The NC House’s Quietly Radical Education Overhaul
Tues., Aug. 10: The NC House drops its budget + Durham masks up + CLT’s NDO + catastrophic climate consequences
+4 BIG STORIES
1. NC House Wants Local Boards to Pick Textbooks
Yesterday, the state House released its proposed budget. The N&O has a good rundown of the highlights here.
The proposed House budget has an average of 5.5% raises for North Carolina teachers and raises for other state employees that are higher than those in the Senate version of the state budget. Raises and tax cuts were announced by the House on Monday ahead of the full budget being made publicly available.
The $25.7 billion budget will also include money for broadband expansion, infrastructure, capital projects, and other plans, Republican lawmakers said during a news conference Monday.
But I’d like to draw your attention to page 110 of the 664-page budget document—specifically, the section called “MODERNIZE SELECTION OF INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS.” There’s a lot of repeal this, add that, but if I’m understanding this correctly, the gist is:
The House wants to strip the State Board of Elections of the power to select textbooks and other instructional materials and delegate that authority to the state’s 115 individual school boards. (Current law here.)
Each of those school boards must establish a “local media community advisory committee,” which will “investigate and evaluate challenges from parents, teachers, and members of the public to instructional materials and supplemental materials on the grounds that they are unfit materials.”
The advisory committee makes recommendations on challenges to the school board. If the person complaining disagrees, he or she can complain to the State Board, which will likewise have a State Community Media Advisory Committee.
The committee makes a recommendation to the SBE, which has final jurisdiction.
WHAT IT MEANS: Based on the media coverage, this part didn’t make the press conference. But it seems likely this section is a response to the Democrat-controlled SBE approving “culturally responsive” social studies standards earlier this year, as well as an extension of the critical fight theory battle Republicans are waging here and across the country.
In short: If you believe the SBE/DPI/liberals are imposing an antiracist and/or neo-Marxist agenda from Raleigh, it makes sense to decentralize curricula, or at least give local school boards (likely in rural counties, I would imagine) the ability to select something suited to their communities, and to give parents the ability to object if they see something, well, objectionable.
Whether some kids might be short-changed by political timidity or self-censorship is another matter. Were this an option a generation ago, how many rural districts’ history texts would still have preached the Lost Cause?
I have no idea whether the Senate is interested in this fight. And while this isn’t my area of expertise by any means, I can’t imagine how 115 different school boards selecting their own textbooks doesn’t become an expensive mess.
On that note, 115 committees giving aggrieved parents an opportunity to complain about school materials they don’t like … just imagine those meetings.
Democrats, meanwhile, point out that the House budget doesn’t meet court-ordered Leandro funding requirements, even while Republicans cut corporate and personal income taxes, keep billions in the rainy-day fund, and appropriate $8 million to keep themselves from getting wet.
Republicans don’t think a court has authority to order them to spend more money on schools—and the House budget gives teachers an average 5.5% raise over two years, though the amount is weighted toward longer-tenured teachers.
They also say lower taxes have made the state more attractive to businesses, and running a robust surplus has helped the state weather difficult periods, including the pandemic.
2. Hope You Kept Your Masks Handy, Durham
As of 5 p.m. yesterday, Durham city and county are again under a stay of emergency, and everyone over the age of five is required to wear a mask indoors.
Take a bow, Mr. I Don’t Need to Be Vaccinated Because I Read a Thing on Facebook. This one’s on you.
COVID-19 has become “a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” Mayor Steve Schewel said at a news conference outside City Hall. More than 90% of current cases are among those who have not been vaccinated against the coronavirus, he said.
The delta variant is fueling the current surge. A month ago, the Duke health system had under five current COVID-19 cases, Schewel said. A week ago it was up to 56. (N&O)
Boone has a similar state of emergency going into effect today. Winston-Salem has a state of emergency, too, and requires masks in government buildings. Raleigh and Wake County require masks in government buildings but have not yet declared states of emergency.
3. Charlotte Passes LGBTQ-Friendly Nondiscrimination Ordinance
The last time the Queen City did this, the General Assembly responded with HB 2. This time, that’s unlikely. The city council voted yesterday to adopt an NDO that includes protections for gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, and natural hairstyles.
The council rejected a motion to add in protections for political identity. Being a Trump voter is not a protected class, it seems.
The NDO applies to employers and public accommodations. Private clubs, religious organizations, and members-only groups are exempt. (Question: Does that include bars, which technically are private clubs?)
The enforcement mechanism isn’t clear.
Despite, I believe, everyone on the Raleigh City Council saying at one time or another that they’d like to pass an LGBTQ-inclusive NDO—and despite Durham and Asheville and Buncombe County and Chapel Hill and Orange County and Carrboro and Hillsborough and Greensboro and Apex (Apex!) and now Charlotte going first—the Raleigh City Council has so far declined to do so.
“My understanding is that there are going to be lawsuits involving some of these other ordinances,” Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin told the N&O earlier this year. “We are waiting to see how this plays out.”
She added: “My sister is gay, and I don’t believe that anyone has the right to treat her differently than they have the right to treat me. Finding that balance is very painful, and I take it very personally. It is very hard.”
4. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: Humanity F**ked, Probably.
The IPCC updated its climate change prognosis yesterday, and, welp, it’s not good. Not good at all.
From The Washington Post:
The sprawling assessment, compiled by 234 authors relying on more than 14,000 studies from around the globe, bluntly lays out for policymakers and the public the most up-to-date understanding of the physical science on climate change. Released amid a summer of deadly fires, floods, and heat waves, it arrives less than three months before a critical summit this November in Scotland, where world leaders face mounting pressure to move more urgently to slow the Earth’s warming. …
But so far, the collective effort to slow climate change has proved gravely insufficient. Instead of the sort of emission cuts that scientists say must happen, global greenhouse gas pollution is still growing. Countries have failed to meet the targets they set under the 2015 Paris climate accord, and even the bolder pledges some nations recently have embraced still leave the world on a perilous path. …
Humans can unleash less than 500 additional gigatons of carbon dioxide—the equivalent of about 10 years of current global emissions—to have an even chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels.
But hopes for remaining below that threshold—the most ambitious goal outlined in the Paris agreement—are undeniably slipping away. The world has already warmed more than 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), with few signs of slowing, and could pass the 1.5-degree mark early in the 2030s.
To translate: Unless the world—the U.S., India, China, everyone—makes radical changes, like, tonight, we’re going to cross the 1.5-degree-over baseline threshold by 2040, at minimum.
Sea levels will rise, oceans will grow acidic, and glaciers will melt at unprecedented rates.
Intense hurricanes and floods and fires and freakish heat waves like we saw in the Pacific Northwest will become common.
God only knows what zombie viruses will emerge when the permafrost melts.
However: 1.5 degrees of warming has long been expected. Things go from bad to worse around 2 degrees—again, a virtual certainty by the end of the century—as the systems that cool the planet break down. After that, warming trends begin to look more exponential. By 4 degrees above baseline—quite possible 80 years from now—your grandkids will be cursing you for not investing in solar panels. At 5 or degrees above baseline, civilization as we know it is more or less done.
Let’s think happy thoughts.
In the best-case scenario, the world rapidly phases out fossil fuels, embraces renewable energy on a massive scale and overhauls how humans work, eat and travel.
People eliminate emissions of carbon dioxide from coal, oil and gas. Societies find a way to curb powerful but short-lived greenhouse gases—most notably methane, which largely comes from burping cows and leaky fossil fuel facilities, and nitrous oxide, of which a huge amount comes from fertilizers used on farms. Natural systems such as forests and human inventions such as carbon-capture operations pull more and more out of the atmosphere.
In this scenario, the world reaches “net-zero” emissions around the year 2050, and warming stabilizes at about 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. Eventually, glaciers stop dwindling and sea-level rise slows. Humans adapt to the new planet we’ve created.
But with each degree of temperature rise, the consequences become dramatically more extreme, scientists underscored once again.
RELATED: Yesterday, Senate Democrats released blueprints for their $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation package, a companion to the $1 trillion infrastructure deal. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Compromise jettisoned most of its climate change stuff in order to become bipartisan. The budget framework doesn’t ask what Republicans think.
The framework is just a framework, and the appropriations committees will fill in the details over the next month. But among the various pots, there’s quite a bit of money potentially allocated to climate priorities:
$135 billion for the Committee on Agriculture Nutrition and Forestry, including instructions to reduce carbon emissions.
$198 billion for the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, including instructions for clean energy development.
$67 billion for the Environment and Public Works Committee to fund low-income solar technologies, environmental justice investments in clean water affordability and access, EPA climate and research programs, federal investments in energy-efficient buildings and green materials, and investments in clean vehicles.
$37 billion for the Homeland Security Committee to fund, among many other things, federal investments in green materials procurement.
$332 billion for the Banking and Housing Committee to fund, among many other things, revitalization projects, zoning, transit improvements—which could, if executed well, go a long way toward reducing cities’ carbon footprints.
Part of the bill will be paid for by a carbon polluter import fee.
Difficulties await. All Democrats in the Senate and virtually all in the House need to stick together to get this through, after figuring out exactly what it is they’re trying to get through, while passing the infrastructure deal, while also raising the debt ceiling by Oct. 1—with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell saying Republicans won’t help.
Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have already voiced skepticism about the price tag.
THE POINT: The Dems’ budget is a lot of money, especially coming on the heels of several other things that were also a lot of money. I won’t go into why I think large investments in things like health care and housing are both long-overdue and justifiable, but it’s not unreasonable to wonder if we’re overheating the economy. (Of course, we could always offset inflationary concerns by raising taxes on the wealthy, but I digress.) Nor is it unreasonable to believe we should lower the deficit while maintaining low income-tax rates. (Just don’t tell me Trump’s tax cut paid for itself.)
But it’s hard for me to read the IPCC report and see any wiggle room. Just look at this language:
Observed increases in well-mixed greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations since around 1750 are unequivocally caused by human activities. Since 2011, concentrations have continued to increase in the atmosphere, reaching annual averages of 410 ppm for carbon dioxide (CO2), 1866 ppb for methane (CH4), and 332 ppb for nitrous oxide (N2O) in 2019. …
Each of the last four decades has been successively warmer than any decade that preceded it since 1850. Global surface temperature in the first two decades of the 21st century (2001-2020) was 0.99 [0.84- 1.10] °C higher than 1850-1900. Global surface temperature was 1.09 [0.95 to 1.20] °C higher in 2011–2020 than 1850–1900, with larger increases over land (1.59 [1.34 to 1.83] °C) than over the ocean (0.88 [0.68 to 1.01] °C). The estimated increase in global surface temperature since [2011] is principally due to further warming since 2003–2012 (+0.19 [0.16 to 0.22] °C). …
It is virtually certain that hot extremes (including heatwaves) have become more frequent and more intense across most land regions since the 1950s, while cold extremes (including cold waves) have become less frequent and less severe, with high confidence that human-induced climate change is the main driver of these changes. Some recent hot extremes observed over the past decade would have been extremely unlikely to occur without human influence on the climate system. …
Human influence has likely increased the chance of compound extreme events since the 1950s. This includes increases in the frequency of concurrent heatwaves and droughts on the global scale (high confidence); fire weather in some regions of all inhabited continents (medium confidence); and compound flooding in some locations (medium confidence).
The report is 4,000 pages long, so I won’t tell you I read the whole thing yesterday. But the takeaway should be obvious: We have a very limited amount of time to dramatically alter our energy consumption patterns. Because market economies respond faster to individual desires rather than long-term collective needs, that’s not something they’re well-equipped to do.
If we acknowledge this problem is real—I hope we’re all there by now—we should also acknowledge that any solution will necessarily involve massive government intervention. Maybe that means carrots (e.g., mega-investments in clean energy), maybe sticks (e.g., taxes on carbon pollution), probably both. But it means government intervention on a scale we’ve not seen since the New Deal.
Yes, a carbon-neutral 2050 will affect the economy—good for some, bad for others. Coal mines will close, the sooner the better. Oil rigs and refineries, too. Factory farms will follow. Same goes for the Iowa corn farms propped up by ethanol mandates.
Electric vehicles and mass transit will be the norm. Gasoline will be outrageously expensive. Solar-panel and wind-turbine construction and plant-based protein companies will thrive.
Getting there will be disruptive. But nibbling around the edges won’t cut it. Pretending we can’t afford to address it will prove disastrous.
Whatever few hundred billion the Senate proposes spending on climate change in its budget this year will a) be more than the government has ever spent and b) not be anywhere close to enough.
By the way: If anyone’s seen a serious (as in, it’s real, it’s bad, and humans are causing it) conservative solution to climate change that doesn’t involve federal government bigfooting or can be done on the cheap, send it my way. I’ll be skeptical, but I’d love to read it.