Creative and simple solution to help new energy and climate change - solar-covered parking

 I got this off Facebook, the "Facts they don't teach you" page:

 France is transforming parking lots into clean energy generators, and it may be one of the most practical climate policies introduced in recent years.

Since July 2023, French law has required parking lots with 80 or more spaces to cover at least half of their surface area with solar canopies. Parking lots with more than 400 spaces must meet the requirement by 2026, while smaller qualifying lots have until 2028 to comply.

The idea is remarkably simple.

Instead of clearing farmland or natural habitats for new solar farms, use land that has already been paved. Parking lots spend most of the day exposed to direct sunlight, making them ideal locations for generating electricity without changing how the land is already used.

The potential is significant. Estimates suggest that if half of France's parking lots were equipped with solar canopies, they could provide between 6.75 and 11.25 gigawatts of installed solar capacity—roughly comparable to the generating capacity of around ten nuclear reactors.

The advantages extend well beyond electricity.

Solar canopies provide shade, reducing temperatures in large paved areas and helping to ease the urban heat island effect. They keep parked vehicles cooler during hot weather, protect them from intense sunlight, rain, and hail, and make parking more comfortable for drivers. Electric vehicle owners benefit as well, since cooler cars require less energy to run their air conditioning after being parked.

France is not the only country moving in this direction. South Korea has also introduced policies requiring solar installations on large public parking lots beginning in late 2025.

The opportunity is even greater elsewhere. With an estimated 800 million parking spaces, the United States has enormous untapped potential to generate clean electricity by making use of infrastructure that already exists, reducing the need to develop additional land for renewable energy projects.

Sometimes the most effective climate solutions are not the most complicated.

They simply make better use of the space we already have.

Source: Chester, M., Horvath, A., & Madanat, S. (2010). Environmental Research Letters

Summaries of Research on Achievement Gaps in K-12: What works?!

 In Evanston and most diverse communities around the country, academic achievement gaps, which lead to opportunity gaps, are prevalent and tend to be generational. Our Project Excite is one approach that had found these gaps can be reduced, and even eliminated, through a long-term, comprehensive approach that begins with working with students when they are young (Excite started with Black and Hispanic 3rd graders, for instance). 

As I am part of a new community-wide effort to try and get those same results on a grand scale, I used AI to do my own meta-study - a look at numerous research studies in the topic - and find the key ideas, concepts, models, and actions that are found to help attack the gaps. I'm pleased that our Excite model, which was run from 1999-2017, 'discovered' nearly all of this independently; published studies for Excite can be found here. 

Check out the meta-study results, which are loaded with ideas and best practices teachers of all grade levels can do to help their students, especially students of color and lower-income students, who are most likely to fall into the gaps. Lists of references are provided. 

1. Achievement gaps in general;  2. EELS role in fighting achievement gaps;  3. Effect of stereotype threat on gaps;  4. Effect and use of multiple intelligence models on gaps.  

EELS (SEL) for Teachers, by Teachers

 Since the COVID pandemic and shutdown of schools here and around the world, I've been fortunate to work with dozens of nationally and globally renowned teachers and educators to develop and promote the commonly called SEL skills - which I think really needs to be renamed and rebranded to what they really are, Everyday Essential Life Skills, or EELS - and provide all sorts of practical resources for teachers. 

ALL of the resources are linked through this Google Sheet, so if you are an educator or just generally interested, have at it and use/copy/modify what you like and can make use of with students!

Climate scientists start new website as a nonprofit!

 Good news for science, and more importantly, the world - scientists who were fired from NOAA, which is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have replaced the dismantled climate.gov site with a new climate.us site. The current administration, who openly and often calls climate change a "hoax", and has cut funding and fired some of the world's best climate scientists for political reasons, has put a massive obstacle in the way of nearly the entire rest of the world when it comes to doing something about climate change. We should be thankful to the actual scientists and experts in the field for doing this as a nonprofit, and mostly as on a volunteer basis! 

GO TO CLIMATE.US for all sorts of data, analyses, and discussions of what's going on with the planet!