I was recently asked by my kids’ primary school to give a talk about climate change, a challenge I enthusiastically accepted but approached with trepidation. While the topic is undoubtedly an essential part of their education, I would not want to make their classmates anxious. How far should we go in spelling out the reality that we are profoundly altering the planet they will inherit?
The reality is deeply distressing, and when I’m invited to give public talks to adults, I don’t hold back in setting out the gravity of the situation and the urgency of action.
But an innocent, carefree childhood should be every child’s right, and I wouldn’t want to burden them with a problem they did not cause.
So I took another approach. I told the children about two things: where our energy comes from – almost entirely the sun – and about all the brilliant jobs they can do when they’re older to help protect the planet.
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The energy released when we use fossil fuels – the heat that comes from a coal fire, the propulsion from a car running on petrol – came originally from sunlight. Hundreds of millions of years ago, before and during the age of dinosaurs, the energy in that sunlight made plants and sea algae grow profusely, and got locked away when the plants died and were buried by mud and sea sediment.
In the classroom, I passed around an ammonite fossil, so the children could touch the imprint of an animal that lived 200 million years ago. I then passed around zip-lock bags of moss and leaves, and together we squashed them – each child’s squashing represented 10 million years of pressure and heat, as the plants cooked deep underground – until we “made coal”.
I couldn’t burn this coal in the classroom, so to show the sunlight released from fossil fuels, I lit a candle, as the wax is made from oil. As we watched the light and heat coming from the flame, I explained that we were releasing sunlight captured by tiny sea creatures millions of years ago. They got buried beneath the sea, becoming oil and gas that people now drill up so we can run cars, power factories, make food and heat homes.
Next, the climate change lesson: I explained that the plants and algae that became fossil fuels also captured carbon from the atmosphere when they were growing, using the sunlight, and that as fossil fuels, oil, gas and coal locked that carbon safely underground, where it stayed until we started digging it up. But when we use fossil fuels and release the energy from sunlight, we also release the carbon, which is heating up and hurting the planet, like invisible litter we can’t easily clean up.
The next steps were delightful. I showed the class a small solar panel wired to an LED light bulb. We stood near the window and watched the bulb light up. When we covered the panel, the light disappeared. This showed how we can use today’s sunlight directly, instead of digging up fossil fuels and releasing the invisible pollution.
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Then I showed them the solar panels on their school’s roof, and told them how it was helping to power their own classroom.
Finally, I told them about some of the jobs of people I know, like the politicians, experts and campaigners who got the Government to give their school the panels through the Solar for Schools programme. I explained that scientists and engineers invented the technology the panels use, and electricians and roofers installed them.
We used the book Your Planet Needs You! Brilliant Jobs to Protect Your World, written by Elizabeth Laird and Will McDowall, and I had them design their own planet-protecting jobs. (My favourite idea was a job feeding people beans, capturing the resulting emissions, and using this as an energy source.)
I wanted them to understand that the problem is serious, but there are solutions, that many adults are working on it and that, when they grow up, they can join in this effort too.
I hope I left the class informed and empowered, rather than crippled by climate anxiety.
I keep the hardest numbers for the adults. If the world reached net zero by 2050, the International Energy Agency calculates that a child born in the EU this decade would emit only one-fifteenth as much carbon dioxide over their lifetime as someone born there in the 1950s. Yet even in the best case, they will live with far more of the consequences. A study in Nature found that if warming is held to 1.5 degrees, just over half of children born in 2020 will still face a lifetime of heatwaves virtually impossible without climate change, compared with one in six of those born in 1960.
Children shouldn’t have to worry about these numbers; we should.
Prof Hannah Daly is professor of sustainable energy at University College Cork
