Third graders at Public School 103 in the north Bronx sat on a rug last month while their teacher, Kristy Neumeister, led a book discussion.
The book, “Rain School,” is about children who live in a rural region of Chad, a country in central Africa. Every year, their school must be rebuilt because storms wash it away.
“And what’s causing all these rains and storms and floods?” asked Ms. Neumeister.
“Carbon,” said Aiden, a serious-looking 8-year-old.
Ms. Neumeister was one of 39 elementary school teachers from across the city who participated in a four-day training session in the summer called “Integrating Climate Education in N.Y.C. Public Schools.” Its goal was to make the teachers familiar with the topic, so they can work climate change into their lesson plans.
Will they educate them about how greedy market capitalists knew they were causing it but covered it up for decades, and lobby still to prevent addressing it adequately so as to not to continue making it worse every single day because it would dig into their private profit expectations?
These kids deserve to know how fucked they are, how much we fucked their only habitat, and who is most responsible.
But we all know that won’t happen. We’ll be teaching them the glorious free market cures all ills as the planet burns around them and the sociopath families most responsible retreat to their luxury bunker complexes, mischief managed.
Over a century. The first papers linking fossil fuel emissions to potential climate change started being published in the very late 1890s/ early 1900s