Accelerating Carbon Abatement

In this reproduced op-ed, climate scientist Andrew Dessler argues that Texas is responding to the growing reality of climate change not by addressing it but by preventing students at its public universities from learning about it, having removed climate change from the core curriculum as part of a state-government takeover of higher education. He explains that the core curriculum requires every bachelor's degree student at institutions like Texas A&M to take a broad set of classes across disciplines, and that climate courses were previously available within that framework until, in his telling, educational central planners decided the subject was too dangerous to teach. Dessler stresses that Texas is among the states most vulnerable to extreme weather, including heat, flooding, hurricanes, wildfires and water shortages, all amplified by climate change, and that today's graduates will spend their careers making engineering, agricultural and community decisions that would benefit from understanding it. He argues the removal is impossible to defend on the merits and is best explained by a desire to avoid confronting the consequences of burning fossil fuels, noting pointedly that courses such as Dinosaur World and Molds and Mushrooms remain approved while climate change does not. He also criticizes the lack of transparency around who ordered the change and calls on the university to restore the course... Click below to read more