Hello,
I am trying to post a general message.
The four theme's of the Wisconsin K-12 Energy Education Program's conceptual framework are as follows:
We Need Energy (includes awareness, what energy is and how it behaves)
Developing Energy Resources (includes energy resources and how they are developed)
Effects of Energy Resource Development and Use (discusses positive and negative effects)
Managing Energy Resource Use (includes conservation, efficiency, alternatives, and future prospects)

KEEP's website: www.uwsp.edu/keep

The thing I'm really concerned about is giving people the hope that the future can be better than the past. I think this is fundamental to being human and having hope about the fate of your children, and fundamental to being pro-active and optimistic. I think it has been a failure of the environmentalist movement that it has been negatively defined, not positively defined as something that can make the future better (it's all about denial instead). Anyway, i'm going to cut and paste some things I've been writing that I care about at the moment....

Energy is invisible, but it won’t be for long...

You might have just driven home. When you filled your car with gasoline, most likely you didn’t even see the fluid as it was pumped into your gas tank. Once home, you probably turned on some lights so you could read this book. You didn’t see the power running through the electrical lines that lead to your light bulb, and you did’t feel the energy, but you do enjoy the results. Our society has made energy invisible. This invisibility makes energy convenient to use - and the modern age is arguably wonderful as a result - but it also makes it easy to take it for granted. This book tries to make our appetite for energy visible.

How do we figure out this estimate? In the US the following fossil fuels are used each year:
• Oil : 20,680,000 barrels of oil per day. • Coal : 1,060,000,000 tons of coal per year. • Natural gas : 652,900,000,000 m3/year
There were around: 307,000,000 people in the US in 200912
After doing some conversion of units and apportioning an equal share to all people in the country, this corresponds to:
22 pints of oil per day per person. 22 pounds of coal per day per person. 180 cubic feet of natural gas per day per person. (around 11 pounds). So all in all, each of us need a 55 pound backpack each day to support our fossil fuels alone.

Climate change is a phenomenon many scientists now recognize as one of the most important chal- lenges to ever confront humanity. Like energy use, it is also mostly invisible to us, and in two important ways. Firstly, the enormous volumes of green-house gases - carbon dioxide, CO2, methane, etc, are lit- erally invisible to the human eye. Secondly, the changes in climate progress so slowly that they seem invisible amidst the hustle and bustle of our daily lives. Because these consequences accumulate over decades, generations, and centuries, it is easy to ignore them as neither pressing, nor urgent. Here we try to make visible these complicated and largely invisible things in order to emphasize the urgency.
The global energy and climate conversation is about choices, both individual choices and collective choices. By choosing the amount and type of energy we consume, we are choosing the look and feel of our future. Everyone is involved in that choice. Don’t be fooled: individual choices collectively have enormous effects. It’s tempting to think that turning off that single light doesn’t make a difference, that your actions are also invisible on the global scale. If 1 billion of your fellow humans make the choice to turn off that light, the consequence will be visible - like eliminating the need for a coal fired power plant.

That is in no way to suggest that efficiency alone gets us to where we want to go making our better future, we will also be trying to illuminate or make visible that efficiency measures merely lowers the amount of new energy generating technology we need to deploy.
This book tries to help you make your energy choices in a more informed manner. We also hope this book influences the governments, organizations and corporations who make the decisions about our energy future on a macro level.
The rest of this book is about illuminating the invisible. Finding out where we use energy, and how we produced (or more correctly harnessed) it, and how we might do both of those things differently to create a better future.
For the average American to leave home each day with a backpack full of the fossil fuels required to run their life, they would require a surprisingly substantial backpack. Dividing the US daily fossil fuel use by the population to apportion consumption equally would mean:
• 22 pints of oil • 22 pounds of coal • 600 cubic feet of natural gas

How might we design our lives so that we live better and use energy in different ways to create a better future for everyone?

Mark,

Thanks for the post on your blog.

With regard to the new science standards coming out of the National Academies sometime in the next year or so, I don't see this as a big concern. We're using what is available now and the new standards will undoubtedly be used to inform language for version 2 of the document. We're drafting guidelines for Energy Literacy education. Existing standards are providing some of the language for this, but we are not limited to only the existing standards. Hopefully we come up with a quality set of guidelines. Still, it will be a set that can be improved. The next generation standards will inform part of that improvement.

It's too bad our timing is just a bit off here, but I don't think we want to wait until the new standards are out and again, I don't think it's a big concern.

All that said, I do have a copy of the draft put out for public comment last summer and will be taking a look at the next draft due out sometime this spring. I will be searching these for relevant or useful language and ideas.

Matthew