Energy Exchange

The more things change the more they stay the same in the Texas Senate. While many Senators said they had epiphanies on global warming as a result of briefings from scientists in the UK and Texas A&M, the Senate continues to cave-in to the worst part of the business community when the rubber meets the road. The latest disappointment is the failure of SB988, which merely asks agencies to begin planning for the impacts of global warming such as droughts and hotter summers.

No one had to accept the scientific consensus that humans are in large part to blame for global warming. The bill would have merely required contingent planning for impacts we are already seeing (note this month’s large wildfires). Many other states are doing this rational planning. Senator Fraser, Seliger, Hegar, Jackson, Estes, and Deuell voted to keep this state’s head in the sand. Kudos to Senators Averitt, Eltife, Uresti, and Hinojosa.

On its face, the board’s vote last week requiring that science textbooks “analyze and evaluate different views on the existence of global warming” seems reasonable. It’s not.

Just because you can find a handful of “experts” who disagree with thousands of climate scientists doesn’t mean our children should be taught that the science is still up in the air. And yet, sadly, that will be just the case when the new textbooks are distributed.

To make matters worse, State Board of Education Chairman Don McLeroy said in Saturday’s Austin American-Statesman: “Conservatives like me think the evidence (for human contributions to global warming) is a bunch of hooey.” Hooey? Such flippant statements impact Texas negatively in several ways:

1. They give thinking, educated Texas conservatives a bad name (while causing many to speculate about the Chairman’s vocabulary capacity).
2. They lead to poor decisions, putting Texas children at a competitive disadvantage in science education, thus failing them as they prepare to compete in the global marketplace.
3. They draw national ridicule, making Texas a laughing stock.

In 1999, when religious conservatives on the Kansas State Board of Education removed evolution from that state’s science curriculum, it brought the Sunflower State international ridicule as a “science-free zone.” Two years later, moderates recaptured the board and reversed the ruling — and, hopefully, Kansas’ reputation.

We can’t afford – literally, can’t afford — for Texas to become known as a new, even bigger, science-free zone. Our children deserve better.

Clean energy growth can certainly be tied to economics, but clean energy’s roots have much to do with our world’s changing climate. That’s why I feel compelled to write about my strong disagreement with today’s decision by the Texas State Board of Education casting doubt on global warming, setting our children back compared with their peers.

The Board’s last-minute decision changed the language in a school textbook chapter on Environmental Systems to include the phrase “analyze and evaluate different views on the existence of global warming.”

The tragedy of this ruling is that it places Texas children at a competitive disadvantage in science education, thus failing them as they prepare to compete in the global marketplace. It also suggests to them that their economic and lifestyle choices are unrelated to global warming, thus eroding many parents’ efforts to instill in their children the ethic that they must be responsible for their own actions.

Why did the board ignore its own scientific advisory committee, let alone leading scientific consensus by the National Academy of Science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and our own A&M University’s Department of Atmospheric Science? Why did the board suggest this language change just two days before a final vote?

Surely they knew that such language would be indefensible and therefore chose to give scant notice for public comment.