Texas Republicans View towards climate change- In Textbooks

By Pennie Spruill On Nov 25, 2023

AUTON – It was the second hottest summer on record in Texas this year, but kids in the southwestern US state might not understand why.

The state Board of Education (BOE) turned down a bunch of science textbooks last week because they were too “one-sided” on climate change. The BOE is mostly made up of Republicans who want to limit the amount of material used in schools.

A lot of the books that were turned down taught that “people are hurting the environment.” “The scare tactics that go along with that are my main problem,” Evelyn Brooks, a Republican board member, told AFP.

The State’s Opinion towards the books

It was her opinion, not those of scientists or the government, that “the science is not settled on global warming.”

The decentralized education system in the United States gives most control over the curriculum to the different states. Local school districts also have some freedom.

Across the country, each area is now debating how to teach about climate change and other highly charged topics like sexuality and racism.

It also gives leaders like Brooks in Texas, which makes 42% of the country’s crude oil, a way to fight back against the “political ideology” of climate change, which she calls “a blatant lie.”

More and more divided

Science textbooks from Green Ninja were among the things that the Texas BOE decided against.

“It was because we talked about climate change,” director Eugene Cordero told AFP in an email. He also said that one board member didn’t like the suggestion that asked students to “write a story warning friends and family about possible future weather and climate extremes.”

Last week, eight of the 22 publishers that sent textbooks to the board were turned down. This is according to a count by Glenn Branch, deputy head of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), a nonprofit that supports teaching about climate change.

Some were finally accepted after parts about climate change and evolution were changed. These are two more controversial topics in Texas, which is mostly Christian.

The rejected books aren’t always banned from schools, but using accepted books is usually necessary to get money from the government.

Some people worry that kids won’t be able to see the bigger picture as climate change makes summers even hotter.

Marisa Perez-Dias, one of five Democrats on the board, said, “If kids don’t understand what all of that means, they’re just going to keep making the problem worse.”

One of the Democrats on the board, Staci Childs, said that some of her coworkers “felt like some of the materials negatively reflected how oil and gas impacts our society.”

Two of the 10 Republicans in Congress work directly for the business. This shows how strong the sector is in Texas, even though the state is becoming a center for renewable energy.

Perez-Diaz told AFP that the debate seems to have become more divided lately, even though the state has been conservative for a long time.

A consensus “could be met across party lines before, but we don’t see that as much anymore.”

What next in the journey

Oklahoma is a neighboring state, and its Energy Resources Board gets all of its money from the oil and gas industry. This board has given free educational materials that are in line with the goals of the industry to schools that don’t have enough money.

Arkansas’s former governor, Mike Huckabee, has written a “Kids Guide to the Truth About Climate Change.”

The online monthly lessons are meant to fight back against a climate change plan “that promotes fear and panic” pushed by “teachers and the media.”

In the same way that other conservative arguments about climate change, the guides try to find a middle ground between outright climate denial and the main scientific consensus.

“Everyone agrees that the Earth’s climate is always changing and that industrial development has negatively impacted the environment,” it says in the curriculum.

“But that does not mean the planet is doomed,” it states. “Some very smart people have been wrong about what will happen to the earth. That’s why we don’t know.”

The Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank, sent its own book to 8,000 teachers earlier this year that didn’t believe in climate change. AFP fact-checkers found that the book was false.

The NCSE’s Branch says that even though things went wrong in Texas, climate change teaching across the country “is generally improving.”

“That’s partly because it’s very low to begin with.”