Climate change has been a constant presence in my life. I was born in 2009; I am sixteen years old and have never known the normal that my parents speak of. During the years my family lived in Japan, it snowed less and less every winter. When I was ten, we moved to California, where my family began collecting extra shower water in buckets to water the plants, doing our part to avoid excess water usage during droughts. Bad air quality from nearby fires means that we sometimes have to stay indoors all day. This is my “normal.”
Worse than the changing weather patterns, though, were the messages I internalized about them. Underneath the idea that “If everyday people act responsibly, we can hopefully prevent the situation from becoming worse than it already is” is a more sobering message: that once the damage is done, there is nothing we can do to reverse it.
That’s a pretty bleak message for a young person to contend with. But my entire perspective changed once I got to experience taking direct action. Over the summer, I interned at an environmental program at Stanford University, which allows high school students to collaborate on postgraduate research projects. My project was focused on Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), the scientific method of injecting carbon emissions into the lithosphere, which has the potential of dramatically slowing global warming. My primary responsibility was to develop computational models to process millions of AI-generated data points to efficiently simulate injection reservoirs in a 3D mesh grid for analysis and visualization. I analyzed environmental variables, including pressure and carbon dioxide concentrations, during and after carbon capture.
By building this model, I was doing a small part in helping researchers choose more efficient and safer injection sites. For the first time in my life, I felt like I could make a small but meaningful direct difference in the fight against climate change—not just by using fewer resources in my personal life, but by participating in the development of technologies to address the issue at a massive scale. I believe that if everyone were to experience taking direct action in this fight, our attitudes about the problem would shift from fear and complacency to excitement about humanity’s capacity for creative solutions.
But I also know that the average person does not have access to opportunities like the experience I had at Stanford—not most adults, and especially not other teens. I am fortunate enough to attend Palo Alto Unified School District, which is one of the districts to which students from the underserved Ravenswood City School District in East Palo Alto may transfer—as a result of a 1976 lawsuit led by Margaret Tinley, who aimed to close the opportunity gap for East Palo Alto’s students. Growing up in Palo Alto, I enjoyed access to outstanding teachers, advanced coursework, and an amazing internship at Stanford. Many students just a short distance away, though, weren’t getting those same academic foundations or exposure to STEM pathways—let alone specialized fields like climate science. Teens unable to experience taking direct action in the fight against climate change are likely to continue believing that climate change is will occur forever and that there is nothing any of us can do about it. And teens who cannot access a cutting-edge science education are missing out on opportunities of all kinds to create a better future through applied research.
Yet, teens in less-resourced school districts in California are still more informed about the basic facts of climate change than their peers in many other states, who have limited or no instruction on climate change. According to a 2016 study by the National Center for Science Education, education standards for Florida’s elementary and middle schools don’t mention the phrase “climate change” at all, South Dakota’s schools require something called “balanced teaching of global warming,” and Texas requires its schools to present “both sides,” highlighting “natural causes” alongside human activity, with 12% of survey respondents not teaching human causes in any way. Katie Worth, author of Miseducation: How Climate Change is Taught in America found, in 25 different US states, educational programs funded by the fossil fuel industry, including free professional development workshops for teachers. According to UNESCO, only about half of all national education curricula worldwide explicitly reference climate change.
It’s not just teens who are being prevented from learning basic facts about climate change: that it’s not only already here, but getting worse, and faster; that, over the past ten years, global surface temperatures have increased by 0.56°C—a significant increase from the 0.13°C change over the prior ten-year period; and that temperature averages in the US are predicted to increase between 1.66°C and 6.66°C (an increase up to 12 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100. In California, where I live, these increased temperatures have contributed to year-round wildfire risk, deteriorating water availability, disrupted ecosystems, and rising sea levels. This July was our hottest on record.
It is in this reality that the Trump administration has, allegedly in the interest of government efficiency, fired hundreds of meteorologists from the National Weather Service capable of warning the public about impending natural disasters and proposed a 2026 budget that would: cut half the funding to NASA and the National Science Foundation, with specific cuts to NASA’s climate-monitoring satellites and NSF’s climate and clean energy projects, including grants to universities for research in these areas; cut over half the funding to the Environmental Protective Agency, with specific cuts to grants ensuring states’ air and water quality; and cut 62% of the US Forest Service’s budget, with the goal to use “national forests for their intended purpose of producing timber.” The Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy would receive a steep cut of 74%, all but eliminating that crucial research.
In April, the US Department of Commerce announced the end of its funding to Princeton University, which has collaborated for nearly sixty years with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to produce the most sophisticated systems for forecasting and climate modeling in the world. Within the NOAA, the office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research would be cut by 74%. The proposed budget includes such drastic cuts to the NOAA, because, according to the language in the budget, those educational programs “radicalize students against markets and spread environmental alarm.” As though markets are more important than our planet’s ability to sustain human life. And that, further, the NOAA promotes “exaggerated and implausible climate threats, contributing to a phenomenon known as ‘climate anxiety,’ which has increased significantly among America’s youth.”
But these proposed cuts would end the very direct-action research that gave me—after a lifetime of climate anxiety—real hope for my future. These cuts would worsen anxiety, and not just among America’s youth.
Looking away from the real problems facing our planet will not make them disappear. The apocalyptic fires and hurricanes will not end when scientists stop researching and predicting them. They will not end even if no one is still employed to warn us about them. What gives this student climate anxiety is the very real possibility that the next time a life-threatening weather pattern emerges, we will no longer have the tools to warn ourselves and seek safety. And that this is what life will be like forever, with no research or technologies to save us, because of an administration that values the fossil fuel industry over human life.
Looking away will not prevent disaster. What we need is for everyone to receive a baseline education in the facts of climate change, and, ideally, for more schools to present opportunities for students to take direct action against climate change. This was transformative for me, and, before these proposed cuts to climate research and technologies, helped me believe in the likelihood of a safer, less volatile future for all of us.
This research and these technologies are critical to our survival; they are an investment in this planet and our ability to live on it. All of us are entitled to a basic education on the climate changes we can see and feel happening around us—without the influence of the fossil fuel industry in our schools. These budgets and departments for climate research and monitoring should not be cut but upheld. My hope is that more climate science resources will be allocated to our schools—all of our schools, not just the most affluent ones—so that all teens can experience the empowerment of using scientific technologies to fight climate change. That would truly alleviate climate anxiety.