Educator's Toolkit: Climate Change, Cars and You

Activities, lessons and investigations to accompany The Green Guide, Issue 91 (July / August 2002)

Let The Green Guide inform your teaching and educate your students about their world and their health! The July / August 2002 climate and energy issue (newsletter#91 plus special content at The Green Guide's website, www.thegreenguide.com) can play a central role in many exciting activities, lessons, and investigations. The issue focuses on the personal and practical when the weather gets hot. Global warming poses not just environmental challenges -- warm winters, early springs, drought, floods, and fires -- but is linked to the increasing occurrence of health problems as well -- allergies , asthma and infectious disease. What's the science and what are the solutions that kids and families can manage in their everyday lives? That's what's in The Green Guide, issue 91, including product suggestions and practical home energy- and money-saving improvements.

Climate Change Resources

Want to provide some background for The Green Guide 91's "Tomorrow's Forecast: Hot and Sneezy" and "Climate Change and Infectious Disease?" A host of resources exist for teaching about global warming and climate change. Here are a few websites, curricula, calculators, and other resources:

• Tim Grant and Gail Littlehjohn, publishers of the excellent Green Teacher magazine (www.greenteacher.com), in 2001 also published Teaching About Climate Change for K-12 classrooms, a multi-disciplinary collection of hands-on activities, experiments, and audits that help children of all ages understand climate change and their role in global warming.
  
  
• The US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) has produced materials that provide information on potential climate change impacts for nine regions of the US (Alaska, Great Lakes, Great Plains, US-Affiliated Islands of the Pacific and Caribbean, Northeast, Pacific Northwest, Rocky Mountain and Great Basin, Southeast, and for Native Peoples and Native Homelands). Each unit provides an introduction to the region and its climate, potential climate scenarios for the region, potential environmental and societal impacts of climate change on the region, options for adaptation, and references. The USGCRP materials are free of charge and are available online at: www.usgcrp.gov/usgcrp/nacc/education/default.htm.
  
  
• The Union of Concerned Scientists (www.ucsusa.org) has a host of resources for educators: a map and teacher's guide, as well as high school units especially appropriate for residents of California and the Gulf of Mexico. These units, appropriate for science and social studies classrooms, explain both the mechanisms of climate change and the human realm that both produces and will be affected by global warming.
  
  
• Northwestern's Worldwatcher Project (www.worldwatcher.northwestern.edu) offers a free, downloadable middle school curriculum, the Global Warming Project, in which students role-play expert science advisors to the heads of state of several different nations, prompting students to learn about the issue as they respond to the various questions and concerns of these leaders.
  
  
• At www.usra.edu/esse/learnmod.html, you can find links to several computer models of the carbon cycle, made with the popular and powerful STELLA software. Students can analyze these models and run them with different values for variables.
  
  
• Student questions can be posted and answered, and past student questions viewed, at Ask Dr. Global Change, from the Global Change Research Information Office.
  
  
• The Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (www.strategies.org) offers interdisciplinary global warming curricula for elementary through high school students. Offerings include Beyond the Bite: Mosquitoes and Malaria (Grades 5-8, 9-12) and Climate and Disease: A Critical Connection (Grades 9-12), which eleborate on The Green Guide's articles on health and climate change; A Sticky Situation, which asks middle schoolers to role-play New Englanders soon to have their maple trees -- and maple syrup industry -- affected by global warming; and Here, There, Everywhere (grades 7 - 12), which looks at climate change and water -- a nice accompaniment to Green Guide 91's "Securing our Water."
  
  
• World Wildlife Fund has a Climate Change Campaign on their website, including material appropriate for teachers and high school students: www.panda.org/climate/. They also have produced Speed Kills: Global Warming and Terrestrial Biodiversity Decline, which highlights the threat to endangered species that the rapid pace of climate change poses.
  
  
• The EPA has a global warming site, with many resources for kids and educators, including a searchable database of resources for teachers: www.epa.gov/globalwarming/
  
  
• The Pew Center on Global Climate Change, www.pewclimate.org, offers excellent reports and practical suggestions for social policy changes that can reduce global warming -- excellent resources for the high school social studies classroom. Pew provides many materials free to educators.
  
  
• Calculators: Many calculators exist to help calculate greenhouse gas emissions and impacts, and to demonstrate improvements in emissions with new practices. These calculators are useful in science, math, and social studies classrooms, as they turn consumer choices into concrete impacts. Here are a few:
  • The New Jersey Sustainable Schools Network has developed tools for measuring your school's greenhouse gas emissions: www.globallearningnj.org/OurShr.htm.
  • The EPA offers an annotated list of global warming calculators. They also offer their own excellent calculator, with tools to demonstrate carbon reductions from energy improvements and a great explanation of the calculator's sources and assumptions -- very useful for developing scientific literacy in students.
  • Safe Climate offers a Carbon Footprint Calculator for households and organizations: www.safeclimate.net/calculator/ . The greenhouse gases that industrialized countries pump into the air constitute a large percentage of rich nations' ecological footprints (ecological footprints are the planetary space that consumption uses).
  • Enviroweb offers a greenhouse gas emissions calculator, along with tips and games.
  • The New Environmentalist, www.newenvironmentalist.com, offers calculators that demonstrate cost savings and greenhouse gas changes related to planting trees and using air conditioning, transportation, and compact fluorescent light bulbs.

Energy

In "Wallet-Friendly Appliances" and "Make Your House Pay," The Green Guide explores some options for saving money and energy. Explore further with:

• More information on Energy Star appliances: www.epa.gov/nrgystar/kids.html
  
  
• The U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy has a great compendium of curriculum, resources, and iformation on renewable energy: www.eren.doe.gov/education/ This site includes an elementary online website, Dr. E's Energy Lab.
  
  
• The federal Energy Information Agency, www.eia.doe.gov, provides user-friendly and comprehensive state energy summaries: a state-by-state clickable map of energy information, for example -- or an excellent state energy usage summary at www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/sep/ny/frame.html (substitute your state for "ny" in link).
  
  
• The Environmental Action series, published by Dale Seymour Publications, offers curricula on Energy Conservation, focusing on investigating school processes and gathering school data, and can be used with middle and high school students.
  
  
• Co-NECT's Watt's Up? Program (3 - 12), also offers a comprehensive list of activities and resources: www.co-nect.com/Schools/Energy/
  
  
• The Earth Day Network (www.earthday.net) offers PowerShift, a brief, focused activity guide on renewable energy, and several energy fact sheets.
  
  

Cars

Cars and sport utility vehicles (SUV's) are the second-largest U.S. source of carbon dioxide (CO₂). In "Coolest Cars," Diane di Costanzo explores what's really "cool" about cars, and the changes we need to make in our automobiles and automobile choices to secure our climate and health. Teach your students more about the systemic implications of cars with:

• The Center for a Sustainable Future offers a free curriculum that looks at cars through the lens of ecological economics, aimed at high school students: "Economics, Resources, and the Future: Focus on the Car."
  
  
• The Car and Bike chapter in Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things. This brief, readable "life-cycle analysis" of cars and bikes looks at the full environmental and health implications of these products, from their production, through their use, and on into their disposal. (A free curriculum guide to Stuff is available at the NEW website.) NEW has proved extremely generous to educators in the past, and may even be able to provide teachers with copies of their materials free of charge. Contact them at 206/447-1880, new@northwestwatch.org for more information. This material is appropriate for middle and high school students.
  
  
• The Earth Day Network (www.earthday.net) offers Smart Moves, an activity guide focused on cars and sustainable transportation choices. Energy fact sheets are also available.
• The Center for a Sustainable Future offers a systemic look at sustainability and cars: TK -- emailed Jaimie about what's happened to it on the CSF website.
  
  

Citizen Involvement and Action
(Civics, Social Studies, Science, Service Learning)

Students can pursue the many suggestions and opportunities for citizen action presented in The Green Guide. The Summer 2002 Green Guide presents many opportunities to take action for a healthier school and planet:

• Dollars and Sensible Actions offers a number of transportation-related consumer steps and citizen actions to reduce global warming.
  
  
• "Tomorrow's Forecast: Hot and Sneezy" offers practical steps to reduce climate change and minimize its effects on health. Put them into practice at your school!
  
  
• "Wallet-Friendly Appliances" helps consumers save money and reduce energy use and climate impacts; "Make Your House Pay" tells readers how just about anyone can arrange a mortgage that also supplies their new home with energy-saving fixtures, insulation, appliances. Why not organize a community information night about these possibilities? Students can also prepare reports for school boards on planned school purchases and renovations. Why not also investigate any special programs ongoing in your state to reduce your school's energy usage: special solar offers, low-interest loans, etc.
  
  
• "Diesel Engines Go Vegetarian!" offers info on biodiesel, a promising new fuel increasingly available and affordable now. Why not investigate the possibility of switching your school bus fleet from diesel to biodiesel? No equipment changes in the buses would be necessary -- and your school would be taking a major step in reducing air pollution and threats to respiratory health by reducing conventional diesel use. The National Biodiesel Board (www.biodiesel.org) has plenty of information, tips, and success stories to guide your efforts.
  
  
• Earth Day Network offers Bright Lights, a guide to organizing a compact-flourescent bulb fundraiser for your school. Everyone wins -- the school and the bulb purchasers, who can save up to $38 per year on their electric bills.
  
  
• The Green Schools Project , www.ase.org/greenschools/about.htm, will help your students do an energy audit of your school, and then take steps to reduce energy use. School districts are urged to pass on energy savings to the schools. The Green Schools Project is prepared to work with a variety of subjects and grade levels; school savings have ranged from $2500 per school to more than $10,000 per school.
  
  
• Youth for Environmental Sanity (YES!, at www.yesworld.org) offers the Green Schools Energy Project manual (9-12). It helps students assess their school's use of energy and make environmentally positive changes.

Questions? Comments? We at The Green Guide strive to make our publication useful to educators, and we seek to provide educators with the best and most relevant resources available. Contact us at education@thegreenguide.com if you have ideas or suggestions for The Educator's Toolkit.