How a class on climate change leaves students feeling ‘energized’

Jeffrey Seidman holds a doctorate in philosophy. He spent much of his first two decades as a college professor helping students interpret texts by writers like Aristotle, Plato and Kant. And yet Seidman, of Vassar College, also teaches one of the most compelling classes on climate change I’ve come across.

The course, Climate Solutions and Climate Careers: Finding Your Place in the Climate Fight, teaches students about the technologies, policies and strategies behind the clean energy transition, and how to advance them. It’s built on the idea that virtually every career — in fields as diverse as law, finance, education and urban planning — can play a role in combating the climate crisis.

Students spend two classes per week studying solutions, such as electrifying transportation, greening the grid and bringing clean energy to the developing world. On Fridays, they hear from an outside speaker whose career is devoted to advancing climate solutions. Past speakers have included Emma Fisher, co-founder of Climate Cabinet, which backs candidates for local and state office who are supportive of climate action, and Zoe Samuel, a venture partner at Starshot Capital, which invests in climate technology like ultra-efficient heat pumps and food additives to reduce livestock methane emissions. Seidman also runs a website to bring lessons from his class to a wider audience.

I recently spoke with Seidman about his course, which he has taught since 2021. At the end of our conversation, he issued a sort of call to arms to other liberal arts professors to step outside of their disciplines and help educate students about the seismic clean energy transition happening around them. Not doing so, he said, does a disservice to students — and the planet.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

You are a philosopher by training, and yet you’re teaching a class on climate solutions and careers. How did that happen?

I like teaching philosophy a lot — I think it’s valuable and makes people’s lives richer. But sometime around 2020ish, as the world was more and more visibly on fire, continuing to do what I was doing felt sort of morally indefensible for me. I began to think hard about leaving academia and trying to find a job where I could spend my working hours trying to move the ball forward on climate. At some point I realized I was 50ish, I had a mortgage and a kid in college, and by the time I retooled and retrained that probably wouldn’t be the most useful thing or the way I could be the most impactful.

I decided the best thing I could do would be try to leverage the role I already had. Right around this time, I read the collection of essays “All We Can Save.” The essayists, they are all women, are very diverse in what they do — some do policy, some are activists, some are in finance. But they are all finding ways to address the climate problem. I got the idea partly from this book for a course that would help students do what I wish I could do if I were 20 years old, which is to find a way to a career in climate.

How does the course help students do that?

The way I conceived of it was twofold. One was understanding the shape of the problem, sector by sector. So, transportation is roughly a third of emissions, and buildings are roughly a third of emissions, and agriculture and land use, depending on how you count it, is a third to a quarter of emissions. And then figuring out what are climate solutions in agriculture, etc.

It’s also helping students broaden their imaginations of what a climate career might be. A lot of students, if you say climate career, they might think climate scientist, activist/organizer, maybe they think politician. And the list stops there.

But we need all the skills. We’re talking about transforming the basis of the whole global economy. And it is going to touch everything, so we need just about every skill. We need storytellers to move narratives, we need architects and urban planners, we need people to negotiate community benefit agreements for renewable energy developers.

What kind of knowledge do your students come in with and where do they end up?

They are really pessimistic, they feel doomed and anxious and scared. Not that any of that is inappropriate — it’s not, and I absolutely don’t believe there’s a right thing to feel. But they do not have a sense of just how much progress there has been. If you look at a pie chart of emissions, three-quarters comes from energy in one way or another. Today we have a recipe for this: Green the grid, and electrify everything. We are going to win this. It’s a question of how much pain and suffering and death and species extinction there is along the way — I am not trying to be overly Pollyannaish. But the energy transition will happen.

Students come out, I think, much more energized. There’s a path to success, and we can do this. And the more people who contribute to this, the faster it goes. That’s motivating.

How has the class evolved since you started teaching it five years ago?

The basic content of the class hasn’t changed all that much; my learning goals for the class have gotten refined. I sort of homed in slowly on three. One is being able to explain things. One assignment has to do with explaining a climate solution — some technology, some policy idea, something else — to a normal audience who doesn’t know anything about it. The students get to choose the medium, anything from standup comedy, design card games, write songs, digital interactives, zines, a podcast.

A second learning goal is advocating for stuff. The climate movement has been great at churning out white papers and mounds of evidence. But the other side has been so effective for so long at using all the tools of public relations. If we don’t do that, we are playing with hands behind our back. I have an assignment where students have a choice of making social media videos or writing letters to the editor, where the goal isn’t simply to inform you, it’s to try to figure out communications strategies that actually reach people and make them click or read.

I also have students find — and I give them resources to help them find — random people whom they don’t know who have some sort of climate career. They can use the Work on Climate Slack room to help find people. On LinkedIn, there is #OpenDoor Climate. People who have that in their LinkedIn profile are happy to be talked to about climate, and have a climate career. I have them reach out to — cold call, cold email — someone who has some sort of climate career and interview them over Zoom and edit it into a nice compact interview.

There’s a push for the liberal arts to seem more directly relevant to what students are going to go on to do career-wise. Do you see your class fitting into that?

Yes and no. First of all, I hate that push. I think it’s really valuable, and also good for people’s careers, to spend time not oriented around deliverable skills. However, practically, that is sort of what this course is about. What it is doing — and this is kind of a liberal artsy thing to do — is it is kind of multidisciplinary.

This course doesn’t do any one thing, like learn about the energy system or climate policy or urban planning, as well as a course in one of those things would. But what it does do is give a syncretic overview of how these parts fit together into a whole.

Anything else you’d like to share?

As an academic, you are trained in some field, and stepping outside of your field is so far outside of our comfort zones. But the thing is, to be useful to our students and give them something genuinely valuable, we only have to know a little more than them. As much as we like to be the authoritative person in the room who has our doctoral research to fall back upon, most of our disciplines, especially in liberal arts colleges, are not set up to equip students with thinking about solutions.

I have lots and lots of students who have taken many courses with climate change in the title, and they are all so depressed and feel we are doomed. They have taken courses in sociology and literature and earth science, and no one has told them there’s this amazing revolution going on in the way we use energy. Especially for liberal arts colleges, I feel like if we don’t talk about solutions, we are doing an active disservice to our students.

We are on the cusp of transformations that will remake the whole world, socially, environmentally, politically. A fossil fuel-powered world is a world where wealth and therefore political power are concentrated. Bill McKibben has this nice line that it’s the greatest wealth redistribution in world history.

We need to be teaching this. And that means we need to be educating ourselves beyond the bounds of our discipline. If not, we are doing a gross disservice to our students, and they leave dispirited and they think, ‘I might as well go join a private equity firm or go work for Deloitte.’

Help them see there’s something really positive to join. They are hungry for that.

Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at preston@hechingerreport.org.

This story about climate change solutions was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s climate change newsletter.