes from nuclear energy. So powering such transportation with electricity stands a good chance of emitting less overall carbon.
Global warming-number one issue confronting us now and in the 2020 election.
Number two-economic inequality.
Number three maybe, unless Trump is impeached or dies first. Get him out of the oval office ASAP.