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CARBONDALE — One afternoon in May, when the crab apple blossoms were just starting to explode into pink-and-white constellations, 70 kids from 24 towns across Colorado were rotating through climate-change information stations at the Third Street Center in Carbondale, checking out different ways to save the planet.
They could stop at the “Bioregionalism” station, with “a focus on exploring watersheds,” presented by The Center for Human Flourishing. They could watch solar panels sipping sunlight at the Solar Energy in Action station, sponsored by SoL Energy LLC and Ken Olson. They could generate their own energy by pedaling a bike with the Carbondale Bike Project. And they could marvel over all of the things you can throw in a compost pile and have it turn into nutrient-rich dirt at Community Composting by EverGreen Zero Waste with CEO Alyssa Reindel.
Mary Fernandez, a sophomore from St. Mary’s Academy in Englewood, sat in the grass soaking in Reindel’s message. When Reindel was finished explaining why it’s best to throw food waste straight onto the ground instead of in closed bins for max effect (hint: oxygen), Fernandez raised her hand.
She wanted to know if greenhouses are connected to greenhouse gases.
No one snickered, because in this crowd a lot of kids knew a lot about global warming, and greenhouses are connected to greenhouse gases, it’s just nuanced. That was good, because one of the main goals of Colorado’s first Youth Climate Summit was for the students from Boulder to Ignacio, Highlands Ranch to Gypsum to build relationships, said Sarah Johnson, an environmental education specialist, founder of Wild Rose Education and the brains behind the summit.
She told them as much during her opening comments a few hours earlier, when she encouraged them to be “subversive” in the face of current politics and the climate crisis.
America’s climate future is under strain, with President Donald Trump in his second term doubling down on climate change denialism and “baking climate denial into how federal agencies conduct their basic duties,” the Natural Resources Defense Council says.
If the climate crisis was a science issue, we would have solved it 70 years ago because we’ve known about it that long. Climate change is a people issue.
— Sarah Johnson, the environmental education specialist behind the Youth Climate Summit
Since January, he has gutted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which focuses on long-term weather trends to understand climate change impacts. He has deleted climate data on agency websites, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the EPA and the State and Defense departments. He has opened the floodgates for more fossil fuel energy production, with a push for what he calls “beautiful clean coal.” And, last week, the U.S. Department of Energy hired three prominent researchers who over the course of their careers have questioned and even rejected the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change.
Yet scientists say the planet is moving toward the 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) tipping point of global temperature increase identified in an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that would potentially result in major extinctions, more severe droughts and hurricanes, a watery Arctic and an increased toll on human health and well-being — if we don’t take drastic action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, even if some tipping points are closer than we thought, says the Natural Resources Defense Council. The IPCC provides scientific basis for the Paris Agreement, which Trump in January pulled the U.S. out of for a second time.
Taking in all of this information can lead to a range of mental health issues in kids, including anxiety, depression, phobias, sleep disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder. But Johnson says whether we’re doomed or not is “the central question, the million-dollar quiz.” Either way, she said, “being an engaged community member that’s trying to make the world a better place for all people” can give kids hope, which is one of the reasons she and dozens of other adults poured so much time, energy and resources into the summit.
“The biggest resistance we can have is to learn from each other and build relationships and community,” she boomed from the stage in the auditorium where the students gathered the first morning. “The world is messed up because of disconnection — we’re disconnected from ourselves, each other and the landscape. My goal is for you to make or deepen connections over your two days here. Or maybe start organizing something you don’t even know is possible. If the climate crisis was a science issue, we would have solved it 70 years ago because we’ve known about it that long. Climate change is a people issue.”
But even with the major threats climate change poses to Colorado, including increased heat and heat waves, drought, more frequent and severe wildfires, pest outbreaks that could destabilize agriculture and threats to outdoor recreation like shorter winters and decreased snowpack, Colorado currently is less-is-more on high school climate education. That was another reason for the creation of a “meaningful, student-centered framework for climate literacy,” said Mary Seawell, CEO of the Denver-based education nonprofit, Lyra Colorado, which supports community‑rooted education initiatives and poured $77,500 into the summit.
“Young people have the power”
Seawell says the state isn’t collecting data on which Colorado schools teach climate literacy — largely because there’s no statewide standard yet for what that should include.
The gap is one of the main reasons Lyra created the Colorado Seal of Climate Literacy, a high school diploma endorsement designed to acknowledge Colorado students who have demonstrated a strong understanding of climate change principles and are prepared to address its impacts.
“That said, momentum is building,” Seawell wrote in an email. “The state Board of Education is currently reviewing science standards with an eye toward strengthening the inclusion of climate change content. At the same time, individual districts are leading the way — Denver and Boulder already confer the seal. And Denver Public Schools is even weaving climate literacy into its civics curriculum, which is a promising approach that recognizes climate as not just a scientific issue but a social and civic one as well.”
At the summit, two Boulder students backed Seawell on this. Tilly Testa and Rylan Neumann were co-leaders in the Fairview High School chapter of the Sunrise Movement, an environmental justice community with presence in Boulder, Denver and Colorado Springs. Sunrise organizes around things like housing justice and peace for Palestine through actions like protesting the 2025 Colfax Marathon because it was sponsored by Chevron, which the group says is “poisoning our air, fueling climate chaos, and supporting human rights abuses. The Colfax Marathon should be a celebration of health, community, and environmental sustainability — not a platform for a company that profits from environmental harm and violence.”
Kids should take an attitude of ‘I have power over you because I’m a young person.’ That’s important because young people do have the power.”
— Tilly Testa, Fairview High School senior and one of the keynote speakers
After introducing themselves, Tilly and Rylan launched into a commentary on why kids have the right to be angry with adults over climate change and why they should lead the movement to fight it. When talking to a room full of adults about a climate issue, “kids should take an attitude of ‘I have power over you because I’m a young person,’” Tilly said. “That’s important because young people do have the power.”
But sometimes kids have to listen to what adults say and be willing to compromise on an issue, Tilly added. Like when she and Rylan were pushing the Boulder Valley School District Board to implement clean energy initiatives, include climate change in the curriculum and create disaster plans, and the board kept telling them “we don’t have the resources, we don’t have the people, we don’t have XYZ,” Tilly said. “So we basically had to take the time to listen to what they were saying and compromise … by going over our proposal line by line and taking out parts that committed the district to paying a whole lot of money. But we also left in all of the parts we thought were most important.” The next week, BVSD passed the country’s first Green New Deal for Schools resolution unanimously.
The Lyra team and Johnson believe young people have power, too, but that they need direction on how to use it. That’s why the summit wasn’t focused on problems, but solutions. The four goals of the weekend were for kids to develop a Climate Action Plan to tackle environmental challenges; collaborate with sustainability experts and policymakers through problem-based learning; explore careers focused on climate action and research; and work toward earning their Seal of Climate Literacy — all while attending hands-on workshops addressing things like youth for democracy and sustainable change, Colorado’s “wild weather extremes,” climate careers and farming in a future changed by climate change.
U.S. dismantling of climate literacy
As the day got going, the kids moved through different workshops led by advisers including a senior climate and energy organizer for the Sierra Club and a soil moisture researcher with the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado in Boulder. CIRES is a partner of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is in the firing line of the Trump administration’s 2026 budget cuts that would slash $1.8 billion in funding for several weather and climate institutes. U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse, who represents Colorado’s 2nd Congressional District, has been leading a coalition of lawmakers urging Congress to reject the cuts.
Workshops during the summit aligned with eight Climate Literacy Essential Principles contained in a 2024 Climate Literacy Guide developed by 15 federal agencies, numerous educational organizations and public input with key concepts and principles that help educators, policymakers, and the public understand climate change. “They guide the framing and development of climate education and climate communication initiatives to promote greater climate literacy for learners and audiences,” Johnson said in an email.
A workshop focusing on turning climate anxiety into climate action drew on the idea that a livable, sustainable future for all is possible with rapid, just and transformational climate action, or the essential principle of “hope and urgency.” Another focused on scientific understanding of the climate system highlighted the importance of interdisciplinary observations and modeling in climate science — or the rationale behind “how we know.” And a workshop on “farming for the future” embraced the essential principle of “mitigation” or the science-backed truth that reducing emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities to net-zero by 2050 can help limit global warming and climate change impacts.
The Climate Literacy Guide “aims to promote greater climate literacy by providing a nationally agreed upon educational and communication framework of climate principles and concepts,” Johnson wrote. And its information came from the fifth National Climate Assessment, or NCA5, created in 2023, which helped ensure the guide is scientifically accurate and up-to-date, making it a key tool for disseminating its findings to a broader audience, she said.
But in January, the Trump administration scrubbed The Climate Literacy Essential Principles from climate.gov and The U.S. Global Change Research Program websites.
Then in June, the administration took down the the NCA5 website.
Both documents were downloaded and archived by many independent people within the field, Johnson said, yet they are not currently easily accessible online by the public. And with them “being derailed … one of the most important sources of climate information in the world is no longer available to policymakers, educators, community members, etc. This is bad for our country because it will impact so many people and also because it degrades us as a world science leader. The economic impact of not paying attention to climate change is also well-known and was highlighted in the NCA5. That’s something those who took it down would rather not focus on.”
Predicting the documents would be scrubbed, Johnson downloaded the fifth assessment “in its entirety” on her computer in February. But it’s been painful accepting the information is now far more difficult to find, she said, because “it was years of work by scientists and communities that took climate literacy from just the physical science of greenhouse gases and CO2 to something far more holistic. It included the Indigenous perspective. It included urgency and hope.” And it gave educators like her a credible framework for teaching climate literacy supported by powerful agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Smithsonian, and the U.S. Department of State.
One of the hardest parts was losing all those government agencies saying “we agree that this is really important, and we agree that this is what climate literacy is, and this tool should be used by school districts, and state education boards, and everybody to empower people with unbiased, government-backed information,” Johnson said. But “while the federal administration is eroding and crumbling our climate science infrastructure,” she said, she “can’t give up on the future of life on Earth so easily.”
So she chooses to focus on things she can control.
So does Cedar Barg, a climate network manager for the Wild Center, which is in upstate New York and has been running youth climate summits around the world since 2009. Barg worked with Johnson, Lyra and Earth Force, another youth-focused climate education organization, to pilot a new Colorado-specific curriculum that was premiering at the summit.
Different kids tackling different problems
The new framework focuses on environmental action civics, Colorado’s Climate Goals, the top climate solutions defined by experts and “teaching kids how to ‘people map’ to find decision-makers in their communities that might be able to influence their climate action projects,” Barg said. To that end Johnson and Lyra had invited John Clark, the mayor of Ridgway, Kathy Plomer, Colorado State Board of Education member-at-large, Sean Rocha, constituent advocate for Colorado Rep. Jason Crow’s office, and a commissioner each from Eagle and Pitkin counties to attend.
Johnson introduced them and urged the kids to ask questions and share their climate action projects.
When a group of kids from Montrose summoned Plomer to their table, she said “Ooh, someone wants to talk to the school board!”
As they ate lunch, a girl said they didn’t have sex education in their school, “and one of the top five things in climate change stuff is teaching about reproductive health.”
The group wanted to know how to address this in their heavily religious community.
Plomer stepped gently into the subject, telling the kids Colorado law “says you need to teach fact-based sex education if you choose to teach sex ed.”
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But the kids weren’t interested in Colorado education policy so much as they’d identified a climate change problem and wanted to do something to help.
So for their climate action plan, Plomer suggested they start by finding someone on their school board they can trust, “and ask them, ‘Has this been discussed?’ Then talk to the district about the curriculum and what’s being taught, because the board makes decisions and the students need to go to that level of government if they want to see changes.”
The Montrose kids indicated they had a sort of “damned if they do, damned if they don’t” problem, because sexuality and climate change are both touchy subjects in their community.
So Plomer suggested they approach the topic from a purely data-driven perspective, saying “let me just show you the climate science standards.” Except that as the Lyra spokesperson Seawell said, the Colorado Board of Education is still ironing these out.
Climate science in schools and the climate summit moving forward
Plomer said the board has delayed a vote on revisions to state science standards that include climate science at the request of students from several high school sustainability clubs called the Good Trouble Climate Network, who asked for the opportunity to provide additional input.
The board is required to review each set of standards every six years, and Plomer said “there’s nothing better than having students come and show they care about what they’re learning in school, because even as the board talks out the standards, there are different political views that can enter the conversation and student voices can get lost.”
But just as revisions meant to make the social studies standards more inclusive of diverse racial groups and LGBTQ+ people proved controversial in 2022, climate science revisions have had their share of controversy. The proposed changes elicited pushback from the four Republican members of the school board, including one who criticized them for depicting the downsides of fossil fuels but not of other forms of energy, and another who pointed out that with some students’ parents working in the oil and gas industry, “to present that to kids as only negative and not touching other forms of energy,” cost her support.
At any rate, Johnson said it doesn’t really matter what the board decides, because climate science has been a part of Colorado’s academic standards for years, even if it only shows up in hard science, which the changes would bolster. And while “there’s always room to address climate change from a more interdisciplinary approach within a public school setting,” she said, she’s not going to sit back and wait for that to happen.
Instead, she’s going to pour more of her time, brain power and heart into the next youth climate summit, because “it isn’t bound to institutional protocol such as a school board,” she said.
“It’s an incredible opportunity to provide an educational experience for high school learners that does encompass this more holistic, interdisciplinary approach.”
