A Public Apology: Maybe Climate Change is My Fault
For most of my teaching career, this time of year was a period of relaxation and celebration. As the semester was winding down, I would finish grading my student’s final exams and enter their grades into the college’s student information system. Sure, I’d have to get ready for the next semester, but after the last grade was in the books, I usually took a few well deserved days off and left the past 16 weeks behind me. That was the way it used to work, but not this year.
To understand what’s different this year, I need to provide you with some background. A few years ago, I wrote a book titled “When They Hid The Fire.” The book was the culmination of my historical research on electrification and how it affected society’s perceptions of energy. As a professor who teaches the history of business and technology, I’ve long contended that society forgot the consequences of its energy use when electricity was introduced and adopted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The “miracle” of electricity was really just a surreptitious agent for dirty burning coal, it was coal disguised as something different, and its clean electrons snuck into our homes over seemingly innocuous wires. When the wall outlet and lightbulb became our tangible energy sources, we forgot about the millions of tons of coal that were burned to power our rapidly modernizing world.
As we slipped into the 21st century, the proliferation of slick smartphones and Teslas further removed our consciousness from the fracking and open-pit mining that remained a significant source of primary energy for these “clean” technologies. In short, we were duped into believing that electricity was a savior, but it was actually just a trick — when wires separated us physically and consciously from the fires that generated our power — most of us forgot where our energy came from.
I’ve spent a lot of time researching and writing on this subject over the past decade. In the process, I recognized that energy (and to some extent, environmental) education is rare in the mainstream higher-ed curriculum. Don’t get me wrong, there are robust programs of ecological studies and energy engineering out there, but most STEM and liberal arts students receive little information about energy literacy, and it is becoming more obvious just as climate change issues have reached a critical threshold.
To some extent, all of us as teachers become aspirational in our ability to impact our student’s lives. We want to turn out the best and the brightest and launch our students into rewarding careers caring for the sick, building the future, and inventing the next generation of sustainable technologies. As a history professor, my platform of teaching the history of technology has provided me the opportunity to educate students about the past and how it led to our current energy conundrum. Even though more of our electricity is generated by renewable sources than ever before, the world needs to go farther and quickly.
It’s not easy to change the world, but as teachers, we chip away and hope to open up a few minds during our careers. Our most significant rewards are witnessing the “aha” moments that come each semester when we see a student enlightened to a new perspective or discovery. For me, this would happen when a student realized that their cellphone was ultimately powered by burning coal or that Elon Musk’s latest vehicle — at least in some regions of the country — depended upon coal or fracked natural gas to get between points a and b. I know that my vocation of teaching students the history of electrification and helping them become aware of the consequentiality of their energy usage has a minor impact in the big picture, but I’ll take what I can get. Perhaps I can’t change the world — but I have always been content with opening up a mind or two along the way.
As a history professor, recent events have given me a new sense of urgency beyond my ongoing concern over the future of the planet. At the same time that the liberal arts are becoming an endangered species, the most critical issues facing the United States can best be understood through an examination of our past. Although the field of history tends to get beaten up or is seen as a vocation with dubious relevance or usefulness, its value is clear. When Shakespeare famously wrote, “What’s past is prologue,” he was expressing the idea that whatever happened up until now sets the stage for the present. Stop and think about all of the coal and oil that has been burned just in the last century — this is the past — and nearly half of our electricity still comes from the burning of fossil fuels — this is the present. Unfortunately, the environment is still a lot less sexy than cable-news driven political scandals or Hollywood’s latest affairs. When the U.S. pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord and the parts per million of carbon dioxide reached a new milestone this decade, few were talking about it. College sports, the latest Star Wars movie, Kanye, and the Kardashians get much more press than melting ice caps and rising sea levels. If only Greta Thunberg was as revered as Billie Eilish.
The reality is that a large swath of our polarized society still views environmentalism as a left-wing conspiracy. While I know that at least half of the population is suspicious of intellectualism and science, all I want to do is build awareness as to the significant issues facing us in hopes of contributing to the creation of a well-informed citizenry. At the very least, I want students to know that our past energy policy and consumption behavior has put us on track to an environmental catastrophe. My goal is not to change minds as much as present all sides of the debate — all positions are valid if they are based on sound reasoning and critical analysis.
While those of us who teach have an occasional semester with students of dubious capacity, usually, the clueless are outranked. Subsequently, I’ve always been able to relax between semesters because I’ve had enough students that have given me hope that the future will be in capable hands. Then came this year.
When students perform poorly on an exam or a question in general, I tend to blame myself first. Did I not reasonably present the information? Maybe I didn’t provide students with the best study aids or the most informative articles, or perhaps I needed to spend more time highlighting the salient points of our discussions. No matter how I looked at it, I’ve taught the same way — and other than updating the materials — nothing really has changed over the years. The facts have changed slightly, but still, about 62% of the electricity in the United States is generated by the burning of fossil fuels. I’m not so concerned that students know the exact percentage of non-renewables used, I want them to associate the electricity that they use with fossil fuels and climate change. I want them to understand that perceptions of energy have been socially constructed and that the American ethos of inconsequential abundance is a slippery slope. I would be thrilled if they realized that the past always informs the present, and when it comes to energy and history, past behaviors are unsustainable. At a minimum, I want them to make the connection that there are consequences for the energy they use and that their actions as both consumers and citizens matter. More importantly, I want them to be critical thinkers — in an era of the attempted legitimization of alternative facts — there is no more pressing concern on the road to a well-informed electorate.
So then came this year. While I am not entirely disheartened, I’m uneasy as this semester draws to a close. The connection between electricity and fossil fuels was missed by many, which has never happened before. Without giving any mention of the science, more than a few students expressed the idea that climate change was an unproven hoax, again, a first for my class. I’m not here as part of a conspiracy to push a liberal agenda on my students, but I do want them to be open-minded enough to consider all positions as I do. Perhaps I am old-school because I still believe in science, and I know that unfettered consumption of anything — especially energy — has to have consequences. Maybe this class was just an anomaly, and things will return back to normal in the spring. Perhaps I’m to blame, maybe I’m no longer convincing enough to get students to objectively look at the facts when it comes to energy usage and the environment, if this is the case I apologize — maybe climate change is my fault after all.
