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(01/23/14 12:55am)
I spent most of my life wanting to be more alone: wanting to leave neighborhood pickup whiffle ball games early so that I could instead go read a book, wanting my own bedroom at home instead of sharing with my brother, wanting to leave home for college and, once here, waiting anxiously to have a single. No roommate for me; I just wanted to be alone.
That fantasy of seclusion is deeply carved into the American psyche, built into the narratives of every successful politician and every movie superhero. Even the bible sends its protagonist to the wilderness for rebirth. We aspire to retreat into the backwoods when all else fails, and then to wall ourselves off in gated houses ringed by hedges when we succeed. While we work towards that lofty vision, we make do with white wires that plug music into our heads and lounges that have been converted into dorms because we don’t value the space that we provide as much as we value the contributions of a few more paying customers.
Even in our romantic efforts, such as they are at this place, we tend towards the solitary. There is no lonelier moment than the long walk home the day after a meaningless encounter, no deeper connection in a single drunken rendezvous with a stranger, where the conversation is scattered, not remembered, or entirely absent. We say that we would like to fix this, but we never take action to change.
We have become far too skilled at being alone together.
This is my fiftieth and final column for the Campus. While turning in my thesis last week might have seemed a more momentous occasion, these pieces stacked on top of each other would make a taller pile. In a little over a week I will ski down the Snow Bowl, pack my possessions into my car, and hope that it doesn’t break down on my way out of the state. I will finally have the option to be completely alone. I could call it soul-searching, or recharging, tell everyone that I need some space. But at long last, perhaps later than I might have hoped, I know that is not what I want.
We blaze trails not so that we might escape the world, but so that others might follow. Life is better with companionship. We are not born alone nor do we die that way; we are born into the embrace of our families and when we die they gather around to recount the happy moments of our lives, and the moments in between where we steal solitude from company are the moments most likely to later bear the tinge of regret.
As I move on into the next chapter, I do not regret the excesses of my time in college: the times that the night ended and the sun rose over the Green Mountains while my friends and I sat and talked about everything and nothing, the hours spent in Proctor over many tiny courses, or the morning classes that I blew off to head to make fresh tracks at the Snow Bowl. What I do regret are the times that I held back. I regret waiting until junior year to try out the sailing and debate teams. I regret waiting to join my social house and the Campus editorial staff until my senior spring, content for too long to contribute only this column. I regret valuing solitude and down time over team spirit and hard work.
The best friends that I have made here have been when I have taken a chance and given other people the chance to reject me flat out or welcome me into their circle. That may seem like an incredibly obvious point for a final column, but it is one that we only think about at orientation and I know too many people here with that same problem. Instead of complaining about hookup culture, ask somebody out the dinner, drinks or skiing. A shocking number of my male and female friends complain about the lack of dating at Middlebury. Too many seem to fear that the sheer act of asking reeks of desperation, but the regret of not acting far outlasts whatever embarrassment it might cause (especially if you don’t write about it in the Campus). Middlebury only changes when we do.
Some last shout-outs from my bully pulpit: Hannah — I was convinced that we would be at each other’s throats, but I have really looked forward to working with you every week to put this section together. Kyle and Alex — you have done an amazing job this semester. Middlebury — fossil fuel divestment makes financial sense. Rachel and the SGA — please reconsider the community education requirement. Dining services — more taco days! To everyone who read “Apply Liberally” over the past four years — it’s been a pleasure. I leave you with the words of President Josiah Bartlett (D-Sorkinland):
What’s next?
Illustration by NOLAN ELLSWORTH
(01/16/14 12:43am)
The day that I was supposed to head home for winter break and the holidays, I put my foot down on the brake pedal of my car and it didn’t stop. It was a scary moment that could have resulted in serious damage, so I decided to take my car to the mechanic before braving the 300 mile journey to Western New York. Two days later and $1200 poorer, I finally made it home.
I didn’t buy that car. I never had to scrape together enough savings or make a monthly car payment. When he bought it new in 2002, my grandfather had — rightly — called it the last car that he would ever own. It was my first.
I don’t pay the insurance on that car, either. My parents cover the cost of that through their policy (and if they haven’t given that recent thought, this will be a very expensive column for me). I pay for the gas and the maintenance costs, and for small repairs. But when calamity strikes, my parents are still my first call. This does necessarily not make me lazy; when my parents wanted to buy their first house, they too called their parents, who probably never could have called on their own for such a favor. If the goal of each generation is to leave their children better off, then success is not something that happens overnight. It builds over years, through family, across generations. We benefit from the hard work and good fortune of those who came before.
Most people in the United States do not have this option. Their ancestors weren’t on the boat as early, or were denied the same opportunities, or were unlucky. If they run into car trouble around the holidays, they must take it out of the money that they might otherwise spend on Christmas presents for their kids, on family trips, or on visits to the dentist. Or they scrap their car and hope that a bus comes along. Millions of Americans live just one piece of misfortune away from utter financial ruin. Some of them may be lazy or unimaginative. Some of them might not have given their bootstraps a tug. But the vast majority are pulling with all of their might, and their fingers are getting sore, but they stay locked in poverty, struggling to make things work out somehow. Until one day their brake pedal sinks to the floor and it all falls apart.
In the alleged economic recovery of the last few years, the type of middle class jobs that come with the type of salary that allows for saving have largely been replaced by low-wage or minimum wage jobs. With a federal minimum wage stuck at $7.25 an hour, a worker who might need a car to get to their job every day would need to work for more than 160 hours — four full-time weeks — just to pay for those repairs. Ford could help by making more reliable cars, but the federal government can help by raising the minimum wage, which when adjusted for inflation is a third lower than its original level. Raising the minimum wage will not slow job growth, especially since many of the worker who would benefit work in service sector jobs that cannot move overseas. Instead, a raise in the wage would help to shift money from record corporate profits and executive compensation to the people who will immediately return that money to the economy. This is not because they lack in thrift, but because their daily needs exceed their daily income.
I have worked in a number of jobs throughout my time in college — landscaper, janitor, web designer, research assistant. For me this has always been a point of pride. I like to think of myself as financially independent and fiscally responsible. But this ignores some inconvenient realities. It ignores the nature of success and the nature of generational improvement. When you are one unexpected serious illness away from bankruptcy, or homelessness, or not being able to afford breakfast for your children — situations that plague millions of Americans — every day is a battle and every spin of the roulette wheel could be deadly. When you struggle to survive it is much more difficult to further your education or build a career. When you struggle to stay out of the ditch it is much more difficult to climb the slippery hill and look beyond it to the stars than if you started two thirds of the way up the slope, where the pitch starts to level. The American Dream is not a rocket ship, but rather a hard slog and the people just starting the trek do not deserve our scorn. They deserve our help.
(12/05/13 1:46am)
On Friday, a week into “new member education” — “pledge” for those not versed in doublespeak — the leadership of Kappa Delta Rho received a letter from Dean of Students Katy Smith Abbott stating that in response to “an allegation of potential hazing,” all functions of the house would be suspended for an indeterminate amount of time to allow for an investigation. Each new member — who at a less absurdly Orwellian institution might be accurately referred to as a “pledge” — was interviewed individually. In some cases, the interviews were conducted by officers from the Department of Public Safety. In most, however, they were run by an external private investigator, Nancy Stevens, at a cost to the student body that likely ran into the thousands of dollars. The investigation, unsurprisingly, found nothing; there was nothing to find. A similar investigation in the fall of 2011 also found that no hazing. It seems unlikely that an apology is forthcoming for either unnecessary investigation. It seems equally unlikely that actual guilt matters.
Various members of the college administration often wax eloquent about the need to foster a greater sense of community on this campus. Yet social houses provide one of the strongest and enduring sources of community on an otherwise transitory campus. Even the most fervent haters of Delta cannot argue that filling Prescott house with first-years and turning its party space into a classroom has somehow improved the Middlebury social scene. Super blocks are not an adequate substitute; a super block moves into an on-campus house for a single year and then vanishes, its members joined by friendship or convenience rather than an interest in being a part of something larger. The administration has attempted to remedy this problem by giving the Super Blocks a theme, but the dearth of actual programming along those lines shows that effort has largely failed.
When students join a social house, they become part of traditions and culture that have endured for decades. Attempting to make it impossible for the current members to pass these along to new initiates is to try and create a Middlebury with no institutional memory — where students come and go with no knowledge or interest in what came before and what will follow, where the stories of a house’s previous tenants vanish down the memory hole.
Social houses are not the repositories of white, male, conservative privilege often associated with Greek life on other campuses. Instead, these houses are some of the only institutions on a campus otherwise fiercely divided by race, class, and gender politics that bring a diverse membership together with a common interest in a space and a set of traditions. In this they have been much more successful again than the other block housing options, which are often composed by students who come from similar backgrounds.
By contrast, KDR is arguably the most diverse organization on campus in both race and socioeconomic status, rivaling interest clubs whose specific purpose is to promote cultural understanding. That breadth of cultural exposure isn’t found elsewhere on campus in a structured setting. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the composites next time you visit. A coeducational membership also creates a unique dynamic in social houses that can provide an example for Greek life across the country. The Middlebury chapter of Kappa Delta Rho was recently readmitted into the national fraternity as a full and equal chapter, where it serves a model for the future.
The social houses of Middlebury College are institutions of which we should be proud. Their existence should be a selling point to prospective students — part of a trend that began here. But instead of trumpeting the diversity and progressiveness of the houses here, tour guides barely mention their existence unless prompted. Instead, the administration throws a series of strict anti-hazing regulations of the social houses that hardly make sense. Scavenger hunts and walks through the woods suddenly become dangerous and illegal. If my friends were to blindfold me on the way to a surprise birthday party, I would presumably have a strong anti-hazing case against them. The administration claims to use a “reasonable person standard” and suggests the type of alternative activities that might be appropriate for a middle school slumber party. One of their recommendations was to make a scrapbook. If mandated scrapbooking is not hazing, then I do not know what is.
This is not to make light of actual hazing. Hazing is a dangerous crime. But in the social houses here at Middlebury — at least in those that are not underground – it simply does not happen. It is long pastime for the administration to cease using absurd allegations of hazing as an excuse to strain, malign, and ultimately destroy one of the best sources of the community on this campus.
(11/13/13 7:09pm)
Last week in Oslo, Marius Holm of the ZERO Foundation presented a report that I co-wrote this summer along with a number of environmental and financial professionals making the case for fossil fuel divestment in Norway’s government pension fund, a portfolio so large that it dwarfs the size of all American university endowments combined. Many of the arguments were specific to Norway, which, as one of the largest producers of oil and gas in the world, is ill-advised to double down on its exposure to shifts within the fossil energy industry. As a fund that already has in place the type of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) criteria for investment missing from Middlebury’s endowment, the debate in Norway is not over whether divestment is an appropriate tool for creating change, but rather how far that tool should be extended. While Middlebury would be well advised to lead the way by creating similar investment screens, even in the absence of concerns about endowment ethics the arguments for divestment in Norway can inform the ongoing debate on this campus.
Over the past six months, many market analysts have revised their predictions for future oil prices from around $110 per barrel to down into the $80 to $90 range. A number of factors are driving this downward trend — increased efficiency of automobiles, uncertainty over future regulations and a Chinese economy far more overleveraged than that of the United States prior to the financial crisis. All of these factors contribute to falling oil demand, which in a world of abundant oil supply means that prices must soon begin to fall.
At lower prices, many of the types of tar sands, ultra-deepwater and shale oil projects currently under development would fail to earn back their investment capital. Any regulatory action that limits carbon dioxide emissions will inevitably require some of these reserves — which have already been factored into the share value of oil companies — to remain in the ground. Expectations about reserves have a significant effect on the share price of fossil fuel companies. When Shell reduced its estimated reserves by 20 percent in January 2004, its share price plunged by 10 percent in a single week. These concerns recently led a large group of investors representing over $100 billion in assets managed by companies that include Boston Common Asset Management and Storebrand Asset Management to issue a call that Norwegian Oil Company Statoil withdraw from tar sands extraction.
World Financial Markets – and, by proxy, the Middlebury College Endowment – are being inflated by a looming Carbon bubble. If you accept that there is a scant one-in-four chance that the world will meet the IEA’s targets to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius, the expected value of the endowment’s position in fossil energy equities is already ten percent inflated. The loss of value if climate change is defeated would be forty percent, which would affect the College’s ability to pay employees, undergo capital projects and award financial aid to deserving students.
The College Administration and Trustees no doubt have faith that, as professional investment managers, Investure will be able to anticipate the shift in fossil energy share prices before they actually arrive. But that poses a significant risk to the endowment – a risk that we would do well to avoid. When financial markets adjust to reflect the changing reality of fossil fuel use, the adjustment will not be smooth or gradual. It will come suddenly and leave those too slow to act with heavy losses. For some of the market, it already has. After an energy speech by President Obama that pledged increased regulation of power plants and an end to international development aid for non-Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) coal plants, the shares of coal companies including Peabody Energy and Walter Energy took dives of 3.4 and 10.4 percent respectively, adding to a year in which Peabody Energy has lost half its value and Walter Energy has lost three quarters. The Stowe Global Coal index, which lists coal-producing companies, fell the same day to its lowest level since the 2009 financial crisis. Utilities across Europe have similarly plunged unexpectedly in response to competition from renewable energy.
To be bullish on the future of the fossil fuel industry is the rough equivalent of a bullish outlook on the nuclear industry sometime after the alarm bells went off at Three Mile Island or after the wave headed for Fukushima. It is comparable to a bet on CFC-producing companies sometime between the discovery of the massive hole in the Ozone layer and the ratification of the Montreal protocol, or a bet on fax machines after the invention of the Internet. Coal and oil powered the 19th and 20th centuries. Their glory days are past. To bet on their future is to bet either against the future of humanity or against the overwhelming judgment of science.
(11/06/13 9:27pm)
All across America, Conservative commentators are jumping up and down, waving their hands in the air, pointing at glitches in the month-old roll-out of Obamacare and yelling “I told you so!” Republicans are so eager to turn attention away from their destructive shenanigans in the budget and debt ceiling debate that more column inches have been devoted to the launch of a website than at any other time in human history. None of them, of course, go so far as to suggest an alternative to fix the actual problem: the 50 million uninsured Americans who could go bankrupt at the first appearance of major illness.
One such offender was fellow columnist Ben Kinney ’15. His column of last week contained a number of the troubling factual errors that have characterized the entire debate. First was the assertion that he lost faith in the workability of the Affordable Care Act while watching Kathleen Sebelius flub an interview on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart just weeks ago. I understand as well as anyone the temptation to use a recent statement to jump into a column (case in point) but I suspect that Kinney belongs firmly in the camp of the Republicans rooting against the program — and doing their best to sabotage its success — from its inception.
More troubling was Kinney’s claim that “The Obama Administration has already spent half-a-billion dollars creating an unusable website…how can we trust it to effectively manage the complex and varied health care needs of 400 million Americans?” This would be a reasonable criticism, if it were in any way correct. Kinney overestimated the number of Americans by 83 million and the cost of the website by roughly $400 million according to the fact-checking website Media Matters. To be fair, he was not alone in this error; much like the $200 million-per-day India trip in 2010, the myth of the absurdly expensive website has flown through a gleeful conservative media looking for any shred of evidence to pin the President as an old-school tax-and-spend liberal.
Kinney’s later claims are less defective in their veracity than deceptive in their scope. He says that health insurance premiums under Obamacare are significantly higher than current premiums. This ignores the vast majority of owners of health insurance plans, who get their coverage through their employers, Medicaid, or Medicare. Those who will see their rates increase are the five percent of Americans who purchase their insurance as individuals and an additional five percent who previously had no health insurance. Some of those people were young, healthy and had previously opted not to purchase insurance. Unsurprisingly, buying health insurance instead of playing a literal game of Russian roulette with fatal illness represents a rate increase for those individuals. A quarter of people who previously did not buy health insurance were unable to do so due to a preexisting illness. For them, the coverage they will gain from the law represents the difference between a nonzero monthly cost and complete medical bankruptcy, or death.
Many of the cheaper plans purchased by consumers in this individual marketplace prior to the law cost less for a reason — they were the insurance equivalent of a shot of whisky and a prayer. They wouldn’t cover the cost of an ambulance or a night in the hospital, and they could be cancelled during treatment due to costs. Obamacare will subsidize the increased cost of health insurance for people making less than 400 percent above the poverty line, but that cannot get around the fact that owning usable health insurance will always cost more than useless or absent insurance — until disaster strikes.
Health insurance, plain and simple, saves lives. When Conservatives point to website glitches and the states across the nation who have refused to expand Medicaid to bring coverage to the uninsured and call Obamacare a failure, they’re ignoring the greater tragedy. The website will eventually be fixed. The states refusing to expand coverage have done so out of ideological spite. And in the richest nation in the world, Americans continue to die because they cannot afford to buy health insurance. Instead of pointing at these failings as a sign that the twice-elected President isn’t so great after all, how about working on a solution?
(10/17/13 3:50am)
“What did you do over your Febmester?”
I looked around the room full of new acquaintances. One had traveled to Africa. Another had ridden on horseback across part of Patagonia. A third had trekked through Nepal. How could I match that? I’d simply enrolled in another college for the fall semester. Like many of my friends and classmates, I had never wanted to be a Feb. But I’d wanted to go to Middlebury since I first skied at the Snow Bowl. The stories you never hear are about the Febs who spent the fall working retail or starting college elsewhere, or who eagerly applied early decision and then sat at home while the rest of their friends left for their schools of choice. You hear about the Febs who went off to save the world; for many Febs, for many reasons, world travel is not an option. Although I later took a semester off to “follow my passions,” I simply wasn’t ready at 18. I had never left home on my own, and I wasn’t comfortable asking my parents for the money for such a trip.
When new Febs arrive at Middlebury, the initial exuberance quickly clashes with the reality of the situation. Regular first-years have a hall of peers, an FYC and a Commons system for support. New Febs do not. They are scattered in whatever space is available, often a long way away from potential new friends and sometimes with upperclassmen with whom they have little in common. Whatever integration they get into the Commons system feels like an afterthought at best. Middlebury, of course, has a way to spin this. Febs, they say, are independent-spirited leaders. What they really are, though, are first-year college students dealing with the same struggles as any other new student – sudden freedom, course loads, the omnipresence of alcohol – but with a lot less official support.
Febs are different than typical first-years in at least one way. We are almost exclusively white. There is a simple reason for this: the College only reports the diversity statistics of fall admits. Former Director of Admissions Bob Clagget said in a Campus article published in March 2010 that “we tend not to offer February admission to American students of color unless they specifically ask for it.” By taking in a lily-white February class, Middlebury looks much more diverse than we actually are. And in a time when Middlebury is straining to put forward a more diverse face, the Feb program is shockingly, publicly, unabashedly racist. There are country clubs in Mississippi with more minority members than the Feb classes.
Middlebury College is renowned for its language programs. February admission makes it difficult for students to take full advantage of these programs. Most introductory language classes start in the fall, and intermediate classes take place over J-term. By the time Febs arrive, they must either wait until their second semester to start a new language or take an accelerated option. For many Febs, this makes going abroad in language programs difficult, as they cannot achieve the required level of mastery by the spring of their junior year.
Although Febs tend to form a more tight-knit class than do the fall classes, this is out of necessity. By the time they come in midway through the year, the fall class has solidified their social circles, often centered around a common hallway or team experience. Many Febs also experience a sense of inferiority, as though they must overcompensate for whatever quality they lacked to allow them to come to Middlebury in the fall. These factors create an unnecessary distance between Febs and the rest of their classmates that often persists throughout the college experience, especially in the final semester when the rest of the class with which they identify has moved on.
The original public justification of the Feb program makes little sense. It is difficult to buy the argument that Febs are necessary to fill the beds of students abroad in the spring when the incoming classes merely serve to replace the outgoing Febs.
This is not to say that I am not grateful for my experience at Middlebury. I love this community, and the people who make it special. If I were to go through the college experience again, I would do nothing differently. Obviously, we should not prevent students from taking gap semesters or gap years if they so choose. But unless the only issue that Middlebury cares about is appearing more diverse on paper than in reality, the Feb program creates far more problems than it solves. It is time to phase out the program in favor of more integrated classes.
(09/25/13 11:47pm)
Ted Cruz really does not want you to get health insurance.
Through a combination of snark and a false bravado that might trick his constituents into thinking that the Canadian-born Senator from Texas was actually at the Alamo, Cruz, Utah Senator Mike Lee, and the Tea Party were able to convince the House of Representatives to pass a resolution to continue funding for the government but deny the necessary funding for the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). This represents the last chance for the wave of teabaggers who came into Washington promising to oppose the legislation at all costs to accomplish their goal and kill the bill.
Eric Cantor, previously my least favorite member of Congress, had initially suggested that the House pass and send to the Senate a stand-alone bill defunding Obamacare. This would have been a tough vote for red-state Democrats up for reelection and an easy vote for most Republicans. But that wasn’t high-stakes enough for Cruz; it would have easily been vetoed by the President and wouldn’t have gotten him a full calendar of talk show appearances. He instead suggested that the measure be tied to the resolution funding the government. Failure to pass a funding resolution means the first government shutdown since 1996. The House of Representatives passed that resolution last Friday.
Cruz has made a career of denying health care to those whose parents couldn’t pull quite as hard on their bootstraps as his did. His father began his political life as a supporter of Fidel Castro. After fleeing to college in the United States and making his fortune starting an oil company in Alberta, he swung hard to the right to become a Tea Party hero and the father of the worst Senator since McCarthy. If that comparison sounds dramatic, you should know that it came from Senator John McCain, who, according to an aide, “hates Cruz.” By all accounts, he is not alone in his dislike for the Texan, who wandered the hallways of his Princeton dorm room in a bathrobe and at Harvard Law refused to study with anyone who hadn’t attended Harvard, Princeton, or Yale (sorry, Middlebury Republicans hoping to someday work with him. You should have gone to a better school).
Cruz – who may be the least polite Canadian to ever cross the border – has an oil painting in his office which depicts him arguing his first ever case before the Supreme Court as Texas’ solicitor general. He describes the giant painting of himself as reminding him to be humble because he lost the case 9-0, although that might have had less to do with his arguments and more to do with the fact that he was arguing that Texas be able to void a legal settlement where it promised to improve the health care services it offered to impoverished children. Apparently it was one of his proudest moments.
Now that Cruz’s measure has made its way to the Senate, he has said that he will ask Majority Leader Harry Reid to require that an amendment restoring funding for Obamacare to the funding resolution need 60 votes – more than the normal 51-vote threshold for amendments. If not, he says that he will filibuster the entirety of the bill that he himself suggested, shutting down the government. Reid, who grew up in rural Nevada and used to box for fun, seems unlikely to comply with such a request, polite or otherwise.
When Ted Cruz runs for President, he can presumably say that he voted for defunding Obamacare before he voted against it.
If Democrats can get six Republican votes for the resolution, the shutdown will not happen. Since McCain seems to be motivated almost entirely by whom he dislikes at any given moment, it is likely that they have at least one. Polls show that the majority of the public do not believe that turning off the lights on government – sending children home from preschools funded by HeadStart, furloughing government employees, halting the processing of paperwork and closing National Parks all at a cost of hundreds of million dollars per day – is a smart idea. Cruz is more than smart enough to realize the effect that his showboating might have. Not to mention the fact that even a total government shutdown would fail to delay the implementation of Obamacare. But good government has never been a consideration for the junior Senator who has never proposed nor passed an actual bill – only the brightness of his personal star and the shininess of his ostrich-skin cowboy boots.
[audio mp3="http://middleburycampus.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Zach-Drennen-Column-Reading.mp3"][/audio]
Listen to ZACH DRENNEN read his column.
(09/12/13 1:06am)
Forget everything you thought you knew about why Middlebury College must divest. It is not about abandoning profitable investments for moral reasons. It is about abandoning investments with little hope of future growth. It is about getting out of a bubble that is about to burst.
Last year, we watched as the movement grew from a niche concern into the mainstream of campus dialogue. The rationale initially focused on the need to send a signal to the oil companies and to the world that we will not profit – that it is abhorrent to profit – from their conscious engineering of a warmer, more dangerous planet. It was moral crusade and, so, a quixotic one; in a world driven by quarterly or even hourly investment numbers, concern over the bottom line usually wins out. Early on in the divestment movement, even the most diehard supporters conceded that there had to be some financial cost to sustainable investment paradigms. This concession was based on a consensus belief about the absurd profitability of the oil industry.
This belief does not hold up to reality.
Research done by Standard and Poors, MCSI, the Associated Press, and other respected sources has shown that fossil fuel companies were mediocre investments all along. They do well in boom times but are extremely volatile, too connected to the whims of dictators, the news of the day, or even the weather. An endowment that excluded the stocks of oil majors over the last decade would have grown by a larger amount than one that included them.
Instead of peak supply, the world is running towards peak demand. The oil majors – ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, etc. – are paying progressively more for the oil that they draw from the ground, while demand in the developed world is flat due to improved technology and the growth of alternative energy. The remaining growth in demand is driven almost entirely by a Chinese economy that looks increasingly like a well-greased house of cards built on a lending boom and a real estate bubble that dwarfs the scale of our own. Deustche Bank says it best: “for big oil companies, the writing is on the wall. Shrink and liquidate over the coming five years, before it is too late.”
As for coal – if the Middlebury College endowment even holds coal company stocks at this point, Investure should be fired immediately. The stock value of Peabody coal fell ten percent in the amount of time it took President Obama to read a speech about energy policy on a sweltering Tuesday. This caps off a year in which that company lost half its stock value. By way of contrast, electric car company Tesla motors is up 300 percent during the same period.
So why would we invest in fossil energy companies? Is it because they make us a lot of money? They do not. Is it because they are a stable hedge against risk? They are not. Is it because we so believe in their mission that we want to back them with capital? We do not. Is it because there are not other worthy and profitable investment opportunities? There are: Bloomberg New Energy Finance forecasts that yearly investment in renewable energy technology will increase from $189 billion to nearly $900 billion by 2030.
The bottom line is that while some oil and coal companies may continue making money for a couple years, their room for growth is gone. Without growth their stocks will stagnate. There are much better opportunities out there to make a lot of money while doing good – or at least not actively doing harm. Divestment is a financial opportunity. We have a chance to avoid the bubble bursting. It also still happens to be the right thing to do.
In five months, I will have graduated. In six, Middlebury will start asking me to give back. I would love to – eventually. But I won’t give one dollar until we have divested from companies like Severstal, which by itself holds a quarter of the carbon needed to warm the planet past two degrees. I ask that you join myself and others in this pledge, and let the administration know of your commitment. Promises of more transparency and the creation of new funds are less than half measures. If the administration’s concern about divestment is merely the bottom line, then this is the only show of support that will change their minds.
(05/08/13 11:10pm)
This week, President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz released a statement reiterating the College’s support for the Vermont Gas pipeline. This comes in the face of motivated and organized student and community opposition that has made its presence well known over the last few weeks. This decision repudiates the state’s ban on hydraulic fracturing by supporting a pipeline that will carry natural gas produced by the process across Vermont. It is also the right thing to do; it is the right thing for Middlebury College, the town of Middlebury and the state of Vermont.
I could spend pages debating the merits of fracking. It has become a dirty word within the environmental movement, and it is an undeniable fact that fracking has an environmental impact. Yet the severity of that impact has been overstated. Natural gas has replaced coal as the go-to method of electrical generation in the United States. This is a step forward; natural gas contains half the carbon dioxide and none of the particulate emissions of coal. Natural gas extraction, through hydraulic fracturing or any other means, has less of an impact on the landscape than the strip mining and mountaintop removal used to produce coal.
In this case, the gas delivered by the pipeline would mainly replace the fuel oil and propane that Vermont residents use to heat their homes. The process of producing either of these is no less fraught with pollution and environmental degradation than fracking. Propane is a byproduct of — surprise — natural gas or petroleum refining. Fuel oil is a similar, dirty leftover of this process. As conventional sources of oil disappear, oil companies increasingly turn to oil sand and oil shale. I don’t need to sell anybody at Middlebury on the harms of oil sand extraction, and oil from shale is produced by a mechanism similar to fracking for natural gas. Whether or not Addison County allows the pipeline, then, its residents will rely on the byproducts of the technological achievement that is fuel extraction through hydraulic fracturing.
The construction of the pipeline will give more than 3,000 area homeowners and a number of local businesses the option to select a fuel that is both cleaner and cheaper. At current prices, a homeowner who switches from fuel oil or propane would save between $1,300 and $1,400 per year. In a county where the median household income is $57,000 per year, this represents a two percent total savings — a difference that only gets greater when considered for those with lower income. At its heart, this is not an environmental issue, but an issue of poverty and economic opportunity. Eleven percent of Addison County residents live below the poverty line. For these residents, a difference of more than $1,000 is a huge quality of life improvement. It means car repairs, more food on the table or summer camp for their kids. It means more money in the pockets of local businesses and lower costs for local schools. Even if the price of natural gas were to suddenly jump, it’s likely that fuels like propane and fuel oil would follow and price savings would remain substantial.
The pipeline is also an issue of economic development. Those savings for an average household will scale up many times for businesses like Cabot, Porter Hospital or Otter Creek Brewery in Middlebury. Lower heating costs for them mean higher wages for their employees or can mean more room in the budget for new hires. When we oppose projects like this, we effectively draw a fence around the area for businesses looking to move in.
I’m sympathetic to the plight of property owners who do not want to see the pipeline run by their houses. It is important that Vermont Gas take steps to reduce the risk and disturbance they will face in its construction and operation. The town of Cornwall, for example, is considering an ordinance that requires the pipeline to pass 300 feet from any structure of high consequence to avoid the extremely minimal but present risk of an explosion. Any other negative impact from the project will be temporary; once built, the pipeline will run three to five feet underground, and farmers will be able to grow crops on top of it.
The pipeline will bring biomethane to the College to satisfy its carbon neutrality pledge and cheaper, cleaner fuel to customers throughout Addison County. Vermont State Government’s vote to ban hydraulic fracturing was nothing more than a symbolic measure; there are no natural gas reserves in the state and no danger of fracking nearby. We should not turn down the possibilities the pipeline brings over a symbolic quibble over the origin of the product it will carry.
(05/01/13 11:19pm)
People on Syrian streets are dying horrible deaths, asphyxiated as the air around them gives way to clouds of toxic gas released upon them by their government. Last week, blood samples of the victims confirmed that the regime of Bashar al-Assad has used weapons of mass destruction in the form of Sarin nerve gas on at least three occasions, including once on the streets of the rebel stronghold of Homs. Assad has shown a willingness to use any and all means to crush dissent in Syria. These attacks are just the tip of the spear, a small taste of the largest arsenal of chemical weapons in the Middle East. Unless he is stopped, there is no reason to assume that these will not continue.
We’ve sat back as Assad has slaughtered his opponents with machine guns and helicopter gunships. We’ve stalled with sanctions and arms embargoes and provided non-lethal aid to the rebels. These were less than half-measures. Had we intervened before, we could have prevented the deaths of 70,000 Syrians at the hands of their ruler and his security forces. We could have prevented Syria from being overrun with foreign jihadi fighters and its middle class from fleeing in one of the region’s worst refugee crises. These things have all happened, but we no longer have a choice.
The United States and United Nations cannot remain on the sidelines of this conflict any longer. President Obama long ago said that the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime represented a red line that the international community would not tolerate. The time has come to stand by these words.
We do not necessarily need to intervene in Syria unilaterally. Assad has defied international law and the international community on this issue. The United Nations has a legal and moral obligation to punish these transgressions. Russia and China must not be allowed to use their veto power to prevent the international community from acting to prevent further atrocities. If the Security Council cannot agree on taking steps beyond merely tightening economic sanctions, the United Nations has lost its final shred of credibility. The United States is one of the founding members, the host and the primary financial backer of the UN. Without at least an agreement to prevent the continued use of chemical weapons, we have no reason to continue supporting the institution.
The international community should work with the most credible elements of the Free Syrian Army to establish a recognized government. We should use our combined military might to enforce a strict no-fly zone over Syria and send in ground forces to secure chemical weapon sites as necessary. These measures combined with an increasingly well-armed and well-trained insurgency should lead to the quick collapse of the Assad regime.
Obviously, the aftermath will be messy. We must learn from the lessons of Iraq to avoid the alienation of the powerful Allawite minority that currently backs Assad. But Syria is not Afghanistan; it has – or used to have – a vibrant middle class and a modern economy. It has a tradition of national institutions and national government, if not democracy. When we intervened in Libya, President Obama pitched the effort as an effort to prevent a humanitarian crisis. We launched a limited and highly successful effort with cooperation from our allies that caused the ouster of Gaddafi. The potential for – and actual record of – humanitarian catastrophe in Syria are far greater.
We obviously cannot and should not intervene in every insurgency or displace every dictator with whom we disagree. But we can show the world that any leader who uses these weapons will face swift and certain destruction. We will use the judgment of the community of nations and the awesome power of the world’s biggest arsenal to reduce their regime to rubble, and if they survive we will pull then from the ruins of their former stronghold to try them for war crimes. We have that power and that responsibility.
(04/24/13 4:36pm)
A natural gas pipeline runs through my neighborhood in western New York. The only reason I know that is because, curious about the orange markers sticking out of the ground at a golf course we sometimes play at, I decided to check them out. There’s no obtrusive pipe sticking out of the ground. The same will be true of the pipeline that Vermont Gas would like to build through the state; it will be buried three to five feet under the surface.
This is the type of project that is incredibly easy to oppose without having an actual stake in the matter. As students we stand to benefit from access to natural gas. But that does not mean we cannot understand the perspective of Vermont homeowners and business owners who see this pipeline as a way to both save money and use cleaner fuel.
As with energy issues, this pipeline is not as simple as benefit and cost in a vacuum. We also have to consider the alternatives currently available. It is not as though, denied access to this natural gas, people will instantly elect to put solar panels on their roofs. Those are still an expensive investment, they can only produce electricity when the sun shines and Vermont winters are cold and dark. Instead, the thousands of people who would be affected by this project currently heat their homes and businesses by burning dirty fuel oil or expensive propane, the former of which emits 25 percent more carbon dioxide than natural gas. Both of these have to be delivered by truck, increasing the risk of an accident that leads to a spill or leak and burning oil in the process of delivery.
Natural gas would produce significantly fewer emissions at a significantly lower cost, saving homeowners somewhere in the neighborhood of $2,000 per year, a nontrivial amount in this era of economic stagnation. The savings would be even more for the types of businesses that Vermont critically needs to attract or maintain in order to keep the state’s population from melting away to warmer pastures. All told, the project is estimated to save Addison County residents and businesses $10 million annually.
I’m troubled by the lack of depth, balance or practicality that the dialogue about this pipeline on campus has shown. The Campus’s own article on the matter, two weeks ago, featured nine quotes by one student activist who opposes the pipeline — along with any other feature of a capitalist economy — and one quote from another student critic. Only a press release spoke for the other side. The repeated opposition to these types of projects has taken on the tenor of a particularly loud religion, the only type of religion truly accepted on this campus. But this is more than a symbol to latch on to. It is a real issue that will have real financial consequences for people. Every time environmentalists wrap our arms around an issue that makes us look indifferent to the concerns of people trying to get a job or pay their bills, we get further away from the type of national consensus that we need for concrete action to fight climate change.
We will never solve climate change by being against every type of energy development. Cleaner, cheaper energy is a good thing — the true difference between civilization and cave-dwelling. The way to motivate a shift to renewable energy technologies is to make them cheaper through continued innovation, economies of scale and, if necessary, government support. The activists who oppose this project in so-called solidarity with average people are ignoring the regressive short-term results if they prevail: higher heating and energy costs for working people.
Raising the price of energy is one of the surest ways to disproportionately tax poor and middle class families who are unable to invest in home upgrades or otherwise shift their consumption patterns during high price periods. Lowering the price of energy — by providing tax credits and feed in tariffs for renewables while, yes, making natural gas available — is one of the surest ways to stimulate the economy. If it has the side effect of reducing carbon emissions, as this project will, that’s even better. The benefits of this project far and away exceed the costs.
(04/17/13 10:36pm)
It’s easy to think that the world is falling apart and closing in upon us. We hear of the threats from North Korea or bombs in downtown Boston and ask ourselves what the world has come to and how we can stop it. If the post-9/11 era can be defined by a feeling, it’s the feeling of vulnerability. Our enemies, it seems, are no longer defined by convenient borders and no longer wear uniforms on the battlefield. They are harder to identify and this terrifies us. We spend much of our lives fearing invisible foes.
Sometimes people respond to these threats by calling for constant monitoring. Sometimes people respond by contemplating moving to another town or another nation. Sometimes they arm themselves, discounting the far greater likelihood of an accident against the chance of a home invasion. All of these are the wrong lesson. We live in one of the safest parts of ones of the safest countries in the safest era of human history.
As a child, I would roam my neighborhood free from that fear. I would walk home with my friends unaccompanied by adults. I would spend countless hours in the woods without anyone aware of my current whereabouts. My sister, currently 12 and raised in the post-9/11 era of cable news and the Internet, doesn’t get to experience these simple joys; my parents don’t want to take the risk that she’ll be abducted off the street by a stranger. Never mind that such tragedy only befalls about 30 Americans per year. In this my parents aren’t alone.
Yes, there is danger in society and in life; when you go for a drive, wander through a dangerous neighborhood or meet up with a stranger, there is a chance that you will die. But that chance is smaller than at any previous point in time. Cars make travel safer than ever thanks to increasing sophistication. Features like seatbelts and airbags were unheard of when our parents grew up. And in history, horse-drawn carriages frequently caused fatalities. Ships bearing goods and hundreds of people across the oceans often disappeared.
Despite the stories about rampant gun violence in society, the murder and violent crime rates have also hit record lows. Interstate warfare has all but vanished, and the daily risk of nuclear annihilation that characterized the Cold War era has faded into the past. Conquering warlords like Ghengis or Attila who proudly put entire nations to the sword remain little more than the stuff of legends. Skirmishes that once pitted family against family, village against village and tribe against tribe now seem absurd and archaic, but they were once a fact of existence. The rampant, gratuitous-seeming violence of “Game of Thrones” is drawn from the real-life examples of the Wars of the Roses and the Hundred Years War. Wars of conquest are no longer recognized as a legitimate tool of nation building. The young men who might once have fought in them now instead spend that time playing competitive sports or video games that merely simulate that viciousness. When we decry those activities as corrupting primers of violent behavior, we forget just how far we have come.
The types of epidemics that once wiped out meaningful percentages of the world’s inhabitants — think of the Spanish flu or the bubonic plague — have retreated, beaten back by modern medicine. Lifespans have grown and infant mortality has fallen. Over all, the trend of human development has been overwhelmingly positive.
As every tragedy reminds us, most people are fundamentally good and help others when given the opportunity. I’m thinking about the runners who finished the Boston Marathon, heard the explosions, and then went straight to the hospital to donate blood. I’m talking about the teachers who sheltered their students against a killer in Newtown at the cost of their own lives. I’m talking about the firefighters who waded into the crumbling Twin Towers.
The fact that we are capable of performing these actions — of putting aside our individual identity for the good of the group when necessity calls — is one of the shining accomplishments of humanity. It’s why disasters like what happened in Boston this week are so shocking. Not because they are common but because they are so rare; not because our experience of life is so separated but because we are all now more connected than ever before. In the modern era, the people of Boston and Aurora and Chicago are all our neighbors. Their pain travels at the speed of light, with color, sound, motion and emotion. We must not confuse the unprecedented information we can access with increasing levels of danger.
(03/20/13 11:03pm)
Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted along party lines to support a bill that would impose a ban on some assault weapons along with other measures aimed at reducing the likelihood of another tragedy like Sandy Hook. That bill, in all likelihood, will now die in the Senate. Even if it somehow survives the Republican tantrum that will inevitably come, it has zero chance of passing a House of Representatives held hostage by rabid constituents and lobbyists like the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre.
I struggle to find words to capture the abiding sadness of this state of affairs. Each new massacre seems like it must be the final straw — that at last, we will come together and decide that even if we cannot agree on the exact prescription, something must change. Instead, we just watch a parade of coffins while we salivate over every twisted detail of the lives of the monsters that fill them with children. And when those lives have vanished into the dirt we do nothing but shout at each other as we buy even more weapons of war for our personal collections. We debate the mental status of the Aurora shooter while we do nothing and expect different results — the very definition of insanity.
Of course he was insane, as is any person who buys his 15 minutes with the blood of others. But at this point, who are we to judge? So we trot out poor Gabby Giffords, applaud her condescendingly and then ignore the plea that she has no choice but to deliver in simple, difficult bursts because the bullet hole through her head robbed the former Congresswoman of her power of speech.
Senator Ted Cruz, who has rapidly usurped Eric Cantor as my least favorite person in Washington, critiqued the bill by pointing out that as the First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, the Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures, and the Sixth Amendment promises a fair and speedy trial. But unlike the Republican party of today, none of these are absolutes. Freedom of speech ceases to apply when it can incite harm, or in the case of slander or libel. The other amendments also have exceptions, especially in times of war. With the number of murders in Chicago alone far exceeding American combat deaths last year, this is no less of an emergency.
The Second Amendment also must have exceptions. We can debate whether an individual guarantee to own arms even exists outside of one’s membership in a well-organized militia. Whether constitutionally-mandated or not, most reasonable people would agree that hunters and sportsmen should be able to continue enjoying those activities. Likewise, presumably even Cruz would agree that the right to bear arms does not include a nuclear weapon. A line must exist somewhere between muskets and missiles.
We should draw that line at assault rifles. There is little reasonable rationale for their private ownership, and their potential for harm far exceeds any use they might have. They are comically unnecessary for activities like deer hunting and less practical for self-defense than a shotgun or a pistol. They are weapons of war. Again, there are exceptions. Farmers in Texas sometimes need AR-15s to shoot invasive hordes of feral pigs. But not a lot of other uses of that weapon immediately come to mind aside from mass murder. This year in the United States there have been far, far too many of those.
It is unconscionable that we cannot agree to take action, that this bill is dead. Teachers are dead. Parents are dead. Kids are dead.
Kids are dead, and yet we cannot agree that maybe a background check that actually checks someone’s background before handing them the power to cut the delicate thread of another’s life would be the prudent thing to do. We cannot agree to take weapons of war out of our homes and off of our streets. Instead we cling to the doctrine of mutually assured destruction — that only when we all have the ability to take the lives of our neighbors at any second of any day do we consider ourselves safe. Instead, we hide behind the idea that since criminals can get guns on the black market, there’s no value in restricting their sale. That ignores a simple fact with a simple fix: the guns used in Aurora and the guns used in Sandy Hook were purchased legally.
(03/06/13 11:15pm)
My last column talked about divestment — how I believe that it has powerful symbolic value but that it must not be used as a substitute for personal or community-level changes that would directly reduce the amount of carbon emissions for which we are responsible. Although I appreciate Hannah Bristol ’14.5’s response, I can’t help but feel as though she missed the point entirely. Tellingly, she does not offer a single solution to climate change beyond talking to “folks.” At this point, education is not enough.
I am fully and painfully aware that we cannot solve global climate change by turning off our lights. But we also must not forget that those choices do have value. When I drive from my apartment downtown to Proctor dining hall in the morning, or crank up the air conditioning on a hot day or fly halfway around the globe to Australia, I am contributing to the problem of climate change by releasing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and increasing the demand for fossil fuels. That round-trip flight alone sent more carbon aloft than the annual car use of entire American families. Such choices should hardly be dismissed as trivial; to do so feeds into the gloomy fallacy that we are helpless against global warming.
I worry about the push for divestment or the protests against the Keystone pipeline not because they don’t have value, but because in these causes I see an unwillingness to accept personal responsibility for climate change. It’s not enough to point at others and cry “stop tempting me with this sweet, sweet gasoline.” Oil and coal companies are not forcing us to buy product that we do not want. I am the cause of climate change. You are the cause of climate change. Al Gore and George W. Bush, Bill McKibben and Rex Tillerson are all the cause of climate change.
The only way to break that cycle is to accept that the problem begins in our backyards. The iron grip of fossil fuels on the business of powering, heating and moving the population will only be broken by making the alternatives cheap and available. Instead, I see a national movement of environmental activists obsessed with negative action. William F. Buckley once said that conservatism means standing athwart history yelling “stop.” That’s a strategy bound to lose without clear alternatives. It failed to stop the implementation of healthcare. It’s failing to prevent marriage equality from spreading across the country. But it seems to me as though modern environmentalism has fallen into this same doomed strategy of screaming “halt” at the world around it.
In the meantime, Vermont is currently debating a bill to ban the construction of wind farms in a state high on outrage but short on alternatives. The Green Mountain State produces less of its electricity from wind and solar than states from North Dakota to Texas, and we have heard barely a peep from those who profess to truly care about climate change.
I know how much easier it is to oppose things than to build up the other options; I spent most of the fall election cycle endlessly mocking Mitt Romney. Creation is much more difficult than moral outrage. It requires far more time, money and energy. But when a patient has heart disease, it’s not enough to tell him or her to simply stop eating, smoking and drinking. To survive, he or she will need to replace steak with salad and smoking with exercise. Without substitutes, stopping bad habits would still be fatal.
This is how to beat climate change: couple cries for divestment with a push for investment in small business solar companies or startups that aim to scrub carbon from the atmosphere. Oppose methods of fossil fuel extraction that cause excessive harm to the environment, but at the same time, encourage research in zero-emission vehicles so that there is no market for those fuels. We are the majority. It’s time to stop acting like the opposition.
It’s time to put solar panels on our roofs, wind turbines behind our homes and hydrogen powered cars in our garages. It’s time to plant more trees and consider seeding the oceans with iron, locking away carbon dioxide in algal blooms. That’s the type of movement we need: campuses and communities, cities and states, deciding to do things differently — not to complain, but to build and not only to divest but also to invest. The amount of money at this institution could do an incredible amount of good invested in companies like Solar Mosaic or First Wind. All of these projects will need to be in somebody’s backyard. You’re welcome to start with mine. Can we have yours, too?
(02/20/13 5:06pm)
It became clear in just a few days here over J-term that the issue of divestment has captured the imagination of the Middlebury population. In a school full of aspiring investors, targeting the endowment is a clever approach, and divestment is not a bad idea. It is the height of hypocrisy to rail against climate change while using the enormous value of the companies that enable it as the source of our funding, akin to a police officer driving drunk or a minister with a mistress. When we profit from the success of oil and coal companies, any carbon reductions that we achieve as a community are essentially greenwashing, a gesture devoid of meaning. The students who pitched the concept to the trustees last weekend have worked hard to make their case to the broader community and to ensure that the change wouldn’t hurt the College’s bottom line. If all goes well, the trustees will respond favorably in the coming weeks and we can jump into new issues with equal enthusiasm. What we cannot do is to declare victory and then return to complacency.
It is important to ensure that we do not become so caught up in this one issue that we lose focus on the things that we can change within our own lives and as a community to reduce the impact of global climate change. If successful, divestment will earn Middlebury headlines from this paper and many more national outlets. It will bring years of positive publicity to this institution and bring our funding in line with our goals. But at the same time, buying a share of ExxonMobile, or AEP or Chesapeake does not bring those companies a dime. Their funding comes not from the stock market but from the fuel that we purchase.
Divestment has important symbolic value but will neither fix climate change nor bankrupt the dealers that exist purely to respond to our addiction to cheap and dirty energy. We cannot turn to divestment simply because changing our own habits is too difficult or because it provides the enormous battle against global climate catastrophe with an easily defined villain. To sit back and attack them while we use their product every day is an even worse form of hypocrisy than to take their money while trying to break the addiction — the moral equivalent of a heroin addict taking pot shots at his dealer while mainlining his product.
Divestment may have helped to end apartheid in South Africa, according to Desmond Tutu, but in that case, companies targeted by disgruntled investors could simply shift their operations in order to avoid patronizing a racist regime. Enterprises that exist exclusively to produce oil have no such flexibility; even BP no longer pretends to be “beyond petroleum.” The only product they produce is one that we must soon finish consuming.
Divestment may have helped to remove the social license for tobacco companies to operate, reducing them to second-class corporate citizens with little public support or lobbying pull. But without public antismoking campaigns, it would have accomplished nothing other than to make their stock a cheaper purchase for less scrupulous investors. And still, even here in the Middlebury bubble, far too many students who know about the dangers of tobacco can’t resist the occasional cigarette, or two, or five. Unfortunately, the same goes for gasoline.
Let’s not pretend that climate change will be defeated by lurching between sexy sideshows that require little from the average person beyond vague outrage. The only way to truly cut into the obscene profits of oil companies is to cease buying their product. We need to turn off the lights and the unused electronics in our dorm rooms, and close our windows when the heat is on. We must choose to walk or ride bikes instead of driving, to put solar panels on our roofs and to install wind turbines in our fields and backyards. We need to ensure that Middlebury actually accomplishes the goal of becoming carbon neutral. Some of these steps are challenging and may require expensive upfront investments. But all are entirely possible with today’s technology if we remain focused and committed, recognizing that measures like divestment are just small stepping stones along the way and that corporations are not solely to blame. They would have no influence without eager customers for their product.
(01/24/13 12:40am)
We do not have a unique mental illness problem in this country; other countries also have people who suffer from mental illness. But you wouldn’t know it from listening to NRA Vice President Wayne LaPierre, who supports the right to carry a gun at the cost of any other right. He seems to think that the problem of gun violence in the United States would be solved best by putting the mentally ill in institutions, a suggestion stuck in the 1950’s. Yes, we could do much more as a nation to help these people, but I seriously doubt that anyone who supports unrestricted gun ownership also supports an expansion of government spending on the type of health care programs needed to have a serious impact. At the same time, many of the people who have taken to the airwaves in the weeks after Newtown to decry gun restrictions also oppose the types of background checks that would actually help to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill.
Including suicides, guns were a factor in 30,000 American deaths last year. In cities like Philadelphia, 80 percent of the victims of gun violence are young men from minority groups. Obviously, not all of these people or their murderers are mentally ill. They’re the victims of rash decisions, poverty and distrust in the police to solve crimes and accord punishment. All of these are major problems that we should attempt to deal with as a nation. But other nations have these problems, too. There is poverty in Britain. Australians don’t particularly trust the police. But in neither of these countries can citizens access deadly firearms with the unique ease of Americans.
Despite the propaganda of gun advocates, we do not have a unique culture of violence in the media in the United States. All of Western Europe plays the same “Call of Duty” games that we do. British movies and television are just as violent as America’s. The same week as the tragic shootings in Newtown, a man walked into a Chinese school and attacked 20 innocent children. None of those children were killed. Had he been carrying a firearm instead, that likely would not have been the case.
Studying abroad in Australia, large group fistfights were an inevitable part of going out, a concept for which Middlebury had left me entirely unprepared. As intoxicated young men threw themselves at one another on the floor of the club, fists swinging, I felt infinitely safer knowing that neither party would pull out a gun to escalate the fight. Not every person who fires a gun in anger is mentally ill. Obviously, they are not thinking clearly in the heat of the moment, but that hardly makes them insane. It makes them human. When they have a gun, it’s all too easy for them to act quickly in anger, without considering the consequences.
Around the globe, humans feel anger, sadness, jealousy and despair. These emotions are not limited to Americans. The reason that other countries don’t have our problem with mass murders and drive-by shootings is not that they don’t have these emotions, or that they miraculously treat all of their mentally ill. It’s not that they don’t have poverty. It’s not that they don’t like violent videos games. It’s that in other countries, these people do not have easy access to firearms. They keep them out of the hands of their mentally ill, out of inner cities and out of bars. All of these are common sense steps that we would be criminally insane to not address.
There is one more absolutely ridiculous argument that I’ve heard many times over the last few weeks that I just can’t leave alone. The government trying to reduce the number of guns in America does not portend the rise of Hitler or Stalin, or any type of dictatorship. It’s called civilization. The day that I would start to actually become concerned about the rise of a dictatorial government is when the government starts calling on citizen gun activists to enforce its rules, co-opting them and earning their loyalty. That, not reductions on fire arm sales, has been a step that has accompanied the rise of totalitarianism. The day that they deputize the militias is the day to start getting scared. Until then, it’s time to acknowledge the absurd cost of our unique level of gun access and do something to change it.
(12/05/12 4:21pm)
Traveling in Australia and New Zealand, you quickly realize that people here are incredibly interested, informed and invested in the outcome of the American presidential election. The result matters to them on several levels. Mostly, of course, it’s symbolic; there was little daylight between the foreign policy platforms of President Barack Obama and the Republican nominee. But, fair or not, they tend to associate the Republican Party with the go-it-alone, “with-us-or-against-us” bluster of Bush and Reagan. These are not times that they fondly remember.
I found out the result of the election from the FM radio on a boat floating in a cove off the coast of Australia (rough life, I know). What struck me first was that the Australian news station reported the result at the top of their broadcast every hour. But mostly I was surprised by the way that they covered it: they didn’t focus on the horse race. They didn’t rattle off poll numbers or Electoral College scores.
But they did talk about Obama’s reelection in terms of issues mostly absent from the campaign trail. They talked about how America would now keep its health care law. They talked about their hope that the President would address issues of global warming — a topic that his opponent raised only as a punch line. They talked about how the government of the United States could expand policies to end discrimination against people on the basis of their sexual orientation, and how Obama’s support for gay marriage had not hurt his electoral chances as it might have just a few years ago. They said — invoking a term usually reserved as an epithet in our own country — that America became a little more liberal that night.
A few days earlier, we had a cab driver who had immigrated to Australia from India 15 years previously. As soon as he found out that we were from the United States, he spent the rest of the drive to the airport singing its praises — literally, by the end, playing us a song he’d written that mentioned everything from the moon landing to the super bowl over a techno beat. The cynic might dismiss it as an attempt to earn a tip, but there are no tips in Australia. Instead, they have a minimum wage of 17 dollars per hour.
This cab driver raised a good point about the way the world sees Barack Hussein Obama. In Australia, the prime minister is white, as is the opposition leader. Colonization is not a distant memory; in both Australia and New Zealand, the Queen of England is still the nominal head of state. Asian immigration is viewed with fear, and bringing up the indigenous population is the easiest way to quiet a room. This is not the exception but the rule throughout much of the Western world.
To people like that cab driver, the fact that America would buck this trend, overcome hundreds of years of discrimination and put a person of color at the top of our chain of command — as the most visible man in the world and the face of the American power — is a symbol more potent than any statement or any policy. Obviously, the election of a single political figure does not mean that America has resolved its long history of racial oppression. But now, at least, that cab driver’s son can grow up in a time when he can dream of becoming a world leader.
That is why the United States of America is still the greatest nation on Earth: we lead, and others follow. We set the example for much of the rest of the world. They listen to our music, they watch our movies, they follow our television shows and they eat in our restaurants. When another nation threatens — China, trying to enforce its will on the South China Sea; Russia, repressing democracy in Central Asia; Iran, threatening to destabilize the Middle East with a nuclear arms race — much of the world genuinely looks to us for leadership and protection. When we err, they are embarrassed for us not because they resent us, but because they know we can do better.
Every election year, we have the chance for a revolution. We can take to the streets, fill out our ballots and throw out our leaders. This is not unique to America, nor is our election process the best, fairest or most competitive. But, travelling as a citizen of the United States, you see just how much it matters on every inhabited inch of our planet. This November, we did something truly revolutionary: we looked at four terrible years and decided that our president deserved more time to fix things. Without firing a shot, we showed the world that we share their challenges, their hopes and their fears. We became a little more liberal.
(10/31/12 7:15pm)
President of the United States Barack Obama’s first term has not been the uninterrupted tale of disappointment and broken promises that the media, his opponents and even pessimistic liberals might have you believe. Obama promised to reform health care and subsequently passed a bill that will allow the United States to finally join the club of developed nations with universal health insurance. He said he would increase the regulation of the financial sector so that we would not repeat the disaster of 2008, and signed such a bill in his second year. He pledged to cut taxes for the middle class; the stimulus and debt ceiling compromise both included tax cuts that gave struggling families a much-needed reprieve. His plan to increase standards-based educational assessment earned opposition in the primary, but his “Race to the Top” initiative set off an unprecedented wave of school reform. He vowed to end the war in Iraq — our troops are home.
Obama repealed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” allowing gay men and women to serve their country openly, and refused to defend the shameful and unconstitutional “Defense of Marriage Act.” His administration passed laws that made it easier for women to sue for equal pay and for students to receive college loans. He dramatically increased fuel economy standards for automobiles and the regulations on coal pollution. Oil imports are at their lowest level in decades. The General Motors assembly lines that seemed at risk of forever falling silent four years ago now churn faster than ever. Osama bin Laden lies on the bottom of the Arabian Sea.
In America, we view the President as wielding near-dictatorial levels of power. We credit him for the good things that happen during his time in office — whether or not he had anything to do with them — and we blame him when things over which he has little control go wrong. This President, time and time again, has taken bold risks that, had they backfired, would have combined him to the place in history occupied by the likes of Carter and Hoover. Let us not forget that Obama never had an honest partner in the Congressional Republicans who have held dozens of votes on repealing Obamacare but few on fixing the economy or investing in our future. This is neither an accident nor an oversight. Their only agenda is to defeat this president. If Barack Hussein Obama can win a second term despite their rancor, their disrespect and their selfish obstructionism, they will have failed.
There is nothing moderate about this Republican Party or their nominee. Most of their plans are still secret — hidden from even their supporters. But based on what they’ve put forward in the debates, several things are clear. They will explode the deficit in order to cut taxes for the mega-rich so that people like Mitt Romney pay even less than the 14 percent of his income that he paid last year. They will appoint justices who will use any opportunity to repeal Roe v. Wade, so that women who must deal with the most personal of choices, and the doctors who help them, risk prison. They will support coal over its logical alternatives and continue to treat global warming as a punch line. In short, their vision of the American dream is a twisted combination of Ayn Rand and The Handmaid’s Tale. Mitt Romney often attacks Obama over his so-called “apology tour” through the Middle East after his election. It takes a stronger and wiser man to admit mistakes than it does to sit on the sidelines and deliver snarky attacks. Obama has a record to run on, and Romney-Ryan is a ticket to run from.
Vote for Obama, whether or not you live in a swing state. His entire agenda is at stake; this election is too important to sit out.
Vote for Obama, even if the excitement of 2008 has faded. The future of our nation is at stake; this election is too important to spend pouting.
Vote for Obama, not some third-party dog-and-pony-show focused on a single issue. I’m looking at you, pot smokers who think that makes you a libertarian. I’m looking at you, environmentalists who think there is no difference between the major parties on our stewardship of the planet. Your future is at stake; this election is too important to throw away your vote.
And vote for some Democratic congressmen, too.
(10/10/12 10:54pm)
Republican politicians and talking heads including W. Mitt Romney have made a big deal lately of the Obama Administration’s supposed “war on coal.” It’s a phrase that no doubt tests well with blue-collar focus groups in the states needed to win the election, and the evidence seems to match the attack line: across the United States, the fires of coal plants have begun to flicker out. Coal prices have increased substantially over the last several years. The construction of new coal-fired power plants has all but ceased. Part of this is due to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has put into place a series of regulations that limit the emissions of mercury, acids and small particles that come from coal plants and cause hundreds of thousands of cases of asthma in the United States every year. But that’s not the whole story. The true culprit of the war on coal is natural gas. Natural gas extraction through high-volume, horizontal hydraulic fracturing — fracking — has revolutionized the American energy industry, lowering both prices and carbon emissions. With the proper safeguards, natural gas extraction can help revitalize stagnant rural communities throughout the nation.
In 2008, Penn State geologist Terry Engelder fired the starting pistol for the natural gas rush when he announced that the Marcellus Shale, a rock formation that stretches from Tennessee to within spitting distance of my house in Western New York, contained as much as 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas — more than is contained anywhere else, with the exception of the giant gas field below the waters between Iran and Qatar. At the time, the most recent public estimate was two trillion feet. Engelder said that the discovery was a Christmas present for America; it turns out that it was much, much more. In the first quarter of 2012, carbon emissions in the United States fell to their lowest level since 1983. As natural gas power plants replace those burning coal, these emissions could continue to fall. Natural gas releases half as much carbon into the atmosphere as coal — not to mention fewer carcinogens — and 30 percent less than oil.
Fracking, obviously, has its flaws. In Pennsylvania, the stories of manipulative leases, overbearing corporations and water contamination have come from a failure of government to step up and play referee. These problems can be addressed by strict testing requirements, proper waste disposal, public disclosure of lease terms and land use restrictions. Sadly, heavy lobbying efforts including more than $300,000 in campaign contributions to Republican Governor of Pennsylvania Tom Corbett have delayed the implementation of a severance tax on natural gas extraction that would help ensure that all Pennsylvanians benefit from the windfall beneath their feet and that the state has the money to adequately police the industry. It’s naïve to assume that, in this or any industry, the companies will behave without oversight.
No energy source exists in a vacuum, and none is free of tradeoffs. Coal extraction often requires the removal of entire mountaintops. Nuclear waste remains radioactive for tens of thousands of years. Hydroelectric blocks the course of rivers — and there aren’t many viable sites left. Solar panels need toxic chemicals like gallium arsenide; batteries use even harsher chemicals. While solar panels and wind power hold significant promise for the future, the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. These technologies need to advance more before they’re cost competitive and capable of meeting the energy needs of the United States. In the meantime, we have more than a century’s supply of extremely cheap, relatively clean natural gas.
Natural gas has a huge advantage besides cost competitiveness and abundance. When we buy fossil fuels, or any product, it represents a transfer of wealth from customer to producer. Europe has no choice but to throw euros at Russia to keep the gas flowing. Japan sends yen to Qatar just to keep the lights on. But in the United States today, urban New Yorkers are transferring wealth to rural Pennsylvanians. San Diegans are sending money to North Dakota. The lights stay on cheaply in our cities, and communities are climbing up from their knees in the countryside. Natural gas doesn’t just reduce our impact on the climate, it strengthens our economy, lowers our electric bills and keeps the flow of money within our own borders. In the years since the recession, the economy has grown by 2.7 million jobs. One million of those were in the energy industry. Fracking has its flaws, but barring a miraculous abandonment of fossil fuels, natural gas is a step in the right direction.
(09/26/12 11:43pm)
In November 2004, a 26 year-old Dutch-Moroccan man named Mohammed Bouyeri ambushed filmmaker Theo Van Gogh as he rode his bike to work. Bouyeri shot the filmmaker eight times with a handgun and attempted to decapitate him with a large knife. Death was the sentence Van Gogh earned for directing a movie that criticized Islam’s treatment of women.
In both 2005 and 2007, European journalists that published cartoons featuring likenesses of Mohammed were met with death threats. In April 2010, Comedy Central censored images of Mohammed, bleeped out his name and — ironically — cut a final speech about standing up to intimidation and fear from an episode of South Park, in part because of death threats against the show’s writers.
A few weeks ago, a poorly made YouTube trailer for a movie called “The Innocence of Muslims” that distastefully portrays the prophet as a bloodthirsty pedophile hit the Internet. Again, the mobs have spoken. Again, there are bodies in the street as the civilizing principles of decency and diplomatic immunity are gleefully discarded. In Libya, the United States ambassador was killed along with three American soldiers. In Egypt, Yemen and Tunisia, crowds attacked American embassies. In Sudan, a giant mob — apparently lacking either an American target or a map — stormed the German embassy. Nineteen people died in riots in Pakistan when rioters stoned a KFC restaurant and torched a church. Two American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan. Even here in Australia, a mob in downtown Sydney attacked police officers with thrown rocks and clenched fists, chanting “Obama, Obama, we love Osama,” in a chorus of support for the tragic murder of 3,000 innocent American men, women and children just over 11 years ago. In the same protest, a five year-old girl held a poster that called for the beheading of those who would offend the prophet. All over a YouTube clip.
Freedom includes the freedom to offend. The trailer was absurd, inaccurate and embarrassing — the disgusting product of an immature mind. But we cannot bow to a world where bad satire leads to the death of diplomats. When we censor a picture — or a word — the radicals exert control over our way of life.
There are those who claim that radical Islam has been so successful because of oppressive governments and poor economic opportunities. This merely shifts the blame, suggesting democracy as a cure-all for the world’s problems. But look at what happened with the Palestinian Territories. Look at Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. The oppressive regimes are gone, but radical Islam remains stronger than ever. Political oppression is no more the culprit today than it was during the Crusades, the Inquisition or the Salem Witch Trials.
Radical Islam is a threat to liberty because it can tolerate no such thing. It is a strain of religion that says that women are inferior — and ensures that they remain so by rendering them invisible and indistinguishable. It says that drawing or criticizing its prophet is a sin and kills those who would dare attempt such a thing. It considers itself infallible and punishes by death those who would leave the faith for any reason. It threatens, bullies, intimidates and explodes. There is little else comparable in the modern world. Radicals of any religion are a dangerous breed, but if a Saudi citizen mocked Jesus on the Internet, Christians wouldn’t storm the walls of Saudi Arabia’s Washington embassy and murder their diplomats. When the creators of South Park brought their mockery of the Mormon faith to Broadway, nobody lost his head.
Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti responded to the riots by calling for their end even as he condemned the video and called upon the United States government to criminalize such content. That’s not how freedom works. It’s not how our nation works — and it’s not how the world should work. As American citizens, our tax dollars pay for a military unparalleled in its reach and its might. That military exists not to conquer nations, but to defend those freedoms that we hold most dear. It’s easy to blame the filmmaker, to ask why he would choose to put out such a thing if he was aware of the consequences. Yet even when the content is incorrect and atrocious, that choice — to mock, to criticize and to produce terrible videos — is one that we must protect with every tool in the arsenal of American power. If we fail to do so, we will sink into the sorry company of nations too afraid to stand up to the chorus of those who bully our men, enslave our women and erase our liberty.