November 2023 Book Commentary

Miseducation: How Climate Change Is Taught in America
By Katie Worth

“Boy, do we need this book now. As the looming climate catastrophe introduces itself by fire
and flood, as the world’s leaders need a sense of public urgency to make some hard choices,
Katie Worth discovers widespread climate denialism in our nation’s schools. Ignorance of the
scientific consensus, ideological pressure, fossil-fuel industry disinformation, and a well-
meaning but misguided desire to tell ‘both sides’ – it is a disheartening story, richly reported,
clearly told and (we can only hope) and just in time.”
-Bill Keller, former executive editor of the New York Times

Investigative reporter Katie Worth reviewed scores of textbooks, built a 50-state database, and
traveled to a dozen communities to talk about climate change in American’s public schools. She
found a red-blue divide in climate education. More than one-third of young adults believe that
climate change is not man-made, and no wonder – that’s what they are taught in school.
Who has tried to influence what children learn, and how successful have they been?
Worth connects the dots: oil corporations, state legislatures, school boards, libertarian think
tanks, conservative lobbyists, and textbook publishers, all of whom have learned from previous
fights over evolution and tobacco. They are now sowing uncertainty, confusion, and distrust
about climate science. Four in five Americans today don’t know there is a scientific consensus
on global warming. In the words of a top climate educator, “We are the only country in the
world that has had a multi-decade, multi-billion dollar deny-delay-confuse campaign.”
Miseducation is the alarming story of how climate denialism is being implanted in the minds of
millions of school children.

Katie Worth is an Emmy and Edward R. Murrow Award-winning investigative journalist. From
2015 to 2021 she worked for the PBS series FRONTLINE on enterprise investigations and
multimedia stories about science and politics. Her work has appeared in Scientific American,
National Geographic, Slate, Vice, Wall Street Journal, and included in The Best American Science
and Nature Writing 2016.