Written by Maya K. van Rossum
First posted Sept 30, 2013
on Mom's Clean Air Force Blog/Website:
http://www.momscleanairforce.org/2013/09/30/pennsylvania-energy-education/
I have often heard from my educator husband that
power companies will pay for the creation and printing of textbooks so they can
rewrite history about the impacts of their industry. Now it looks like the state of Pennsylvania
is getting in on the act – this time possibly brainwashing middle schoolers
about clean energy.
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental
Protection (PA DEP) has announced a new program called KEEP which stands for
“Keystone Energy Education Program.” The
agency describes KEEP as a “series of free workshops, geared to middle school
building teams” where “participants will learn about and explore energy
issues.”
While I believe children as young as middle school
should be thinking about the serious issues surrounding energy development, I
am concerned about any political agenda being a part of the programming. And I question
the ability of the PA DEP to provide good information about the most beneficial
energy options for present and future generations.
Michael Krancer, who recently left the position of
PA DEP Secretary, is on record questioning the level of scientific
understanding and agreement regarding climate change: “There is no uniformity within the scientific
community on how much the warming is occurring,” said Krancer to State Impact,
“And there’s no agreement about how much is attributable to the human part of
it and how much is attributable to other factors.”
E. Christopher Abruzzo, the Acting Secretary of PA
DEP, is not on record as a climate change denier. In fact, he has no record on
environmental issues at all. Abruzzo may be an able prosecutor (he served
previously in the Attorney General’s office), but he has no environmental expertise.
Abruzzo is Governor Corbett’s man at PA DEP; he remains in the role as the
Governor’s Deputy Chief of Staff even as he assumes the role of Acting
Secretary at PA DEP. He was recently
nominated by Corbett to assume the leadership of DEP permanently.
There are good people at PA DEP trying hard to
protect Pennsylvania’s natural resources. But budget cuts have drastically
reduced staffing levels, and the hands of regulators have been tied by
permitting windows that don’t allow time for thoughtful consideration of environmental
impacts. Individuals are afraid of losing their jobs if their decisions delay
pet projects of connected corporations. And if the recent leadership at the
agency is any example, I’m afraid I see the potential for KEEP to be used to indoctrinate
a new generation into supporting the current administration’s short-sighted path
for our energy future – reliance on shale gas.
In fact, while the DEP description of KEEP is that
it will: “will focus on teaching about and tracking energy efficiency in the
school building and in the homes of the community” under this heading two of
the eight topics for the “full day energy workshop” are: (√) Energy extraction technologies and (√)
Electricity generation technologies, including geologic resource extraction and
renewable resources. Shale gas and
fracking are clearly among the priority areas of their clean energy focus.
The recent effort by the PA DEP to delete a peer
reviewed paper by Dr. Robert Howarth, the David R. Atkinson Professor of
Ecology and Environmental Biology at Cornell University, from a state report on
how Pennsylvania will be impacted by climate is yet another example of why PA
DEP’s KEEP program should be received with skepticism. Dr. Howarth’s published paper challenges the
assertion that natural gas is not a significant contributor to climate change
and suggests that that it could be as harmful a contributor to climate change
as coal.
Education is about providing facts, science,
well-rounded information and helping students to become critical thinkers with
the capability to assess and analyze data.
If PA DEP is not allowing its own documents to include studies with
which it disagrees for political reasons, and has among its leadership climate
change deniers, how can it be trusted to educate our children about energy
options in a fair and balanced way?
Since the 2008-2009 fiscal year, PA DEP’s annual
budget had been slashed by one-third. Rather than investing in programs for
educators who are already trained and capable of creating their own energy
curricula, perhaps PA DEP should invest its limited resources in enforcing our
environmental protection laws and carrying out environmental protection
programs. Investing in strong environmental
programs would better serve the goal of safeguarding our children’s health and
future.
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