Green Education

GreenPolicy360

GreenPolicy360 journeys across 50+ years of the modern environmental movement

Green Eco-Education

https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Eco-Fields | Earth Science Eco-Fields
https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Ecology_Studies | Ecology Studies
http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_Studies_Online | Eco-Education Online
https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Online_Education | Online Education
https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Lawrence_University,_WI_%22Green_Roots%22 | Lawrence University, a 'Green Roots' University

Introduction: In a manner of speaking, GreenPolicy360's point of view is about values. We hold a 'politics of values' and profess a 'value-based politics'. In this sense we look to preserve and protect a 'living earth' and 'quality of life'. We work to advance 'science, facts, critical thinking skills' and, in each generation, caring, responsible parental involvement in the education of children.

Our education begins with family and soon relatives, friends, teachers and educators arrive and begin to assist us in so many ways. They will share stories, and visions, sometimes of values to live by... This is where and how green ideas come into our lives. The understanding of nature is one of these lessons. Another lesson, ongoing we find out, is about creativity, about dreamers and doers, those who make a difference, a positive difference every day, working hard, working with a purpose. This a world of education that GreenPolicy360 brings forward here with an initial Table of Contents. It's a beginning guide to exploring GreenPolicy360.

Your GreenPolicy360 siterunner joins in now and thanks the 'influencers' in his life, mainly good, some bad, those real-life experiences that each of us have that teach us as we go on our life journeys. As the saying goes, "I thank my lucky stars" for the special influencing moments, the extraordinary educators, the shining stars who enlightened me. The road traveled was memorable, especially due to my teachers.

Today, after many years of travels and experiences, and inspiring art, ideas and those who taught me about thinking and how to think, and great books, I am here to say that all us at GreenPolicy360 are 'into' education, learning and sharing, growing -- and improving. Whether for personal reasons and/or to meet economic challenges, we are here together with this eOS/eco Operating System to bring history, politics and future possibilities into our day-to-day lives.

GreenPolicy360's mix is an education that imbues lifelong learning. Welcome along for the adventure.

A case study: "My friend George" (who became a lifelong colleague and teacher) -- read of Rep. George E. Brown, (D), East Los Angeles, who changed the world (and your GreenPolicy360 founder's life)

We hope our green visitors, young and old from around our world, in every community from villages to big city high rises, find value here everyday in myriad ways.

We even see Green education as sort of like the movie "Being There" , where the writer Jerzy Kosinski introduces a gardener, Chance (Chauncey) who brings his understanding of the life of plants, soil and water, seasons and nature, life and a living earth into business and politics. Surprises beyond satire bloom.

Green education is like an interactive network. We are nodes of learning shared like an online university. We are 'distance learning' like a Virtual University our Siterunner helped start, now called the WGU.edu and networking in every community connected to the Internet.

A wise WGU mascot owl looks on...

https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:WGU-we_are_wise.jpg

https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:WGU-we_are_wise.jpg

https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:WGU_8-25-2020.jpg

2024

Featured Green Ed News

ClimateGPT

Today's question: Several months after its AI launch announcement, how is ClimateGPT doing?

As a new and open source climate, green politics project, ClimateGPT is moving into the GreenPolicy360 arena and we have now turned an eye on the flight path of ClimateGPT's launch.

Let's take a quick look.

As most everyone in the Internet-connected world knows by now, an immense amount of attention (and deep-pocket money from seemingly everywhere) has accompanied the generative AI 'boom'. Since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, the generative AI market has reached into the billions and according to industry reports has a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) that will reach over a hundred billion in the next five years.

To put it another way, far beyond ledger sheets and the market, large Language Models (LLMs) are projected to be the next revolution of the Net and tech. The Web, software/hardware/firmware, chips and chip development, geopolitics and international competition, economics with database targeted marketing (and the snooping) world of governments and companies) are all in play and the numbers involved are larger that can be displayed on any spreadsheet or analysis of spreadsheets.

The facts are, however one looks at an AI revolution-in-the-making, the West Coast/Siiicon Valley U.S. power companies are out in force. Alongside are the top-tier venture capital brokers and top-of-market generative AI companies are creating and shaping a world-yet-to-be-definded of proprietary, profit-seeking ventures.

More on 2024 AI top-tier and emerging companies:

Within this gold rush, GreenPolicy360 asks 'what of the prospectors who have a public mission?' What of those who are looking to do 'good work' and be 'sustainable' with revenues, but are not looking to make a 'killing in the market'. What are the prospects of those who are beginning to develop AI capabilities with a public interest, and a commons outreach, transparency and a working model that is building in checks and balances to prevent misuse of their info and delivery platforms, acting to prevent dis- and misinformation and the consequences of AI going rogue?

Turning to mission statements and educational/beneficial uses for AI/generative development, let's look at a first-gen model that has now entered the AI dev field with a mission statement of sharing climate-related research and green, environmental solutions to the climate crisis.

Hello ClimateGPT -- time to enter the mix, to step up and speak up.

Here is their opening public relations release:

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/announcing-climategpt-the-first-open-source-foundational-ai-platform-dedicated-to-addressing-the-impact-of-climate-change-302038979.html

About ClimateGPT

ClimateGPT techno-talk

(Via Cornell University) This paper introduces ClimateGPT, a model family of domain-specific large language models that synthesize interdisciplinary research on climate change. We trained two 7B models from scratch on a science-oriented dataset of 300B tokens. For the first model, the 4.2B domain-specific tokens were included during pre-training and the second was adapted to the climate domain after pre-training. Additionally, ClimateGPT-7B, 13B and 70B are continuously pre-trained from Llama~2 on a domain-specific dataset of 4.2B tokens. Each model is instruction fine-tuned on a high-quality and human-generated domain-specific dataset that has been created in close cooperation with climate scientists. To reduce the number of hallucinations, we optimize the model for retrieval augmentation and propose a hierarchical retrieval strategy. To increase the accessibility of our model to non-English speakers, we propose to make use of cascaded machine translation and show that this approach can perform comparably to natively multilingual models while being easier to scale to a large number of languages. Further, to address the intrinsic interdisciplinary aspect of climate change we consider different research perspectives. Therefore, the model can produce in-depth answers focusing on different perspectives in addition to an overall answer. We propose a suite of automatic climate-specific benchmarks to evaluate LLMs. On these benchmarks, ClimateGPT-7B performs on par with the ten times larger Llama-2-70B Chat model while not degrading results on general domain benchmarks. Our human evaluation confirms the trends we saw in our benchmarks. All models were trained and evaluated using renewable energy and are released publicly.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.09646

~

Having brought technology and politics front-of-mind and front-of-stage, let's take a closer look. As with every in depth and breadth analysis, let's look across a political spectrum (leaving aside the far reaches of the spectrum.)

Begin with a 2023-24 point of view about educational needs as delivered from one of the most known U.S. business voices - the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. They are speaking of how STEM education (a favorite topic of business and technology) now needing to become STEAM education with Arts adding a new dimensions, a vast creative input to Science/Technology/Engineering/Math careers, work, ventures and endeavors. The addition of art, creativity, 'far out' ideas, imagination, wisdom, ethics, are greening economies across the Earth, and bringing into reality a game-changing future. It seems the Chamber is getting with the program.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce/June 2024: From architecture to automotives and fashion design to product design, student creators and innovators are designing a better and more sustainable future. Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM) disciplines underpin essentially all industries, and they drive the intellectual property (IP)-intensive industries that account for over 41% of U.S. gross domestic product and employ one- third of America’s total workforce.

All too often, creative contributions to industries like manufacturing, architecture, transportation, and agriculture are severely overlooked. Yet, without artists, designers, and other creative minds, the world wouldn’t have the sleek look of American muscle cars, iconic structures like the Empire State Building, or innovative products like smart watches.

Many universities and colleges offer a variety of programs for these creators to hone their skills and learn more about related industries. For example, Detroit’s College for Creative Studies (CCS) offers courses and degrees in advertising design, animation, art education, art practice, communication design, color and materials design, crafts and material studies, entertainment arts, graphic design, interaction design, motion design, concept design, design for sustainability, entertainment arts, fashion and fashion accessories design, film, game design illustration, interdisciplinary art + design, interior design, photography, product design, textiles, fine art, glass, metalsmithing and jewelry, painting, printmaking, sculpture, transportation design, user experience design, and visual development.

Who knew there is such a wide variety of employment options across a range of different industries? Creators aren’t limited to—the equally important—traditional roles associated with music, film, television, painting, sculpting, writing, or theater. (GreenPolicy360 knew)

There are so many possibilities for creators to reinvent industries toward a more sustainable future. The latest and greatest high-tech projects and products certainly provide consumers, creators, and innovators with state-of-the-art options. From high-efficiency doors and windows to electric agricultural vehicles and cleaner manufacturing systems, advanced innovations offer a wide range of solutions for an environmentally friendly future.

(The US Chamber of Commerce is evidently 'going green')

https://www.uschamber.com/assets/documents/IP-Stories-STEAM-Design-Students.pdf

On Earth

"Greening Our Blue Planet"

Going Green

https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Going_Green

Fact Checking

https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Fact_Checking

Climate Problems, Climate Solutions

https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Problems,_Climate_Solutions

Beginnings of the 'Modern Environmental Movement'

https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Earthrise | "Earthrise"
https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_Earth_Perspective | Planet Earth Perspective
http://www.thinbluelayer.com | "Thin Blue"
http://www.earthpov.com | EarthPOV.com
https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/@Earth360 | Earth360

Planet Citizen Vision of Living Earth

https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Living_Earth.png

https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Day | Earth Day (Flashback to 1970)
https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_movement | The Modern Environmental Movement
https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Change_-_Global_Warming_Keyword-Terms | Climate Terms that Are Coming into Use
https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/It%27s_All_Related | It's All Related

http://www.planetcitizen.org | Planet Citizen
http://www.planetcitizens.org | Planet Citizens
https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_Citizens,_Planet_Scientists | Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists
https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:EarthScience_Missions_via_the_EOS_-_2022.png | Earth Observing System

"Earth Day Is Every Day and Every Day Is Earth Day"

https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenLinks | GreenLinks

http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Book_Reviews_@GreenPolicy | GRN360 Book Reviews
http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/BigPicture_Media | GRN360 Film/Media

"Vita contemplativa to Vita activa"

* https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:The_Human_Condition_-_Hannah_Arendt.jpg

* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Life_of_the_Mind_2.png

About GreenPolicy360

* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/About_Us

* https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:On_the_road_sjs.jpg

* https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Above.png

Water, water, life...

We are a watery world

https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Himawari8_water_vapor_via_CIMSS.gif

Speaking of water... H2O

Let's look ahead at solutions to the Climate Crisis.

Our climate-related education work started in the late 1960s/early 70s in California which faced some of the planet's worst (internal combustion engine produced) air pollution. A Congressman from the center of the 'smog' led Clean Air Act efforts, that became national with the first legislation to address atmospheric pollution and warming. The National Climate Program Act, drafted by Rep. George E. Brown can be considered a beginning of US government efforts to deal with climate change.

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First National Climate Act

GreenPolicy360 Siterunner / SJ Schmidt: The beginnings of modern environmental and climate science can be traced to the 1960s and 1970s. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences played a key role in laying a foundation of scientific reports and data.

Energy and Climate Report, 1977, National Academy of Sciences / 175 pp. / PDF via GreenPolicy360

Rep. George Brown took the findings of the 1977 Energy and Climate Report from the Academy of Sciences and made the science actionable. In a historic moment, he proposed and drafted the legislation of the first U.S. National Climate Program and shepherded its passage in 1978.

This first federal program established to study and assess scientifically the issues and risks of human-caused climate change became a foundation for comprehensive initiatives, with an array of new Earth Science missions led by NASA and NOAA, the EPA and USGS.

1992 -- Earth Summit

We reported 'deep on the first Earth Summit'...

and worked to draft a 1992 US presidential campaign platform 'heavy on the green'

Launch of Annual International Climate Conferences

Earth Summit (1992)

Environmental protection efforts, as GreenPolicy360 documents here on our website network and EOS (e.g., GreenPolicy360 ToC/Table of Contents), continue community-to-community with increasing importance into the 21st century. Green issues, most critically those of the Climate Crisis and Nuclear Weapons proliferation, are top-of-agenda existential threats.

Visit our GreenPolicy360 associate, Strategic Demands for geopolitics, especially regarding nuclear weapons and geostrategic, real and perceived threats to national security and life on Earth.

At both GreenPolicy360 and Strategic Demands the environmental protection, security, and climate issues are key considerations. The stories and story arc, as we attempt to explain, are 'Whole Earth' life-changers. The first-ever images of our blue-green living planet, seen from the Apollo mission, "Earthrise" in 1968 and "Blue Marble" in 1972, delivered planetary awareness worldwide.

Now, with responsibilities taken on, citizens and nations of Planet Earth are looking to new technologies and ways to decrease the impacts of atmospheric pollution (CO2/GHG hydrocarbon emissions).

How we see ourselves: Most often we do not see our home planet as a watery world (approximately 71% water), but it is and we are...

Given this 'geo-fact', let's talk about water as a fuel instead of coal/gas/oil.

Let's begin a lesson and look at how a mainstream news publisher sees one of the new energy producing water-as-hydrogen fuel production plants beginning to be built.

Read this (free/without paywall) June 2024 article in the Washington Post and, as you may have heard the words "compare and contrast" from a teacher over the course of your own education, GreenPolicy360 orges you to "discuss and debate" alternatives to fossil fuels as energy sources... What is regarded as "clean energy"? How realistic is a water/hydrogen alternative source of energy? Think, research, express the pros and cons, plus and minus, costs and benefits...

https://wapo.st/3L3ZDkQ

CLIMATE LEAP

How water could be the future of fuel

A new generation of fuels could power planes and ships without warming the planet

Turning hydrogen into liquid fuel...

Per the Wapo: This process could represent the biggest change in how fuel for planes, ships, trains and trucks is made since the first internal combustion engine fired up in the 19th century. In his 1874 science fiction novel “The Mysterious Island,” Jules Verne predicted that “water will be the coal of the future.” This plant, one of the first in the world to transform water into fuel, shows what that looks like on the ground today.

Experts say that for green hydrogen to be truly clean, it has to be made at a plant hooked up to its own dedicated wind turbines and solar panels, or follow strict rules for using newly added renewable electricity from the grid. Federal officials are setting clean power rules that will decide which hydrogen plants qualify for billions of dollars in tax credits.

Although cars and light trucks are shifting to electric motors, other forms of transport will likely rely on some kind of liquid fuel for the foreseeable future. Batteries are too heavy for planes and too bulky for ships. Extended charging times could be an obstacle for long-haul trucks, and some rail lines may be too expensive to electrify. Together, these vehicles represent roughly half of emissions from transportation, the fourth-biggest source of greenhouse gases.

To wean machines off oil, companies ... are starting to churn out hydrogen-based fuels that — in the best case — produce close to net zero emissions. They could also pave the way for a new technology, hydrogen fuel cells, to power planes, ships and trucks in the second half of this century. For now, these fuels are expensive and almost no one makes them, so the U.S. government, businesses and philanthropists including Bill Gates are investing billions of dollars to build up a hydrogen industry that could cut eventually some of the most stubborn, hard-to-remove carbon pollution.

* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Too_Hot

GreenPolicy360: We are at the front of a water/hydrogen option as one of many solutiond for the climate change problems now facing us. The fossil fuels era is what we have inherited -- and thanks to science and the efforts of Generation Green we have learned change is upon us. The problems and solutions question is today, in front of us, choices need to be made. It's our choice where we're going and how to navigate.

The stakes are literally those of how best we can protect and preserve a living Earth today and for future generations.

Carry on Planet Citizens!