In Wyoming, after 18 months of study and comparison with standards from other states, a committee of science educators unanimously recommended last fall that the State Board of Education adopt the guidelines. In March, at the tail end of the state’s legislative session, lawmakers passed a footnote to the biennial budget, prohibiting any public spending to implement the new standards.

And last month, the State Board of Education ordered the committee of science educators to come up with a new set of standards. Mr. Micheli, the chairman and a cattle rancher from Fort Bridger, said he was concerned about any teaching on climate change that did not consider “the cost-benefit analysis in terms of the expenditure of the effort to bring under control global warming.”

In other states, the debate is also intense. Last fall, the Legislature in Kentucky voted to reject the new science guidelines but Gov. Steven L. Beshear overruled the Legislature and put the standards in place with an executive order. In South Carolina, state-specific guidelines with watered-down references to climate change and evolution are still awaiting approval by the State Legislature.

Here in Wyoming and elsewhere, criticism of the Next Generation standards is also being fueled by a spreading backlash against national academic standards in general. Across the country, opponents on the right and left have attacked the Common Core, a separately developed set of standards for what elementary, middle and high school students should know and be able to do in reading and math, and that have been adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia.

With an election for governor this year, opposing the standards is “becoming a political litmus test,” said Richard Barrans, a science education professor at the University of Wyoming who served on the state’s standards review committee. “Are you enough of an independent, antigovernment person?” He added that the role of humans in climate change is only a small part of the science standards.