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An Amusing Paper on Education about Extreme Global Heating (often euphemized as "climate change." )
I came across this opinion piece in the most recent issue of Environmental Science & Technology.
Viewpoint: Catalyzing Climate Solutions through Energy and Carbon Education Bruce E. Logan, Mim Rahimi, Li Li, Lea R. Winter, Wei Peng, and Brandi J. Robinson Environmental Science & Technology 2024 58 (46), 20333-20335
It's open sourced, anyone can read it.
I rather enjoyed (albeit in a cynical despairing way) this paragraph:
...An educational challenge of units and big numbers. A key educational challenge for developing curricula around climate solutions for a broader university audience is how to improve the tangibility of quantifying energy consumption and carbon emissions, which is often muddled by big numbers and esoteric units. Most people do not have the training to equate different energy units, for example, to compare kilowatt-hours of electricity with gallons of gasoline. Many energy units, such as quads (quadrillion BTU) or exajoules, are also just too “big” to sensibly comprehend. Translating energy consumption into carbon emissions is nontrivial. Finally, educating diverse audiences about how to assess the effectiveness of different climate solutions requires the presentation of energy and carbon associated with activities such as choices of food, clothing, and transportation in broadly understandable numbers...
The "Exa" prefix refers to 1018. Again the use of these prefixes, and of units, should be taught, if not in junior high school, then definitely in high school.
It's actually worse than that. We have adults cruising around who can't tell the difference between a Joule and Watt, the later unit derived from the first by dividing the former by one second 1W = Js-1. This inability leads to the very stupid conclusion that 1000 "MW" of solar cells, which may not, even for a second, actually produce 1000 MW of power and which cannot ever produce power 24 hours today because of a widely known time period known as "night," is the equivalent of a 1000 MW nuclear plant that can - and many do - run 24 hours, 365.24 days a year at full power never falling below 1000 MW of power. The capacity utilization of solar cells, depending on location, typically runs about 25%, and the energy produced has no connection whatsoever with energy demand. (On most grids, peak power demand takes place in the late afternoon/early evening.)
I run across these kinds of people all the time, people who can't make the distinction between a Watt and a Joule. One doesn't want to believe that this distinction isn't obvious to anyone who has successfully graduated high school, but it is, and is widely encouraged in various public discourse, with the result that the misinformation inherent in the poor use of language has left the planet is in flames.
(The soon to be former United States consumes between 95 and 110 Exajoules of energy each year.)