In recent years the range of problems and concerns that we categorize under the banner of environmental issues seems to grow in number, magnitude and scale. We have determined that many of humanitarian failures in the developing world have their causes rooted not just in the political or economic systems but also in the need to accommodate the ecological systems that sustain life. In short, we are changing the climate. At first glance these problems appear to be so large and involve such complex international negotiations that it is easy to conclude that solutions will evade us. Yet that has not been the case. What may have seemed the greatest hurdle, the formation of an international consensus to deal with these issues, was completed with relative ease (as these international conventions go). Most of the world, and certainly North America, has not embraced concepts of sustainable development and therefore not restructured their policies and economic activity accordingly. This paper examines the nature of the conflicting values, beliefs and opinions that characterize the national debates over environmental initiatives in North American cultures. Based on the assumption that the international positions expressed in these major environmental treaties are the correct ones, the paper will further examine the conceptual deficiencies that underlie opposition arguments with a view to how educators could address these concepts in curricula to help prepare their students for the public debate that will lead to resolution of these conflicts. This paper concludes that a solution to this public policy impasse may lie within the curricula of secondary education where certain fundamental concepts could be instilled within a broader range of students. The long-term benefit would be that the fallacious anti-environmental arguments of the naive and the narrow-minded will no longer find support in the public forum.