Starting this fall, a course in climate change is required for all incoming students at the University of California San Diego.
The “Jane Teranes Climate Change Education Requirement” will help students learn about the “fundamental challenge that we face in the university [or] on this planet in the coming hundred years,” Professor Sarah Gille tells The College Fix.
A memo from the Academic Senate says that at least 30 percent of the class content “should be focused on understanding and addressing climate change and its impacts.”
“Students can fulfill the requirement in courses that span the entire curriculum,” Gille says. “There are courses in literature that cover the literature related to climate change – climate fiction, for example – and there are courses in policy, there are courses in environmental economics. Students may feel like this is an unexpected requirement, but it’s not intended to increase their time to degree.” Gille adds that “the impact will be different for different students”
Qualifying courses this semester include “Gender and Climate Justice,” “Philosophy and the Environment” and “Intro to Environmental Studies.”
A researcher at the California Policy Center is skeptical of the course requirement. Edward Ring says the phrase “climate change” is amorphous, yet is “used to justify restrictions on everything, from the ability to build new homes and roads and other infrastructure to water and energy projects to the food we eat or travel, to how much we consume of literally anything.”
Ring, an expert on water policy, cites scientists who believe climate change is not a crisis, such as former Georgia Institute of Technology climatologist Judith Curry and former MIT professor and climate scientist Richard Lindzen.
Ring laments the fact that climate change is invoked to justify projects that have adverse impacts on water supplies and forests, such as lithium, cobalt, and copper mines in Indonesia, West Africa, and South America. Lithium is used in the batteries of electric cars and green-energy storage systems.
Ring says that the “resource requirement for so-called renewable energy is about ten times the resource requirement for conventional energy.”
Ring views restrictions on energy use in developing countries as “neocolonialism” and “a form of imperialism hiding behind ‘green’ ideology. It’s a form of corporatism where you have government-funded corporations monopolizing entire industry sectors. And it’s all being done in the name of saving the planet.”
