The College Fix

Climate change is ‘fundamental challenge’ of ‘coming hundred years’ professor says

A climate change course is required learning for all incoming freshmen at the University of California San Diego starting this semester.

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 told The College Fix on a phone interview.

Gille, a climate scientist, served on the faculty senate workgroup with the administration to finalize the requirement.

The 30 percent of the class content “should be focused on understanding and addressing climate change and its impacts,” according to an academic senate memo.

“Students can fulfill the requirement in courses that span the entire curriculum,” Gille told The Fix when asked about possible pushback from students who study in fields unrelated to climate change.

“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,” Gille said. “Students may feel like this is an unexpected requirement, but it’s not intended to increase their time to degree.”

The requirement “does not increase the number of courses required for graduation” according to a university website.

Gille said “the impact will be different for different students” and that the classes in the various departments will cause students to “confront climate questions in very different ways and that will equip them in different ways for what happens next.”

Qualifying classes this semester include “Gender and Climate Justice,” “Philosophy and the Environment” and “Intro to Environmental Studies,” according to the university.

With regard to the veracity of climate change and its impact on the environment, the professor said that “scientists are intrinsically super skeptical” and that “there is indisputable evidence for the climate change that we see.”

Climate change claims ‘used to justify restrictions on everything,’ expert says

But a researcher with the California Policy Center questioned the claims of climate change proponents.

Edward Ring said “the entire meaning of the phrase ‘climate change’ is propaganda,” during a phone interview with The Fix. He is the director of water and energy policy for the conservative think tank.

It’s “a concept that’s 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 said.

He has written several books about public policy, including one on water policy, according to his bio.

He cited scientists like former Georgia Institute of Technology climatologist Judith Curry and former MIT climate scientist Richard Lindzen, and “so many … impeccably credential[ed scientists] that are telling us this is not a crisis.”

Moreover, he spoke of climate change being used to justify projects such as mining lithium, cobalt, and copper in Indonesia, West Africa, and South America.

“The resource requirement for so-called renewable energy is about ten times the resource requirement for conventional energy,” Ring said.

He called it “neocolonialism” and said “it’s a form of imperialism hiding behind ‘green’ ideology.”

“It’s a form of corporatism where you have government-funded corporations monopolizing entire industry sectors,” Ring said. “And it’s all being done in the name of saving the planet.”

When asked about pros and cons of climate change requirements for undergraduates, he said that any environmental course requirement at a university level should present climate change as a theory, and not as a “settled science.”

Ring spoke about some “hopeful signs,” when asked about the overall trends of recent degree requirements in higher education.

He said that parents and students are waking up to the idea that many degrees aren’t worth anything and beginning to demand that “their tuition buys an education that’s marketable,” while Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida and activists like Chris Rufo, are “making some significant changes in some of their colleges and universities.”

However, the process of turning around trends in higher education is often “one step forward and two steps backward, because the woke bureaucracy and the climate crisis bureaucracy are so entrenched that they get around these things.”

Higher education leaders will change labels on courses and ideologies which parents and students object to and “go right on indoctrinating students,” Ring said.

MORE: Harvard to train ‘planetary healers’

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