Every teacher in America should hear this

"This summer’s scorching heat, raging wildfires and deadly floods are a warning of what lies ahead. We must make the overshoot above 1.5 degrees as small and short as possible." - UN Secretary-General Antőnio Guterres, speaking about the current UNEP report on "Limiting Overshoot," now that the world is exceeding the 1.5°C target set at Paris in 2015. In France, television and radio programs have been examining the social and economic impacts of the nation's most extreme summer on record, with discussions like "2026, l'ete qui a tout change" (the summer that changed everything) via France Info. Meanwhile, the guests on this episode of Bridging the Carbon Gap chart the indifference of the US educational system to climate education, even as a climate-transformed world is the future of every student in America. Catherine Du, a student at Hunter College High School in NYC, interviews two of her fellow high school climate activists, who are now entering their first year of college: Helena Rambler, Hunter College High School '26 (UNC Chapel Hill '30) and Ananya Gupta, Geffen Academy at UCLA '26 (Stanford '30). Helena Rambler has been part of the Bridging the Carbon Gap production team for several years, interviewing climate scientists and communicators for the show, including Professor Gail Whiteman, founder of Arctic Basecamp. That experience of being a reporter, of asking the tough questions of experts and then explaining their answers to students, really influences how she thinks about what a climate-literate high school education should actually be. Bringing the University of California’s solutions-focused Bending the Curve climate course to high schools has been Ananya Gupta’s goal. She adapted it into a program for teens, called Intersections, and co-authored a peer-reviewed study on the outcomes with researchers at the University of California, San Diego, which found the course measurably increased students’ belief that climate change will affect them and future generations personally. In this chat Helena and Ananya share what it’s like to have climate change as background noise growing up, why they believe eco-anxiety is more prevalent than tangible plans to act among their peers, how this year’s wildfires shifted conversations at home, and how they both believe any career, whether in architecture, AI or otherwise, can be a green job. Send us Fan Mail