OpEd: AFT Resolution Supports Decarbonization and Climate Justice Education
Learning as Action for Climate Justice
Deb L. Morrison & Tom Roderick
At its recent convention, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) passed a resolution to Support Decarbonization of Our Public Schools, Colleges, Universities, Hospitals, And City Buildings Through Inflation Reduction Act Funds. This resolution acknowledged that:
…we are in the middle of a climate emergency and unless we dramatically move away from using fossil fuels and toward renewable energy, we will succumb to the worst-case scenario of climate crisis, harming the future of our families, our students, and our planet. (AFT, 2024)
The resolution pairs efforts to transition schools to clean energy with a call for the AFT and its locals to:
…urge and support efforts to ensure our young people engage in robust, meaningful, interdisciplinary climate-change and climate-justice curricula with the goal of preparing students to participate productively and responsibly in a rapidly changing world, and in emerging green, sustainable professions (AFT, 2024).
In this resolution, the AFT points to a powerful vision for education in the 21st century by linking infrastructure decarbonization to knowledge mobilization and capacity building of youth, educators, and communities. The AFT believes, as do we, that preparing students for green jobs and educating for our rapidly changing world with interdisciplinary climate-change and climate-justice curricula is a necessary part of our decarbonization work! And they appropriately identify the Inflation Reduction Act as a source of funding to help us get started.
As work expands to support climate learning toward these goals and funding begins to move in this direction, clarity is needed about what we mean by climate education. We need to come to a shared vision, drawing from the extensive experience of educators already engaged in this work and researchers collaborating with them to document best practices.
Justice needs to be the heart of this vision.
Why climate justice? Because low-income people of color and Indigenous people across the globe have paid the highest price for a world economy based on fossil fuels. Although least responsible for the environmental crisis, they stand first in line to suffer the catastrophic consequences and can offer alternative ways of thinking to foster just climate action.
Why climate justice? Because the fossil fuel economy has created gross extremes of wealth and poverty. Half of people in the United States live paycheck to paycheck; forty million live in poverty; eighty-seven million have no health insurance or are underinsured; and half a million are homeless.
Why climate justice? Because we need everyone engaged in the work of climate mitigation, climate adaptation, and the fight to halt the extraction and burning of fossil fuels and embrace planet- and people-friendly sources of energy. Only a broad-based, inclusive, and unified movement can bring about the transformational changes required to turn things around.
