Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. One of the stories that's most dominant in the news right now is climate change. Behind the story of climate change, though, lies not just the underlying science, but the question of who knows that science and how they learn it. In particular, how is climate change or the absence of climate change a story that some people believe in being taught in schools in the United States. A new book explores precisely that issue. The author is Katie Worth, an investigative journalist who writes about science politics, and there are many intersections. Her book is called Miseducation, How Climate Change Is Taught in America. It shows a number of ways in which fossil fuel companies have influenced science education, and it also shows how the politics of many teachers in the United States affect the way they teach climate science to their students. The book is fascinating and significant and in many ways troubling, and I'm very pleased that Katie is here to discuss it with me today. Katy, thank you so much for joining me. We're going to talk about your fascinating new book, Miseducation How Climate Change is Taught in America, And I want to begin by asking you just to tell us your basic view of what is going on. How is climate change being taught or not taught in America? Your title missage gives away something of your answer. Yeah, Well, the short answer is that there is a surprising amount of climate skepticism climate denial being taught in public schools. And my reporting kind of went into how that happened and why it matters. There's a lot of points of friction in the world of climate education, teachers arguing with other teachers about what should be taught, and administrators mandating that it not be taught, and teachers pushing back, and students and parents mad about it. I found that everywhere that I went, no matter what community, it was in the reddest communities and the bluest communities. But the ultimate takeaway is that the classroom is not this ideologically neutral place when it comes to climate change. In some places, kids are getting a fairly robust education about this issue that's going to define the century they were born into. And then in other places they're actively learning climate denialism. In class. That leads perfectly into the biggest question that I have coming out of reading the book, and it's this, I completely buy the story you're telling. I mean, you've convinced me entirely that the teaching of climate changes, as you just put it, not ideologically neutral. Why would we expect that it would be? And the reason I asked that is the teaching of evolution is not ideologically neutral in the United States, a century after we started having our biggest fights about it. Education in the United States is democratically structured with a small D, which means local school boards make decisions and sometimes state legislatures make decisions, and those are political bodies. And we have in the United States a continuing, deep, politicized, partisanized disagreement about climate change, independent of what the science says. So why wouldn't we expect to see the exact same kinds of ideological divisions that you that you find. Yes, we live in a country where you know, one of our two major parties rejects climate science. But you know, I think we have this idea that in an ideal world, kids walk into a science class and learn science and the science is incontrovertible, right like there is no evidence that climate change is not happening or not happening because of humans, and yet kids are learning or told that that's not certain. Right, So, in an ideal world, we wouldn't have to worry about the adult politics seeping into the minds of children. We would just be able to truy that kids are able to access the truth of the matter. That's a fascinating answer, Kittie, and I want to just delve into a little bit if it's okay with you, please, Yeah. So, in an ideal world, I think I hear you saying science would be science and there would be no politics in it. But there is politics and science and more fundamentally, there's always a politics to education. When you teach kids, you're not just teaching them facts. You're also teaching them values, beliefs, ideas. And it may be that the aspiration to treat science as a quote unquote truth sounds good as a matter of pr or polemic in favor of science, but it's not the way that many people think of science, right. Many people think of science as produced by social processes. And if it's produced by social processes, it's susceptible to these kinds of political disagreements. That was maybe more of amusing than a question. But I wonder why you think about that. Yeah, totally fair. I mean, adult politics make their way into our educational spaces. Period. We're saying that about critical race theory. So it's not in some ways very surprising that that's happening with this issue that is a big point of disagreement among adults. Of course that's going to kind of passively seep into classrooms too. And yet I would argue it's still shocking. And what's shocking about it is that these kids are being born into a century that will be defined by this crisis. There's no child on this earth that will be untouched by this crisis. And they in America. And again, this is a problem in America that is not a problem in many other developed nations. They are sometimes learning nothing about it, sometimes learning active misinformation about it. I think it's a big problem, you know, like for our future, we need these kids to be active participants, be able to participate in civic deliberation over what we do next on this crisis. Let's turn then to the part of your book that talks about how this is happening did you find that there are shadowy groups hiding out there that are trying to pitch the narrative that there is no climate change to this day in the country, Yes, there are. There's this history of the fossil fuel industry borrowing from Big Tobacco's playbook and being very coordinated in getting out misinformation about climate change because they feared that it would affect their business. And this has been very well reported and at one point they even had a meeting that we know this from a leaked document, in which they made a plan specifically to insert their view on climate change into education because they wanted to protect against future action on climate change. They were at that time, this was in nineteen ninety eight, they were worried about Kyoto protocol and then they realized, like, well, if we want to protect against Kyoto protocols in the future, we got to get it into the minds of kids that this is not actually something that they need to worry about. So since then, the fossil fuel industry has like kind of backed off that at least in its most egregious sense, you know, but they're still getting their messages into classrooms. They create a ton of classroom materials. When you say that you who is the they who's creating the classroom materials. So many fossil fuel companies create their own educational materials. The American Petroleum Institute has has done so and partnered with the National Science Teachers Association. And then there's smaller state wide lobbying groups. For example, in Arkansas, the Arkansas Oil and Gas Lobby hires a person to go classroom to classroom, this is her whole job, and give presentations on the fossil fuel industry in Arkansas. And as part of that presentation, she explicitly downplays climate change and says it's not something that the kids need to worry about. That every source of fuel has problems. When mills kill birds, you know, solar power can be taken out by a tornado. She raises, like, fossil fuels have problems, and then every other renewable has problems. Who's to say which one is really the best? You know, is kind of her talking point on this issue. And she's telling this just third graders, seventh graders, tenth graders who don't know enough to question those messages, and who pays her salary. The Arkansas Oil and gas lobby. I think they're called the Independent Oil and Gas Producers. Is that something similar model that you've observed elsewhere around the country, where a fossil fuel lobbying body literally pay someone to go classroom to classroom. I haven't found that in every state. There are other techniques. I found that in many states the oil and gas industry pays for field trips, so like you can go visit an oil derek, or visit a museum that has gotten a big donation from the industry and has a presentation on the history of oil the importance of fossil fuel products. In Oklahoma, there is an organization it's actually state agency called the Oklahoma Energy Resources Board, and they create school book that they send out to classrooms as young as kindergarten. So there's a book called Petro Pete's Bad Dream in which Petro Pete wakes up one day and doesn't have his toothbrush, doesn't have his regular clothes, the tires are missing from his bicycle, and so you know, eventually he finds out like, oh no, what's wrong with today is that I'm missing all my petroleum products. And then he wakes up and it was all a bad dream, you know, And he says, I think this is a direct quote. Having no petroleum products is a nightmare. Right, So of curiosity, how old is that book? Which just within the last few years and it's still being sent out. They've actually created new Petro Pete books since then, like in the last year or two. So this is not some historical thing that is happening. This is actively happening today. Is that different though? I mean, the Petro Pete story, it's a great story of a story. It sounds a bit different than questioning the science behind climate change. Yeah, sure. I mean it's getting a positive view of the fossil fuel industry into the minds of kids, which is not the same as denying climate change. It seems to me that what it is is that you have an industry that's very powerful in a state, like the fossiliel industry in Oklahoma is super duper powerful, has been for well over one hundred years. Right. They want people to work in their industry, they want people to like them, they want a lobby, and they figure, why not start young on those processes. I just don't know enough to know whether other industries are as organized as the fossil fuel industry is. I'm not saying it's good, but it does sound possibly like a different kind of thing than trying to question the science of climate change itself. Yeah. I think that there are other industries that do very similar things, but the difference is that the fossil fuel industry is doing real harm to our world, right, like major or major irreversible harm to these kids futures. I guess this springs up a bigger question of how comfortable we are having these public private partnerships, if you want to call those are kind of like allowing private industry into our public schools. And I also want to make the point that some of this stuff is very explicit about climate change. I did some reporting in twenty seventeen twenty eighteen on the nonprofit think tank Heartland, and they are libertarian think tank, and they produced a book called Why Scientists Disagree about Global Warming, which is infused with all these non scientific talking points, and then they mailed them to over two hundred thousand science teachers in the US, along with a video about solar cycles and how climate change is costed by solar cycles. Lots of teachers wound up throwing those away, but surely some of them didn't know enough or were ideologically aligned and have actually used those materials in public school classrooms. I'm glad that you brought up the teachers because that's where I was hoping to go next. So again, you make a pretty commencing case to me that the fossil fuel industry wants to be well thought of and would like to the extent that it can to call into question climate change. But I want to talk about the human beings who teach our kids, who are also a crucial part of this story. Now, thinking about teachers is they're just like all other human beings. They have beliefs and values, and their beliefs about facts are influenced by their values, the way our beliefs about facts are also influenced by our values. And presumably those teachers do have some say in what they want to teach in the classroom. What do you think can be done in practical terms to change attitudes of teachers in a world where teachers come from the same society which we live, and in which not quite half, but something like roughly half of the people belong to a political side of the world that doesn't take climate change. Seriously. Yeah, it's a tricky issue. We don't have any definitive numbers about what's happening in every classroom in America, but we do know from some surveys that about a third of teachers tell their students that many scientists believe climate change is natural, which is false. That's a patently false statement. And yet a third of students are learning in science class, you know, and that is because it's, as you point out, it's aligned with these teachers belief systems. And it's an equity question. Are we comfortable with some kids learning the truth and some kids learning lies? And my reporting found there's some rough red blue divide. You can kind of roughly guess what a kid will learn in school about climate change based on whether they live in a red state in a blue state. Partly it's because there's Republicans in red states and they're more inclined to disbelieve the climate science right, But part of it is also a state law, Like every state has academic standards of that dictate what a kid should learn in a given grade, So they leave fourth grade history knowing something about Columbus or something like that. And so some states have climate change in their standards. Some states don't. There have been protracted battles over that in some states. And you know, I think lots of people would say that there's kids in every state, no matter what community they're born in, have a right to the truth. We'll be right back. So you said two things that both grab my attention, partly because my day job is constitutional lawyer. You talked about equity and then you talked about a right to the truth. But let's just start with this idea that there's an equity right to know the truth. How can we say that when there's dispute among teachers and dispute among parents about what constitutes the truth, even if there is no meaningful dispute among scientists, as I agree with you there is not. I mean, does a teacher have the right to teach that the earth is flat? Does a student have the right to learn that the earth is not flat? Like? Where? What is the line of how much academic freedom a teacher has versus the right of a student to learn something the truth like not learn lies? Right? I mean it's a hard question. I mean it's a super hard question. And liberals used to be on the other side of it right when evolution was first being taught in schools in the US, and some states tried to ban the teaching of evolution or did ban the teaching of evolution, it was liberals. It was the ACLU that argued, like in the Scoop's Monkey trial which you mentioned in your book, for a free speech, freedom of academic judgment, right on behalf of the teachers to teach evolution despite the fact that the law in the state prohibited it. And that was for a long time the mainstream liberal view that teachers at the elementary school level on the high school level should be free to teach what they say and what they believe. And I don't think that's in principle an outrageous idea. We probably have a more middle ground now where we think that to some degree teachers should be obligated to teach a set curriculum, but to some degree they should have freedom to editorialize around that curriculum. Certainly, if we were, you know, in a state which is banning critical race theory, and a teacher got up and taught that the Constitution of the United States was based on supremacy, which is also a fact insofar as the Constitution included the futuritive Slave Clause and the three fifth Compromise and other features that embedded slavery, and that teacher were fired, I would be thrilled to go and represent that teacher pro bono on the claim that he or she should have the freedom to teach what he or she believes, notwithstanding that the state is banning the teaching of critical race theory. Wouldn't you. I have a couple of thoughts about that. First of all, yes, but what that teacher is teaching is the truth, right, Like you wouldn't necessarily jump at the chance to defend someone who was insisting on teaching that the earth is flat. There's a fundamental difference. You can't equate the two. One teaching something that is defensible truth and one teaching something that is indefensible that it has no bearing on the truth and is only ideological. It is only a politically driven And you know you're right that. At the beginning of the fight over Darwin in schools, the argument was that teachers should have the right to teach evolition in schools, but it's very quickly evolved into a debate over whether teachers should have the right to teach creation in schools, and the courts again and again ruled that they do not have the right to teach creationism in schools. And that's not because it's falls, that's because we have an establishment clause in the Constitution that says the state can't teach a religious belief, and the courts have repeatedly held the creationism, creation science, intelligent design are all proxies for a religious belief, and that's why it's unlawful. I mean, one of the things that I teach to use the word in my first Amendment class, is that there's a weird feature of our law, which is that there's nothing in our system that says you can only teach the truth to kids, no such proposition. And indeed, state legislatures and local school boards decide what they think should be taught all the time in our country with no manifestation of whether it's true or not. I mean, they believe it's true, but that's all the matters. Whereas if it's got a religious content, then the Constitution kicks in and says you can't teach it. But you can teach I always tell them, and it's true false things any day of the week in schools without violating the constitution or the law provided those aren't religious things. Yeah, there is no separation of state and business in the same way that there is a separation of state and church. Right, So, yeah, you're absolutely right. There's no constitutional protection for students who want who pushed back, or who would want to forbid teachers their teachers from teaching climate denialism. So what we're talking about then, is kind of a consciousness raising project. Yeah. I mean what your book does is it tells us the story of what's going on out there to raise our consciousness and tell us, hey, you know, this climate denial business is ubiquitous, pervasive, and you already knew reader that it was true in politics, but I'm showing you're showing us that it's also true at the level of the schools, and therefore it's going to be arguably perpetuated over future generations. What do you think, if anything catter should be done about that. I mean, it's not your job in this book to solve that problem, and I'm not asking you too, but I'm just asking you personally, since inevitably you must have thought about that having worked on this book for a long time and written it. It's a good question, and it's not one that I'm not an activist. You know, my reporting was focused on what the problem is more than what the solution is. You know, there's a lot of people who feel that to set students up for success, they should at least understand the fundamentals of climate change, and those fundaments tools can be distilled to eight words. It's happening, it's us, it's bad, and there's hope. And if a child walks away from an education with that basic understanding of climate change, they're doing a lot better than most adults in the world. The kids have the most at stake in this issue, you know, it's like, this is not a this is an issue that will absolutely show up in their lives. And also what's at stake is that if we hope to prevent the worst outcomes of climate change, all the scientists say that we need radical action, and if there is still doubt about whether it's even happening and what's causing it, that's an innoculation against action. And we are dooming to ourselves to a three degree world, a four degree world, a world with hundreds of millions of people who are displaced, and you know all the other effects. I don't need to repeat. I'm sure everyone has heard them. So the last of those words in your in your list where there's hope, I think it's fair to say that it's happening is not controversial. It's us is not controversial among scientists. It's bad is not controversial among scientists. There's hope is indeed controversial. I heard a lecture recently by David Wallace Wells, who published a very widely read book in twenty nineteen, I think, based on a New York magazine article, and if you could sum up his book in three words, it would be there's no hope. I mean, his argument is effectively and he is a strong, you know, support of environmental intervention. But his view is that things are almost certainly already so far gone and there is so little practical capacity for change that there's really no reason to expect that we're not going to face very extreme, disastrous global consequences of climate change. And I'm not mentioning this so much to you know, to quibble at all with that there's hope. As to note that for those people who want climate change should be taught in the schools. It's not just about the science. It's about a program of interventive change, which is fine, nothing wrong with that, but that's different than scientific fact. That's seeking the possibility of political action, and that is precisely where there's such disagreement in our society about what action should or shouldn't be taken. Surely, yeah, climate change is already happening, and I think, but there's still a big difference between a two degree world and a four degree world and a six degree world. Right, so there may not be hope for making climate change poof go away, but there is a way to minimize future human suffering, and that necessarily will involve leaving some fossil fuels in the ground, which of course is a big for the fossil fuel industry. As for you know what, the I think what you're asking is whether it's appropriate to ask children to participate in this question of what should we do about it? If anything. Some people would say no, that's not what education should be about. But others would say that's exactly what education should be about. That we are creating future citizens who are going to have to participate in civic discourse, and that it's completely a central part of education to prepare them for that. But if we never know the words climate change, if we never hear those in school, we are not set up for success as individuals or as a society. So I happen to agree one hundred percent with the second view that you articulated. I think that education necessarily entails not just truth or facts, which I think is a wildly overused option of education and not very realistic in most cases. But I'm deeply committed to and I think education is deeply engaged with the idea of creating possibilities for action and for engagement in the world. So I'm completely with you on that being what education is ultimately all about, it tactically doable. Is it reasonable to then tack back and say, well, the problem with the fact that people are teaching a different view of climate change is that it's false, is that it's not the truth, when in fact, I believe at least what's motivating climate change denialism is not that people want to be ostriches. It's that they have a different normative view about what we ought to do in the world. They weigh risk differently, and they may also be ignorant but I think in many cases people are not. They have a different view of how the world ought to be engaged with, They want to do different things. And that's why it's a political dispute in the United States, because the political parties are fundamentally in disagreement about how to conduct the world and how to conduct our lives. And so the question that I'm trying to explore, and admittedly it's a hard puzzle, and so that's why I'm making a lot of noise about it now, is how can one say, well, you shouldn't teach that other side because that's not true, and then at the same time say the reason we need to teach this is we need to do certain things about it which are not about truth, but are about doing things. Those seem to me at least a little bit intention with each other. I mean, I think we're talking about two different things. I feel comfortable saying we shouldn't teach lies in school, and that shouldn't be the right of a teacher to teach something that is demonstrably false. So when we're talking about those first three things, it's real, it's us, it's bad. There is scientific consensus on that. And yet one third of teachers self report that they teach students that it's debateable, right, and so I think that shouldn't happen. I think we shouldn't teach things that are false, So we shouldn't tell kids falsehoods in their public education. And then the question of you know, whether the fourth thing there's hope, what should we do about it? If anything, that's a reasonable thing to have a disagreement over. So when we think about how to conduct a process of moving the world in a direction where a third of teachers would not be self reporting that they're teaching that there is a non existent dispute among scientists here, how do we get there? It's a really tricky question. I mean, the truth is that a lot of teachers didn't learn a thing about it themselves in school, and they are not necessarily very prepared to teach it with any depth. So, you know, there's some interesting projects out there. I think Washington State has this program right now. They have put some significant money into professional development program, so basically teaching teachers how to teach climate change. So every science teacher in the state has gone through that now. I think it's one out of five teachers receive that professional development in the first two years of the program, and it's ongoing and they're trying to get to every teacher. So programs like that can actually where they really focus on getting teachers educated on the subject, that can have a big impact. But of course, what happens in Washington State might not happen in Oklahoma. Yeah. I worry that, let's say there were a national movement to go to state legislatures and get them to pass laws outlawing the teaching of climate change denialisms, sort of like the laws that are outlining the teaching of critical race theory, that it would backfire and then you'd get a bunch of states passing laws outlawing the teaching of climate science. I mean, I'm actually a little surprised that no state, as far as I can tell from your book, has yet passed a law saying to teachers, you may not teach that the climate is being changed by humans. They've tried, but nobody has successfully. Nobody has actually managed to get it past yet. Yeah, so a national lobbying approach isn't going to work. You think it's a kind of teacher by teacher, district by district effort to get good science in front of people's eyes so that they will move in a better direction. You know, I'm not an expert on organizing and change making, but from the folks that I talked to, yeah, that's a major approach. Changing academic standards so that they include climate change, so that you know, every seventh grade teacher in the state must include climate change, the greenhouse effect, etc. In their curricula at some point in the year. And that's been a big push. There's been a big push to do that. And then there's been some states I think, you know, notably New Jersey just recently passed new academic standards that include climate change, not just in science classes, but in Civics classes, in English classes, I think, in a math class. Right. So like there, this is something that kids don't learn about in a single unit, you know, in seventh grade science, but they get it repeatedly touched back on it from different angles, right, not just from the scientific angle, but from the civic single. Katie, last question, based on your reporting, if you had to look forward, say ten years or twenty years into the future, do you think things are going to be any better? I mean, do you think the extreme climate events that we're experiencing on a everyday basis, it seems this year might have an impact. Or do you think that the institutional interests of the fossil fuel industry plus the political interests of climate change deniers are so powerful that basically when you publish an anniversary edition ten years out or twenty years out of this book once it's become a classic, do you think it would have to be changed a lot. Are you're gonna have to write a forward that says, of course everything has changed, or would you say, basically what I described is still true now ten or twenty years later. I really hesitated to answer prediction questions. But what I've seen is that there's a growing red blue divide. So like what I would imagine is that blue states may in ten years really be on top of this, and maybe even some red states. So where climate change is present in many different classes, kids are getting a really robust education about it, and then the states where ideologically that is not welcome, kids may be continuing to learn misinformation about it or nothing at all. I mean that said, though, I met teachers in the reddest state, kind of intrepid teachers and the reddest states and in the reddest parts of blue states, who really cared about this issue, knew a lot about it, approached it in a really professional way, and their students had the benefit of that. Did you leave the book after the research and they're writing more optimistic about our future or more pessimistic? I mean, I have a lot of despair in my heart about the future when it comes to climate change. I would say that it helped to talk to teachers who are, to paint with a very broadbrush, very optimistic people, and they're talking to the kids, and they feel that humans are great at innovation when we are forced to be, and hopefully we'll be able to get it together. I mean, especially as climate change is no longer this hypothetical, futuristic thing. It's happening to us right now, and as that becomes more and more obviously, it'll be harder and harder to deny it. What about you, what's your feeling. I've left reading your book more pessimistic than when I came into reading the book. I'm not sure what my baseline, but I was really struck by how hard it is to make the kind of change that I would certainly like to see, given not so much the institutional side, though that seemed really bad, but given the beliefs of teachers themselves, who are after all, human beings and have beliefs and values and attitudes and are not just machines who teach whatever comes out of the curricular machine at them. So that left me actually more depressed about the educational side than I came into. But I also was very grateful for the book Becaich I think is important and significant because it tells the story of what's going on, and that story enables people like me to say, WHOA, there's a real structural problem here, and we need to think long and hard about what to do about it. So I want to thank you for the book, and I want to thank you for a conversation, and thank you also for tolerating my mulling over or trying to explore what could be done given the commitments that we have to teachers and to their ability to at least to some degree, teach what they believe to be true, even where as you point out, we would really prefer teachers not to teach things that the scientific community has reached consensus on being false. Yeah, I appreciate how deeply you think about this stuff. It was a really good conversation. It was an amazing book. I really learned. I learned a ton from it. Any as I said, it's scary, it's scary. Book scared me, Which maybe is the one is sociitude. Thanks so much. We'll be right back. Talking to Katie Worth about her fascinating book Miseducation How Climate Change is Taught in America left me, as I mentioned at the end of the interview, saddened and a little bit worried about just how we can approach the problem of changing what's taught in classrooms when so many Americans themselves question climate change. One possibility, call it the optimistic depressing one, is that things will just get so bad in the foreseeable future that the man made nature of climate change will come to seem much more obvious and evident, even to Republicans who otherwise share political values that question the climate science. In this picture, things get bad, and as a consequence, views change, and it becomes slowly but gradually possible to do more. But there's another scenario in which the political parties are so deeply divided about so many aspects of the right way to live that their disagreements about the right way to address climate issues and to address fossil fuels is simply, at this point indistinguishable from people's views about science itself. On this theory, when teachers falsely say that there is no consensus among scientists about climate change, it's not just that they're saying something that's inaccurate. They're also reflecting a deeply held set of political values and ideals. And when it comes to values and ideals like that, it's pretty difficult to legislate away the teaching of things that people in fact believe. This brings us to what was for me, and you could probably hear it in my voice when I was talking to Katy Worth, a really hard problem to which I don't have a definitive answer. On the one hand, I agree with Katie that when we teach science in the schools, it should be to the extent possible, true science and up to date science. On the other hand, I have a lot of respect for people who devote their lives to teaching our kids in elementary and secondary schools, and I want them to have a degree of capacity and freedom to teach their own interpretation of what they are teaching. As a matter of fact, that makes it very hard for people like me to object strongly when we do not like the interpretation or spin the teachers are offering. It poses a deep problem for our conception of democracy. We don't have a ministry of education in the United States that sets a national curriculum and says what is true and what is not. And when I hear state legislature is doing things like outlying the teaching of critical race theory, what upsets me is not that I think critical race theory is true or not true. What upsets me is the very idea that a state legislature would be purporting to insist on knowing that some beliefs or ideas or values ought not be taught in school. Katie and I didn't solve this problem today, and I don't think we're going to anytime soon. But I do think that Katie's fascinating and important book drives us to think harder about these deeper structural problems that lie behind the effort to get the facts about climate change taught in our schools. Until the next time I speak to you here on deep background breathe, deep think, deep thoughts, and at least when you're not thinking about climate change, try to have a little fun. If you're a regular listener, you know I love communicating with you here on Deep Background. I also really want that communication to run both ways. I want to know what you think are the most important stories of the moment, and what kinds of guests you think you would be useful to hear from. More So, I'm opening a new channel of communication. To access it, just go to my website Noa Dashfelman dot com. You can sign up from my newsletter and you can tell me exactly what's on your mind, something that would be really valuable to me and I hope to you too. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is mo La Board, our engineer is Ben Holliday, and our showrunner is Sophie Crane mckibbon. Editorial support from noahm Osband. Theme music by Luis Gara at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Lydia Chencott, Heather Faine, Carlie mcgliori, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at bloomberg dot com slash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts, go to bloomberg dot com slash podcasts, and if you liked what you've heard today, please write a review or tell a friend. This is deep background

Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. One of the stories that's most dominant in the news right now is climate change. Behind the story of climate change, though, lies not just the underlying science, but the question of who knows that science and how they learn it. In particular, how is climate change or the absence of climate change a story that some people believe in being taught in schools in the United States. A new book explores precisely that issue. The author is Katie Worth, an investigative journalist who writes about science politics, and there are many intersections. Her book is called Miseducation, How Climate Change Is Taught in America. It shows a number of ways in which fossil fuel companies have influenced science education, and it also shows how the politics of many teachers in the United States affect the way they teach climate science to their students. The book is fascinating and significant and in many ways troubling, and I'm very pleased that Katie is here to discuss it with me today. Katy, thank you so much for joining me. We're going to talk about your fascinating new book, Miseducation How Climate Change is Taught in America, And I want to begin by asking you just to tell us your basic view of what is going on. How is climate change being taught or not taught in America? Your title missage gives away something of your answer. Yeah, Well, the short answer is that there is a surprising amount of climate skepticism climate denial being taught in public schools. And my reporting kind of went into how that happened and why it matters. There's a lot of points of friction in the world of climate education, teachers arguing with other teachers about what should be taught, and administrators mandating that it not be taught, and teachers pushing back, and students and parents mad about it. I found that everywhere that I went, no matter what community, it was in the reddest communities and the bluest communities. But the ultimate takeaway is that the classroom is not this ideologically neutral place when it comes to climate change. In some places, kids are getting a fairly robust education about this issue that's going to define the century they were born into. And then in other places they're actively learning climate denialism. In class. That leads perfectly into the biggest question that I have coming out of reading the book, and it's this, I completely buy the story you're telling. I mean, you've convinced me entirely that the teaching of climate changes, as you just put it, not ideologically neutral. Why would we expect that it would be? And the reason I asked that is the teaching of evolution is not ideologically neutral in the United States, a century after we started having our biggest fights about it. Education in the United States is democratically structured with a small D, which means local school boards make decisions and sometimes state legislatures make decisions, and those are political bodies. And we have in the United States a continuing, deep, politicized, partisanized disagreement about climate change, independent of what the science says. So why wouldn't we expect to see the exact same kinds of ideological divisions that you that you find. Yes, we live in a country where you know, one of our two major parties rejects climate science. But you know, I think we have this idea that in an ideal world, kids walk into a science class and learn science and the science is incontrovertible, right like there is no evidence that climate change is not happening or not happening because of humans, and yet kids are learning or told that that's not certain. Right, So, in an ideal world, we wouldn't have to worry about the adult politics seeping into the minds of children. We would just be able to truy that kids are able to access the truth of the matter. That's a fascinating answer, Kittie, and I want to just delve into a little bit if it's okay with you, please, Yeah. So, in an ideal world, I think I hear you saying science would be science and there would be no politics in it. But there is politics and science and more fundamentally, there's always a politics to education. When you teach kids, you're not just teaching them facts. You're also teaching them values, beliefs, ideas. And it may be that the aspiration to treat science as a quote unquote truth sounds good as a matter of pr or polemic in favor of science, but it's not the way that many people think of science, right. Many people think of science as produced by social processes. And if it's produced by social processes, it's susceptible to these kinds of political disagreements. That was maybe more of amusing than a question. But I wonder why you think about that. Yeah, totally fair. I mean, adult politics make their way into our educational spaces. Period. We're saying that about critical race theory. So it's not in some ways very surprising that that's happening with this issue that is a big point of disagreement among adults. Of course that's going to kind of passively seep into classrooms too. And yet I would argue it's still shocking. And what's shocking about it is that these kids are being born into a century that will be defined by this crisis. There's no child on this earth that will be untouched by this crisis. And they in America. And again, this is a problem in America that is not a problem in many other developed nations. They are sometimes learning nothing about it, sometimes learning active misinformation about it. I think it's a big problem, you know, like for our future, we need these kids to be active participants, be able to participate in civic deliberation over what we do next on this crisis. Let's turn then to the part of your book that talks about how this is happening did you find that there are shadowy groups hiding out there that are trying to pitch the narrative that there is no climate change to this day in the country, Yes, there are. There's this history of the fossil fuel industry borrowing from Big Tobacco's playbook and being very coordinated in getting out misinformation about climate change because they feared that it would affect their business. And this has been very well reported and at one point they even had a meeting that we know this from a leaked document, in which they made a plan specifically to insert their view on climate change into education because they wanted to protect against future action on climate change. They were at that time, this was in nineteen ninety eight, they were worried about Kyoto protocol and then they realized, like, well, if we want to protect against Kyoto protocols in the future, we got to get it into the minds of kids that this is not actually something that they need to worry about. So since then, the fossil fuel industry has like kind of backed off that at least in its most egregious sense, you know, but they're still getting their messages into classrooms. They create a ton of classroom materials. When you say that you who is the they who's creating the classroom materials. So many fossil fuel companies create their own educational materials. The American Petroleum Institute has has done so and partnered with the National Science Teachers Association. And then there's smaller state wide lobbying groups. For example, in Arkansas, the Arkansas Oil and Gas Lobby hires a person to go classroom to classroom, this is her whole job, and give presentations on the fossil fuel industry in Arkansas. And as part of that presentation, she explicitly downplays climate change and says it's not something that the kids need to worry about. That every source of fuel has problems. When mills kill birds, you know, solar power can be taken out by a tornado. She raises, like, fossil fuels have problems, and then every other renewable has problems. Who's to say which one is really the best? You know, is kind of her talking point on this issue. And she's telling this just third graders, seventh graders, tenth graders who don't know enough to question those messages, and who pays her salary. The Arkansas Oil and gas lobby. I think they're called the Independent Oil and Gas Producers. Is that something similar model that you've observed elsewhere around the country, where a fossil fuel lobbying body literally pay someone to go classroom to classroom. I haven't found that in every state. There are other techniques. I found that in many states the oil and gas industry pays for field trips, so like you can go visit an oil derek, or visit a museum that has gotten a big donation from the industry and has a presentation on the history of oil the importance of fossil fuel products. In Oklahoma, there is an organization it's actually state agency called the Oklahoma Energy Resources Board, and they create school book that they send out to classrooms as young as kindergarten. So there's a book called Petro Pete's Bad Dream in which Petro Pete wakes up one day and doesn't have his toothbrush, doesn't have his regular clothes, the tires are missing from his bicycle, and so you know, eventually he finds out like, oh no, what's wrong with today is that I'm missing all my petroleum products. And then he wakes up and it was all a bad dream, you know, And he says, I think this is a direct quote. Having no petroleum products is a nightmare. Right, So of curiosity, how old is that book? Which just within the last few years and it's still being sent out. They've actually created new Petro Pete books since then, like in the last year or two. So this is not some historical thing that is happening. This is actively happening today. Is that different though? I mean, the Petro Pete story, it's a great story of a story. It sounds a bit different than questioning the science behind climate change. Yeah, sure. I mean it's getting a positive view of the fossil fuel industry into the minds of kids, which is not the same as denying climate change. It seems to me that what it is is that you have an industry that's very powerful in a state, like the fossiliel industry in Oklahoma is super duper powerful, has been for well over one hundred years. Right. They want people to work in their industry, they want people to like them, they want a lobby, and they figure, why not start young on those processes. I just don't know enough to know whether other industries are as organized as the fossil fuel industry is. I'm not saying it's good, but it does sound possibly like a different kind of thing than trying to question the science of climate change itself. Yeah. I think that there are other industries that do very similar things, but the difference is that the fossil fuel industry is doing real harm to our world, right, like major or major irreversible harm to these kids futures. I guess this springs up a bigger question of how comfortable we are having these public private partnerships, if you want to call those are kind of like allowing private industry into our public schools. And I also want to make the point that some of this stuff is very explicit about climate change. I did some reporting in twenty seventeen twenty eighteen on the nonprofit think tank Heartland, and they are libertarian think tank, and they produced a book called Why Scientists Disagree about Global Warming, which is infused with all these non scientific talking points, and then they mailed them to over two hundred thousand science teachers in the US, along with a video about solar cycles and how climate change is costed by solar cycles. Lots of teachers wound up throwing those away, but surely some of them didn't know enough or were ideologically aligned and have actually used those materials in public school classrooms. I'm glad that you brought up the teachers because that's where I was hoping to go next. So again, you make a pretty commencing case to me that the fossil fuel industry wants to be well thought of and would like to the extent that it can to call into question climate change. But I want to talk about the human beings who teach our kids, who are also a crucial part of this story. Now, thinking about teachers is they're just like all other human beings. They have beliefs and values, and their beliefs about facts are influenced by their values, the way our beliefs about facts are also influenced by our values. And presumably those teachers do have some say in what they want to teach in the classroom. What do you think can be done in practical terms to change attitudes of teachers in a world where teachers come from the same society which we live, and in which not quite half, but something like roughly half of the people belong to a political side of the world that doesn't take climate change. Seriously. Yeah, it's a tricky issue. We don't have any definitive numbers about what's happening in every classroom in America, but we do know from some surveys that about a third of teachers tell their students that many scientists believe climate change is natural, which is false. That's a patently false statement. And yet a third of students are learning in science class, you know, and that is because it's, as you point out, it's aligned with these teachers belief systems. And it's an equity question. Are we comfortable with some kids learning the truth and some kids learning lies? And my reporting found there's some rough red blue divide. You can kind of roughly guess what a kid will learn in school about climate change based on whether they live in a red state in a blue state. Partly it's because there's Republicans in red states and they're more inclined to disbelieve the climate science right, But part of it is also a state law, Like every state has academic standards of that dictate what a kid should learn in a given grade, So they leave fourth grade history knowing something about Columbus or something like that. And so some states have climate change in their standards. Some states don't. There have been protracted battles over that in some states. And you know, I think lots of people would say that there's kids in every state, no matter what community they're born in, have a right to the truth. We'll be right back. So you said two things that both grab my attention, partly because my day job is constitutional lawyer. You talked about equity and then you talked about a right to the truth. But let's just start with this idea that there's an equity right to know the truth. How can we say that when there's dispute among teachers and dispute among parents about what constitutes the truth, even if there is no meaningful dispute among scientists, as I agree with you there is not. I mean, does a teacher have the right to teach that the earth is flat? Does a student have the right to learn that the earth is not flat? Like? Where? What is the line of how much academic freedom a teacher has versus the right of a student to learn something the truth like not learn lies? Right? I mean it's a hard question. I mean it's a super hard question. And liberals used to be on the other side of it right when evolution was first being taught in schools in the US, and some states tried to ban the teaching of evolution or did ban the teaching of evolution, it was liberals. It was the ACLU that argued, like in the Scoop's Monkey trial which you mentioned in your book, for a free speech, freedom of academic judgment, right on behalf of the teachers to teach evolution despite the fact that the law in the state prohibited it. And that was for a long time the mainstream liberal view that teachers at the elementary school level on the high school level should be free to teach what they say and what they believe. And I don't think that's in principle an outrageous idea. We probably have a more middle ground now where we think that to some degree teachers should be obligated to teach a set curriculum, but to some degree they should have freedom to editorialize around that curriculum. Certainly, if we were, you know, in a state which is banning critical race theory, and a teacher got up and taught that the Constitution of the United States was based on supremacy, which is also a fact insofar as the Constitution included the futuritive Slave Clause and the three fifth Compromise and other features that embedded slavery, and that teacher were fired, I would be thrilled to go and represent that teacher pro bono on the claim that he or she should have the freedom to teach what he or she believes, notwithstanding that the state is banning the teaching of critical race theory. Wouldn't you. I have a couple of thoughts about that. First of all, yes, but what that teacher is teaching is the truth, right, Like you wouldn't necessarily jump at the chance to defend someone who was insisting on teaching that the earth is flat. There's a fundamental difference. You can't equate the two. One teaching something that is defensible truth and one teaching something that is indefensible that it has no bearing on the truth and is only ideological. It is only a politically driven And you know you're right that. At the beginning of the fight over Darwin in schools, the argument was that teachers should have the right to teach evolition in schools, but it's very quickly evolved into a debate over whether teachers should have the right to teach creation in schools, and the courts again and again ruled that they do not have the right to teach creationism in schools. And that's not because it's falls, that's because we have an establishment clause in the Constitution that says the state can't teach a religious belief, and the courts have repeatedly held the creationism, creation science, intelligent design are all proxies for a religious belief, and that's why it's unlawful. I mean, one of the things that I teach to use the word in my first Amendment class, is that there's a weird feature of our law, which is that there's nothing in our system that says you can only teach the truth to kids, no such proposition. And indeed, state legislatures and local school boards decide what they think should be taught all the time in our country with no manifestation of whether it's true or not. I mean, they believe it's true, but that's all the matters. Whereas if it's got a religious content, then the Constitution kicks in and says you can't teach it. But you can teach I always tell them, and it's true false things any day of the week in schools without violating the constitution or the law provided those aren't religious things. Yeah, there is no separation of state and business in the same way that there is a separation of state and church. Right, So, yeah, you're absolutely right. There's no constitutional protection for students who want who pushed back, or who would want to forbid teachers their teachers from teaching climate denialism. So what we're talking about then, is kind of a consciousness raising project. Yeah. I mean what your book does is it tells us the story of what's going on out there to raise our consciousness and tell us, hey, you know, this climate denial business is ubiquitous, pervasive, and you already knew reader that it was true in politics, but I'm showing you're showing us that it's also true at the level of the schools, and therefore it's going to be arguably perpetuated over future generations. What do you think, if anything catter should be done about that. I mean, it's not your job in this book to solve that problem, and I'm not asking you too, but I'm just asking you personally, since inevitably you must have thought about that having worked on this book for a long time and written it. It's a good question, and it's not one that I'm not an activist. You know, my reporting was focused on what the problem is more than what the solution is. You know, there's a lot of people who feel that to set students up for success, they should at least understand the fundamentals of climate change, and those fundaments tools can be distilled to eight words. It's happening, it's us, it's bad, and there's hope. And if a child walks away from an education with that basic understanding of climate change, they're doing a lot better than most adults in the world. The kids have the most at stake in this issue, you know, it's like, this is not a this is an issue that will absolutely show up in their lives. And also what's at stake is that if we hope to prevent the worst outcomes of climate change, all the scientists say that we need radical action, and if there is still doubt about whether it's even happening and what's causing it, that's an innoculation against action. And we are dooming to ourselves to a three degree world, a four degree world, a world with hundreds of millions of people who are displaced, and you know all the other effects. I don't need to repeat. I'm sure everyone has heard them. So the last of those words in your in your list where there's hope, I think it's fair to say that it's happening is not controversial. It's us is not controversial among scientists. It's bad is not controversial among scientists. There's hope is indeed controversial. I heard a lecture recently by David Wallace Wells, who published a very widely read book in twenty nineteen, I think, based on a New York magazine article, and if you could sum up his book in three words, it would be there's no hope. I mean, his argument is effectively and he is a strong, you know, support of environmental intervention. But his view is that things are almost certainly already so far gone and there is so little practical capacity for change that there's really no reason to expect that we're not going to face very extreme, disastrous global consequences of climate change. And I'm not mentioning this so much to you know, to quibble at all with that there's hope. As to note that for those people who want climate change should be taught in the schools. It's not just about the science. It's about a program of interventive change, which is fine, nothing wrong with that, but that's different than scientific fact. That's seeking the possibility of political action, and that is precisely where there's such disagreement in our society about what action should or shouldn't be taken. Surely, yeah, climate change is already happening, and I think, but there's still a big difference between a two degree world and a four degree world and a six degree world. Right, so there may not be hope for making climate change poof go away, but there is a way to minimize future human suffering, and that necessarily will involve leaving some fossil fuels in the ground, which of course is a big for the fossil fuel industry. As for you know what, the I think what you're asking is whether it's appropriate to ask children to participate in this question of what should we do about it? If anything. Some people would say no, that's not what education should be about. But others would say that's exactly what education should be about. That we are creating future citizens who are going to have to participate in civic discourse, and that it's completely a central part of education to prepare them for that. But if we never know the words climate change, if we never hear those in school, we are not set up for success as individuals or as a society. So I happen to agree one hundred percent with the second view that you articulated. I think that education necessarily entails not just truth or facts, which I think is a wildly overused option of education and not very realistic in most cases. But I'm deeply committed to and I think education is deeply engaged with the idea of creating possibilities for action and for engagement in the world. So I'm completely with you on that being what education is ultimately all about, it tactically doable. Is it reasonable to then tack back and say, well, the problem with the fact that people are teaching a different view of climate change is that it's false, is that it's not the truth, when in fact, I believe at least what's motivating climate change denialism is not that people want to be ostriches. It's that they have a different normative view about what we ought to do in the world. They weigh risk differently, and they may also be ignorant but I think in many cases people are not. They have a different view of how the world ought to be engaged with, They want to do different things. And that's why it's a political dispute in the United States, because the political parties are fundamentally in disagreement about how to conduct the world and how to conduct our lives. And so the question that I'm trying to explore, and admittedly it's a hard puzzle, and so that's why I'm making a lot of noise about it now, is how can one say, well, you shouldn't teach that other side because that's not true, and then at the same time say the reason we need to teach this is we need to do certain things about it which are not about truth, but are about doing things. Those seem to me at least a little bit intention with each other. I mean, I think we're talking about two different things. I feel comfortable saying we shouldn't teach lies in school, and that shouldn't be the right of a teacher to teach something that is demonstrably false. So when we're talking about those first three things, it's real, it's us, it's bad. There is scientific consensus on that. And yet one third of teachers self report that they teach students that it's debateable, right, and so I think that shouldn't happen. I think we shouldn't teach things that are false, So we shouldn't tell kids falsehoods in their public education. And then the question of you know, whether the fourth thing there's hope, what should we do about it? If anything, that's a reasonable thing to have a disagreement over. So when we think about how to conduct a process of moving the world in a direction where a third of teachers would not be self reporting that they're teaching that there is a non existent dispute among scientists here, how do we get there? It's a really tricky question. I mean, the truth is that a lot of teachers didn't learn a thing about it themselves in school, and they are not necessarily very prepared to teach it with any depth. So, you know, there's some interesting projects out there. I think Washington State has this program right now. They have put some significant money into professional development program, so basically teaching teachers how to teach climate change. So every science teacher in the state has gone through that now. I think it's one out of five teachers receive that professional development in the first two years of the program, and it's ongoing and they're trying to get to every teacher. So programs like that can actually where they really focus on getting teachers educated on the subject, that can have a big impact. But of course, what happens in Washington State might not happen in Oklahoma. Yeah. I worry that, let's say there were a national movement to go to state legislatures and get them to pass laws outlawing the teaching of climate change denialisms, sort of like the laws that are outlining the teaching of critical race theory, that it would backfire and then you'd get a bunch of states passing laws outlawing the teaching of climate science. I mean, I'm actually a little surprised that no state, as far as I can tell from your book, has yet passed a law saying to teachers, you may not teach that the climate is being changed by humans. They've tried, but nobody has successfully. Nobody has actually managed to get it past yet. Yeah, so a national lobbying approach isn't going to work. You think it's a kind of teacher by teacher, district by district effort to get good science in front of people's eyes so that they will move in a better direction. You know, I'm not an expert on organizing and change making, but from the folks that I talked to, yeah, that's a major approach. Changing academic standards so that they include climate change, so that you know, every seventh grade teacher in the state must include climate change, the greenhouse effect, etc. In their curricula at some point in the year. And that's been a big push. There's been a big push to do that. And then there's been some states I think, you know, notably New Jersey just recently passed new academic standards that include climate change, not just in science classes, but in Civics classes, in English classes, I think, in a math class. Right. So like there, this is something that kids don't learn about in a single unit, you know, in seventh grade science, but they get it repeatedly touched back on it from different angles, right, not just from the scientific angle, but from the civic single. Katie, last question, based on your reporting, if you had to look forward, say ten years or twenty years into the future, do you think things are going to be any better? I mean, do you think the extreme climate events that we're experiencing on a everyday basis, it seems this year might have an impact. Or do you think that the institutional interests of the fossil fuel industry plus the political interests of climate change deniers are so powerful that basically when you publish an anniversary edition ten years out or twenty years out of this book once it's become a classic, do you think it would have to be changed a lot. Are you're gonna have to write a forward that says, of course everything has changed, or would you say, basically what I described is still true now ten or twenty years later. I really hesitated to answer prediction questions. But what I've seen is that there's a growing red blue divide. So like what I would imagine is that blue states may in ten years really be on top of this, and maybe even some red states. So where climate change is present in many different classes, kids are getting a really robust education about it, and then the states where ideologically that is not welcome, kids may be continuing to learn misinformation about it or nothing at all. I mean that said, though, I met teachers in the reddest state, kind of intrepid teachers and the reddest states and in the reddest parts of blue states, who really cared about this issue, knew a lot about it, approached it in a really professional way, and their students had the benefit of that. Did you leave the book after the research and they're writing more optimistic about our future or more pessimistic? I mean, I have a lot of despair in my heart about the future when it comes to climate change. I would say that it helped to talk to teachers who are, to paint with a very broadbrush, very optimistic people, and they're talking to the kids, and they feel that humans are great at innovation when we are forced to be, and hopefully we'll be able to get it together. I mean, especially as climate change is no longer this hypothetical, futuristic thing. It's happening to us right now, and as that becomes more and more obviously, it'll be harder and harder to deny it. What about you, what's your feeling. I've left reading your book more pessimistic than when I came into reading the book. I'm not sure what my baseline, but I was really struck by how hard it is to make the kind of change that I would certainly like to see, given not so much the institutional side, though that seemed really bad, but given the beliefs of teachers themselves, who are after all, human beings and have beliefs and values and attitudes and are not just machines who teach whatever comes out of the curricular machine at them. So that left me actually more depressed about the educational side than I came into. But I also was very grateful for the book Becaich I think is important and significant because it tells the story of what's going on, and that story enables people like me to say, WHOA, there's a real structural problem here, and we need to think long and hard about what to do about it. So I want to thank you for the book, and I want to thank you for a conversation, and thank you also for tolerating my mulling over or trying to explore what could be done given the commitments that we have to teachers and to their ability to at least to some degree, teach what they believe to be true, even where as you point out, we would really prefer teachers not to teach things that the scientific community has reached consensus on being false. Yeah, I appreciate how deeply you think about this stuff. It was a really good conversation. It was an amazing book. I really learned. I learned a ton from it. Any as I said, it's scary, it's scary. Book scared me, Which maybe is the one is sociitude. Thanks so much. We'll be right back. Talking to Katie Worth about her fascinating book Miseducation How Climate Change is Taught in America left me, as I mentioned at the end of the interview, saddened and a little bit worried about just how we can approach the problem of changing what's taught in classrooms when so many Americans themselves question climate change. One possibility, call it the optimistic depressing one, is that things will just get so bad in the foreseeable future that the man made nature of climate change will come to seem much more obvious and evident, even to Republicans who otherwise share political values that question the climate science. In this picture, things get bad, and as a consequence, views change, and it becomes slowly but gradually possible to do more. But there's another scenario in which the political parties are so deeply divided about so many aspects of the right way to live that their disagreements about the right way to address climate issues and to address fossil fuels is simply, at this point indistinguishable from people's views about science itself. On this theory, when teachers falsely say that there is no consensus among scientists about climate change, it's not just that they're saying something that's inaccurate. They're also reflecting a deeply held set of political values and ideals. And when it comes to values and ideals like that, it's pretty difficult to legislate away the teaching of things that people in fact believe. This brings us to what was for me, and you could probably hear it in my voice when I was talking to Katy Worth, a really hard problem to which I don't have a definitive answer. On the one hand, I agree with Katie that when we teach science in the schools, it should be to the extent possible, true science and up to date science. On the other hand, I have a lot of respect for people who devote their lives to teaching our kids in elementary and secondary schools, and I want them to have a degree of capacity and freedom to teach their own interpretation of what they are teaching. As a matter of fact, that makes it very hard for people like me to object strongly when we do not like the interpretation or spin the teachers are offering. It poses a deep problem for our conception of democracy. We don't have a ministry of education in the United States that sets a national curriculum and says what is true and what is not. And when I hear state legislature is doing things like outlying the teaching of critical race theory, what upsets me is not that I think critical race theory is true or not true. What upsets me is the very idea that a state legislature would be purporting to insist on knowing that some beliefs or ideas or values ought not be taught in school. Katie and I didn't solve this problem today, and I don't think we're going to anytime soon. But I do think that Katie's fascinating and important book drives us to think harder about these deeper structural problems that lie behind the effort to get the facts about climate change taught in our schools. Until the next time I speak to you here on deep background breathe, deep think, deep thoughts, and at least when you're not thinking about climate change, try to have a little fun. If you're a regular listener, you know I love communicating with you here on Deep Background. I also really want that communication to run both ways. I want to know what you think are the most important stories of the moment, and what kinds of guests you think you would be useful to hear from. More So, I'm opening a new channel of communication. To access it, just go to my website Noa Dashfelman dot com. You can sign up from my newsletter and you can tell me exactly what's on your mind, something that would be really valuable to me and I hope to you too. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is mo La Board, our engineer is Ben Holliday, and our showrunner is Sophie Crane mckibbon. Editorial support from noahm Osband. Theme music by Luis Gara at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Lydia Chencott, Heather Faine, Carlie mcgliori, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at bloomberg dot com slash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts, go to bloomberg dot com slash podcasts, and if you liked what you've heard today, please write a review or tell a friend. This is deep background