A Climate Change Curriculum

Hi everyone,

Quarex has moved into a content-building phase — the platform tools are largely done, so the focus now is deepening the library. The first big push: climate change. Here's what went live, where to find it, and a change in how we're going to decide what to build next.

What we built

Quarex already had four climate books scattered across different parts of the library — the physical science, the public debate, the ethics, and a current-events overview. What was missing was the infrastructure angle: not the science of the problem, but the engineered systems of the response.

So we built a new Climate Infrastructure shelf — ten books, a hundred chapters, six hundred sharp sourced questions:

1. Grid Decarbonization: Rebuilding the Power System
2. Carbon Capture and Storage: Engineering the Drawdown
3. Flood Defense and Coastal Infrastructure
4. Climate-Resilient Agriculture
5. Water Infrastructure Under Climate Stress
6. Cooling a Warming World: Urban Heat Infrastructure
7. The Electrified Transportation System
8. Climate-Adapted Construction and Building Codes
9. Disaster Response and Early-Warning Systems
10. Climate Monitoring: The Observation Infrastructure

We also rebuilt one of the older, thinner books — Global Climate & Environment — from four chapters to ten, adding the fossil-fuel politics of delay, climate finance, climate migration, the courtroom fights, the disinformation war, and the geopolitics of a warming world.

Where to find it: the Climate Change syllabus

All of it — the four existing foundation books plus the ten new ones — is now stitched into a single curriculum on Public Studies:

→ The Climate Change Syllabus — 14 courses, 141 chapters, 850+ topics. Free and open, like everything on Public Studies.

The curriculum is built as a deliberate learning arc:

• The Science — how the climate system physically works
• The Debate — what is genuinely contested and what isn't
• The Ethics — what we owe each other and other species
• The Current State — climate as a live news-and-politics story
• The Engineering Response — the ten new books, on how we actually build our way through it

A learner walks from how the problem works → what we argue about → what we owe → where things stand → how we respond. No single part of the Quarex library could deliver that arc alone — the curriculum pulls books from four different library types into one coherent path.

The change in how we build

Here's the part worth your attention. Designing that curriculum taught us something about how to build content well.

The Climate Change curriculum is the proof. The structure it imposed is exactly what revealed the real hole — the infrastructure angle — rather than letting us build a fourth book duplicating climate science we already had. It also caught that the old Global Climate book was underbuilt the moment it had to stand as a real course.

So going forward, the workflow flips: design the curriculum first, then build the books to fill it. The curriculum becomes the project plan — it tells us which books need to exist, what angle each should take so they don't overlap, and what order they belong in. And it's a standing audit: every course is either a real book or a visible gap.

Where you come in

A few are already on our list. Some need new books built first — a Corruption & Accountability curriculum, and one on truth and honesty in American politics. Others would mostly organize what already exists: History, Biography, and AI Fundamentals each have dozens of books in the library but no curriculum tying them into a path. But the best ideas usually come from outside the building.

Take a look at the Climate Change syllabus, and tell me what you'd want to learn next.

— Peter