ALEC's 'Environmental Literacy Improvement Act' Mandates Teaching Climate Denial in Schools

On May 5, 2000, the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) Natural Resources Task Force adopted the ‘Environmental Literacy Improvement Act’ at ALEC’s Spring Task Force Summit, with full approval by ALEC’s Board of Directors in June 2000. The model bill was designed to spread climate denial to K-12 students by requiring that ‘both sides’ of climate science be taught in schools, establishing state-level councils to oversee all scientific material presented to students and allowing fossil fuel companies to directly influence how climate science is presented in classrooms. The bill mandated teaching that there is ‘major controversy over whether or not humans are changing the weather,’ despite overwhelming scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change.

The task force was headed by Sandy Liddy Bourne from 1999-2004, who ascended to Director of Legislation and Policy for ALEC in 2004, then became the Heartland Institute’s Vice President for Policy Strategy upon leaving ALEC in 2006—creating a direct personnel pipeline from ALEC to the climate denial think tank ecosystem. In 2012, leaked internal Heartland Institute documents revealed their ‘Global Warming Curriculum for K-12 Classrooms’ project designed to teach students climate doubt, operating in coordination with ALEC’s model legislation. The Heartland Institute continued to promote ALEC’s Environmental Literacy Improvement Act on its website years after the initial leak. Between 2000 and 2013, ALEC planted the Environmental Literacy Improvement Act in 11 state legislatures, with the bill passing in four states and introduced in Oklahoma, Colorado, and Arizona in early 2013.

The systematic injection of climate denial into public education represented institutional corruption of scientific education by fossil fuel interests. By mandating ‘both sides’ teaching of settled climate science, ALEC created false equivalence between peer-reviewed climate research and industry-funded denial—the same propaganda strategy Philip Morris used with tobacco science denial. The establishment of state oversight councils gave fossil fuel companies direct veto power over curriculum content, ensuring students received industry-approved misinformation during their formative educational years. This multi-decade campaign to corrupt science education demonstrates how corporate lobbying organizations weaponized the education system to manufacture future generations of climate science skeptics, undermining the scientific literacy needed for democratic climate policy debates.