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(03/16/16 8:38pm)
The fourth annual International and Interdisciplinary Conference, titled “Food Insecurity in a Globalized World: The Politics and Culture of Food Systems” was hosted at the College’s Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs on March 10-12. The conference explored the politics, economics and history of food insecurity and included presentations by Middlebury professors and guest lecturers from around the world. According to Tamar Mayer, the Robert R. Churchill Professor of Geosciences who directs both the Rohatyn Center and the International and Global Studies Program, the conference organizing committee selected the 17 papers presented out of 54 submissions.
The topic of global food insecurity was chosen in 2013 when Mayer and the Rohatyn Center Steering Committee planned conference topics until 2020.
“Food insecurity is probably one of the most important social problems of our time,” Mayer said. “Students need to understand that food insecurity is constructed. It’s not natural. A lot of it is political – it’s the economic systems that created it, it’s the neoliberal policies that created it. And our students are either going to challenge those, or going to participate in them, or both.”
Lee Schlenker ’16 attended the conference and enjoyed the variety of perspectives. “It was nice to have professors who came to Middlebury who had very different purposes or missions with their research,” Schlenker said. “Even if I don’t really agree with all of the things that were said I think it’s nice to have that interdisciplinary perspective.”
Jessie Mazer, a graduate student at the University of Vermont, gave a presentation on local issues of food insecurity. Her talk focused on how undocumented migrant dairy farmworkers in Vermont struggle to feed their families. Mazer highlighted the difficulties Mexican farmworkers face in Vermont, which she identified as the second whitest state in the nation. Mazer posited that government surveys do not capture the full extent of food insecurity among migrants because people often say they can afford certain foods that they cannot access.
“[The migrant workers are] saying that ‘Yes, we have enough money to access food but we can’t go to the grocery store because we don’t have transportation and when we go to the grocery store we’re at risk for deportation,’” Mazer said.
On Saturday the conference turned to discussing solutions to food insecurity. The College’s William R. Kenan Professor of Food Studies Molly Anderson argued in her presentation that changes to the food system must start with grassroots movements to inspire the public interest needed to push reform onto the political agenda.
“As this permeates through society—this awareness of impacts and the influence of these legislators—then cultural values and beliefs start changing,” Anderson said.
David Cleveland, an environmental studies professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, presented his work looking at the intersection between food justice and climate justice. His research focused on the medical and environmental benefits of healthier diets. The alternative diets had less red and processed meats and less processed grain than the average American diet. They included more vegetables, beans and fruits. By adopting healthier diets Cleveland suggested Americans could save billions on healthcare costs and reduce green house emissions related to food production.
The conference ended with Angélica Segura ’16 and Francesca Conde ’17 providing a summary in which they identified six overarching themes. The first theme was individual choice versus broader food safety.
“A lot of the topics highlighted the problematic trade off that has often occurred when the rights of the citizens are sacrificed in order to eradicate food insecurity,” Segura said.
Next, they discussed the way food insecurity relates to class and gender. The third topic explored how food insecurity is the product of systematic disinvestment in low-income communities and lack of institutional state support. The fourth theme they outlined was the need to identify dominant actors in the food discussion. “In the past few years we have witnessed a seismic shift in farming driven by new technologies and the nature of such technologies means that not all of us have the scientific understanding that is often necessary to participate in the conversation,” Segura said.
The fifth theme looked at food as cultural capital by noting the importance of social networks in food insecure communities. Lastly, the pair explored the tensions between producers and consumers and between industry efficiency and the nutritional value of food.
“Over the past few days ideas have been put forward that have shattered a traditional understanding of food insecurity and have exposed it for what it really is,” Segura said. “[It is] a phenomenological experience, a historical product and often the result of trade policies and power interest.”
For a full list of presenters, presentation topics and to see videos of the panels visit the Rohatyn Center website.
(03/10/16 4:27am)
In 2007, Middlebury College’s Commencement speaker was former President Bill Clinton. If you weren’t here then, it is probably still possible for you to imagine the attention that was garnered by his presence on campus. We dealt with increased security, the promise of an audience that extended well beyond family and well-wishers, and how to keep the day focused on our graduates. It was busy, bordering on chaotic. Almost nine years later, though, I don’t actually remember the logistics or the specific headaches. I remember a single anecdote distilled into a single phrase: “I see you.” Here’s the relevant excerpt from President Clinton’s speech:
(03/09/16 10:59pm)
By Renee Chang
As spring semester gets underway, the College is abuzz with activity. From classes to sporting events, there is hardly room to deny that life at the College is anything but uneventful. But besides classes and extracurricular activities, there is something else that lingers on students’ minds this season: the summer internship.
In addition to navigating the process of applying for suitable internships, students may face the challenging task of securing funding for opportunities that do not provide compensation. While the financial burden of an unpaid internship may deter students from taking on an otherwise exceptional opportunity, the Center for Careers and Internships (CCI) hopes to remedy this situation. Last year, the CCI rolled out a new funding program wherein rising juniors and seniors could apply for a fixed grant of $2,500 that would go towards funding an unpaid opportunity.
Cheryl Whitney Lower, Associate Director of Internships and Early Engagement at the CCI said, historically, students were provided with “significantly less” funding than the current $2,500 grant.
“The grants cover more expenses and allow students decision-making power over how they want to spend their summer and gain experience or explore an interest,” Lower said. “This amount will typically cover a significant portion of a more expensive experience in another country or in a city away from home, for example. Others may choose to do an internship with lower expenses and use some of the money to offset lost summer wages.”
And for Joel Wilner ’18 and Andrew Hollyday ’18.5, the grant did just that. Wilner and Hollyday both received funding to participate in the Juneau Icefield Research Program (JIRP), a program that recruits a select group of undergraduate and graduate students to participate in hands-on research in glaciology, or the study of glaciers.
Wilner, who hopes to pursue a PhD in glaciology, says that his time in Juneau, Alaska, was the perfect complement to his interest in glaciers.
“I have always been fascinated by the Earth’s cold regions, from both scientific and cultural standpoints,” Wilner said. “Even when I was very young, my favorite geographical areas to study were places like Greenland and Antarctica. I became interested in studying glaciology in an academic capacity after climbing the glaciers of Mount Rainier before coming to Middlebury. ”
In Alaska, Wilner’s scientific and cultural interest in glaciers naturally converged. On top of “traversing the entire width of the Alaskan panhandle” from Juneau to Atlin, British Columbia — all on a single pair of cross-country skis! — Wilner also got the opportunity to assist in first-hand scientific research.
“I worked with Dr. Seth Campbell, a research geophysicist from the University of Maine and the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory,” Wilner said. “We used ground-penetrating radar to investigate how surface meltwater percolates from the surface of glaciers to form layers, which has important implications for improving our models regarding how glaciers will respond to climate change.”
Nonetheless, the value of Wilner’s time in Alaska went beyond simply gaining work experience.
“The most memorable part of my experience at JIRP was staying at Camp 8, which is essentially a one-room metal shed near the summit of Mount Moore, a 7,000-ft-high jagged mountain near the US-Canada border,” Wilner said. “Two other students and I took a three-day shift at Camp 8 with the purpose of relaying radio messages between other camps on the Juneau Icefield that couldn’t communicate with each other directly by radio. Because this was our only real duty for those three days, we had a lot of free time. We spent this time looking out over a vast expanse of the Taku Glacier watching the sunset from our sleeping bags on the roof of the shed. The solitude was simply enchanting and life-changing, despite the abundant mold and mouse droppings in the shed where we lived!”
For Camille Kim ’16, the $2,500 grant went primarily towards paying for housing and provided a jumping off point for exploring her interest in software development. As a summer intern at the Wyss Institute for the Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, Kim was given the opportunity to develop her own software.
“The main project I was working on involved writing software to operate a device that researchers would use to automate the process of growing bacterial cultures, as well as a web application and user interface that would allow users to control and monitor their experiments remotely.”
Kim said the most satisfying moment of her internship was when the code she authored was allowed to run on its own.
“I still remember the first time we actually hooked up all the different hardware components and just let our code do its thing — it was a really satisfying moment to see what we’d been working on all summer start moving and coming to life,” she said. “It was a huge feeling of accomplishment to see that happen right in front of me.”
Similarly, Divesh Rizal ’17 says that teaching science and mathematics to eighth and tenth grades at the Udayapur Secondary English School in his native Nepal would not have been possible had it not been for the funding he received from the CCI.
Surrounded by “highly energetic, mischievous and curious” students, Rizal views teaching as an “art” that requires a heightened sense of awareness.
“Teaching is an art that requires an acute understanding of people around us,” he said. “It requires a state of being when you can truly speak to somebody, ensure your words are being heard. An important aspect of teaching is learning about the art of teaching itself, about your audience, about their opinions.”
Although he was only able to spend a month at Udayapur, Rizal found it difficult to distill his experience into a single memorable experience.
“Almost everything was memorable,” Rizal said. “But perhaps the most would be the impromptu singing competition we had in our class one day. It was the day when it rained heavy outside. Since the classrooms do not have glass windows, the water disrupted the class and the students on the opposite side made more room for the students by the window. Since we had a rather dense part in the room, we abandoned our books and took on a suggestion from one of the students. The ‘competition’ was between girls and boys in the class. The girls did a rather great job and they won the competition without a sweat.”
In addition to the $2,500 grants for rising juniors and seniors, the CCI also offers $1,000 “Explore Grants,” which are targeted towards first-year students and first-year Febs who have not yet committed to a particular career path and simply wish to “explore” different fields.
Students who posses a strong passion for dance can also take advantage of the CCI’s “Dance Festival Grant,” which Lower said were designed keeping in mind that “for many dance majors, participation in these festivals is important to their development as dancers and artists.”
To learn more about the different kinds of grants offered by the CCI and how to apply, visit go/funding.
(03/02/16 11:59pm)
Were the Paris climate talks of 2015 a success or a failure, and where do we go from there? These were the central questions in a talk entitled “Adequacy and Equity under Neoliberal Climate Governance: Assessing the Paris Moment” on Thursday, Feb 25. Co-sponsored by the Geography Department and the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs as part of the Howard E. Woodin ES Colloquium Series, the presentation featured Timmons Roberts, Ittleson Professor of Environmental Studies and Professor of Sociology at Brown University.
Standing before a packed room of ES majors, faculty members and curious students looking to expand their knowledge on a deeply relevant issue, Roberts opened his speech with a few stark statistics. Due to the nature of global climate governance, people in the least developed countries – including Myanmar, Nepal and Bangladesh – are five times more likely than anyone else to die from natural disasters. Comprising only 11 percent of the total population, the most disadvantaged civilians of the world live in areas that experience 21 percent of climate-related disasters and witness 51 percent of climate-related deaths.
These disproportionate numbers stem from what researchers have dubbed “the climate paradox,” in which the least responsible parties – those that have contributed least to carbon dioxide emissions – are the most vulnerable to climate change. Lacking the proper infrastructure to respond to environmental damage caused by global warming, these lesser developed countries pay dearly for the climate policies instated by and for their wealthier, more powerful neighbors.
So did the United Nations Climate Change Conference of 2015 – also known as the 21st Conference of the Parties, COP 21 or the Paris climate talks – address this inequity? Roberts, who brings the students in his climate and development lab to the event each year, unpacked the details of last December’s Paris agreement, a plan to reduce climate change as negotiated by the 195 participating countries, and its long-term implications for the world. Because countries had not settled on many concrete measures before the 2015 conference, nearly every single issue – from peaking emissions to net reductions – was on the table.
A major goal outlined in the 12-page document is to “hold the increase in global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.” Roberts cast a wary eye on this clause, however, explaining that researchers do not know if the 1.5°C limit is even enough to maintain a safe long-term environment. Besides, with human activity already elevating the global temperature by 1°C, the 1.5°C threshold may turn out to be more difficult to uphold than researchers imagine.
Roberts provided a historical context for the Paris talks by explaining the evolution of global policies across the past few decades. In 1972, representatives convened in Stockholm to piece together a pre-cautionary approach to climate change. At the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, the cost of conservation entered the international dialogue. Five years later, the Kyoto Protocol institutionalized liberal environmentalism, and certain wealthy countries became subject to binding limits on emissions.
More recently, the Copenhagen conference in 2009 marked a significant turning point in global climate governance, as officials ushered in a new process of pledge and review entitled the “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” (INDC). The United States and China, the two largest emitters, made initial announcements of their national pledges in 2013, creating a domino effect throughout the international community. In total, 189 national pledges were submitted, all of which reflected a general willingness to make meaningful and pragmatic changes to their climate policies. With these INDCs in effect, the global average temperature went down slightly, from 3.6°C to 2.7°C.
“It wasn’t enough, but it was something,” Roberts said, before quoting the following line from George Monbiot in The Guardian: “By comparison to what it could’ve been, it was a success. By comparison to what it should’ve been, it was a disaster.”
According to Roberts, the shift from top-down command to a completely flexible and voluntary approach gave birth to a system of “shared irresponsibility.” Plagued by a lack of accountability, the policy enacted in Copenhagen has been criticized as inequitable and undemocratic.
“The pledges are not binding,” Roberts stated. “Logically, wouldn’t a better way of solving this problem have been figuring out a budget and dividing it up by a fair burden-sharing formula? If I were king of the world, that’s what I would do. That’s the rational management approach. We tried that for 15 years, but countries simply didn’t sign up [at the Kyoto Protocol].”
The Paris talks strived to incorporate all present parties at the conference in a long-term plan for environmental conservation. However, the lack of binding commitments and enforcement measures make some experts doubt the efficacy of the agreement. Countries are expected to sign the document and implement it in their own legal systems between April 22, 2016 (Earth Day) and April 21, 2017, but there is no established consequenc if they fail to do so. Furthermore, each nation will determine their own goals of emission reduction. The Paris agreement operates on an unofficial “name and shame” system, also known as the mantra of “name and encourage.” The proposed measures will not go into effect until the 55 parties who produce over 55 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas have signed.
Roberts pointed out that the flexibility granted to participating countries is entirely strategic.
“Countries worried about their sovereignty don’t want to be told what to do, but they may go beyond what they are asked to do,” he explained.
For instance, knowing that the appearance of coercion might lead to a political blockade, President Obama purposefully used the word “should” instead of “shall” throughout the U.S. treaty. 66 senators must agree to the proposed measures, which may be difficult given the nature of the people occupying those seats.
Based on the new book Power in a Warming World, which Roberts co-authored alongside David Siplet, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and Mizan Khan, Professor of Environmental Science and Management at North South University in Bangladesh, the speech emphasized the importance of a neo-liberal climate governance that exemplifies both efficacy and equity. Deemed by Roberts as the “holy grail of climate justice,” this approach is partially lacking from the Paris agreement.
Because the voluntary aspect of the Paris agreement is a far cry from the hard-hitting conservation policies that the world so desperately needs, Roberts urged the audience to spring to action. Now is an opportunity for citizens to hold their governments accountable, particularly as the opportunities to enact radical change become fewer and farther between.
“The kinds of solutions to our climate problems that we can put forward now in 2016 are really limited. We used to be able to bring out state regulations or strong international agreements,” Roberts stated, referencing the binding 1987 protocol to address the hole in the ozone, as well as the extra decade once allotted to developing countries like China and India to reduce their carbon emissions.
In light of the recent presidential primaries, perhaps it was fitting that the first question posed after the presentation concerned Donald Trump. The controversial Republican candidate has expressed the intention to back out of the Paris agreement should he assume office.
“I feel like I have to ask – what effect would Trump have on U.S. agreements with other countries?” a student asked.
“It’s hard to imagine Trump being very multilateral,” Roberts responded, his understatement prompting laughter from the crowd. “This problem needs a global solution, and the U.S. acting unilaterally is not a good approach. A lot is on the line.”
The moral of the story? Elections matter – and the full implications of the Paris talks will continue to come to light as countries choose whether or not to opt into these national pledges.
(01/28/16 12:41am)
The College installed a charging station for electric vehicles (EVs) in the parking lot behind Proctor Dining Hall this Nov. The station is a level two charging station that can service two cars at once and charge an EV battery in three to six hours, depending on the EV model and other factors, such as temperature.
Director of Sustainability Integration Jack Byrne helped lead the initiative and said that the increased prevalence and practicality of electric cars made the charging station an important addition.
“We have at least five employees with all electric vehicles and it makes it much more convenient for them to charge their cars while at work when needed,” Byrne said. “It may help other employees in deciding if their next vehicles will be electric knowing that there is a place for them to charge it at work. It also will be used by alumni, parents and students who have EVs. We have had several requests from people in those groups in the past as well.”
The charging station’s installation was a yearlong effort that began in 2014. It was funded by the Environmental Council, which gives grants to student projects. In previous years they have funded the wind turbine at the recycling center, the solar decathlon houses, Earth Day events, the fermenter’s guild, and the organic farm’s initiative to raise chickens.
“The Environmental Council has a grant program that runs the entire academic year,” Byrne said. “People can propose any project that in the broadest sense moves the sustainability agenda forward at The College. They can propose anytime for up to $1,500. For bigger projects you can propose for up to $5,000. We have a deadline Jan. 31 and another Feb. 29. We are just receiving our first batch of them now. We seem to have fewer proposals this year than in previous years. So it’s a good year to propose because the odds are in your favor.”
Ali Cook ’16, who worked on the Environmental Council for two years, came up with the idea for the EV charging station and submitted the proposal to the grant committee.
“There was environmental and compact car parking behind Hillcrest, but we didn’t have a EV charging station,” Cook said. “ I thought this was strange because we try to promote a sustainable lifestyle for faculty and students. One day I overheard a parent on a guided tour exclaim ‘Middlebury doesn’t even have electric car parking!’ It was sort of embarrassing.”
Cook researched the logistics of installing an EV charging station and surveyed faculty and staff on whether they drove an EV, how long they commute and if having a charging station at the College would make a difference to them. The response was overwhelmingly positive. After the grant was approved, the Environmental Council had to find a space on campus, negotiate with Green Mountain Power, which has a EV charging station program, and get approval from the Space Committee.
Although the single EV charging station can only service two cars at once, it is an important first step in expanding the amount of EVs at the College.
“It’s a pilot project, and it’s symbolic, but the idea is that in the future Middlebury could have an all electric fleet, and public safety could drive electric cars,” Cook said.
Two major problems: EVs have battled with are range and charging time. But recent electric car models have started to change this: the Nissan Leaf, to be released in 2016, will be able to travel 107 miles on a single charge and the Tesla Model S can travel 208 miles. The number of electric charging stations across the country is also increasing. Vermont, for instance, has over 115 EV charging stations. One company, Better Place, is creating electric car charging stations that can switch out an EV battery autonomously on a conveyor belt and replace it with a new, fully charged battery in five minutes. The company has launched pilot programs in Israel and Denmark.
Electric cars will be an important part of our future, and as climate change becomes more urgent and oil dwindles, it will become increasingly necessary to make the transition from gas-powered cars. The EV charging station is a symbolic start, and it’s hopefully a sign of more EVs and charging stations to come.
(01/27/16 5:10pm)
The trustees who serve on the College Board of Overseers discussed diversity and inclusivity last week during one of three of the Board of Trustees’ annual conferences. The Board’s governance system is divided into three Boards of Overseers: one for the College, one for the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and one for the Schools, including the School of the Environment, Bread Loaf School of English and the Language Schools.
“This issue is absolutely a priority for the Trustees, and they are very supportive of the work that has been happening on campus, while also understanding that there is much work yet to be done,” said Dean of Faculty and Vice President for Academic Affairs Andi Lloyd.
She continued, “Diversity and inclusion has been a focus for the College Board of Overseers since last year. It emerged as a priority during conversations last year about innovation and change in higher education — diversity and inclusion emerged, in those discussions, as a priority that was seen as central to the College’s mission. This has, therefore, been an ongoing conversation for the Trustees. They were, however, eager to hear about what has been happening at Middlebury during the fall, so we did provide them with an update on what has happened here, and we talked about events at Middlebury in the context of the broader higher education landscape.”
The Board met over the course of the weekend, inviting Leslie Harris, a professor at Emory University who has done research into campus climate, to speak to the trustees. Lloyd, along with Chief Diversity Officer Miguel Fernandez and Dean of the College and Vice President for Student Affairs Katy Smith Abbott, also briefed the trustees on campus events.
“Diversity and inclusion was the primary agenda topic,” Lloyd said. “We covered other pieces of business during our three-hour meeting on Friday afternoon, but this was the focal point for discussions.”
Multiple committees met and discussed new programs, strategic plans, master planning and international programs related to the matter. The standing committees and overseers reported the progress that had been made in their sectors to the other members of the board.
President of the Student Government Association (SGA) Ilana Gratch who serves as the Constituent Overseer to the College Board of Overseers, was also present.
“[The trustees] are 100 percent interested in student opinion and seem to genuinely care about the student experience at the College,” she said.
“We are very lucky at Middlebury,” Chair of the Board Marna Whittington said. “We have a very committed, very engaged Board that is really there wanting the best for Middlebury and they come to work. They work hard.”
(01/21/16 12:25am)
Distrust of scientific experts is widespread in the United States. It fuels the anti-vaccine, climate change denial and creationist movements, to name only a few of its most noticeable consequences. Why is there pervasive distrust, when is it justified and what can scientists do to combat it? The George Nye and Anne Walker Boardman Professor of Mental and Moral Science Heidi Grasswick explored these questions on Wednesday, Jan. 13 in a lecture titled “In Science We Trust! – Or Not? Developing a situated account of responsible trust in scientific experts.”
Grasswick began by exploring a number of cases of scientific distrust. A growing number of parents in the United States have stopped vaccinating their children after a now discredited report linked the MMR vaccine to autism, despite the reassurances of the medical and scientific communities. Close to 25 percent of Americans do not believe that global warming is real.
“Scientists are often surprised or dismayed when their work is met with distrust or rejection by members of the general public,” Grasswick said. “As far as they are concerned, they are engaged in the most robust form of knowledge generation available. They are the experts on their topics, and it seems to follow that non-experts should follow what they have to say. Furthermore, since sound policy making needs to based on sound science, it’s deeply worrisome that trust in science is not widespread.”
However, because the scientific community sometimes makes mistakes or acts irresponsibly, distrust can be warranted. For instance, during the Tuskegee syphilis experiment from 1932 to 1972, scientists studied the effects of untreated syphilis on hundreds of black men even after penicillin was discovered as a viable treatment. Thalidomide, a morning sickness drug, was given to tens of thousands of women during the 1950s, causing thousands of infants to be born with malformed limbs. Even the people most trusting of the scientific community often roll their eyes at trending diets and seemingly arbitrary nutrition suggestions.
“While widespread distrust in science is worrisome, what’s perhaps more worrisome is that epistemologically distrust in science can be understood to be well grounded,” Grasswick said. “Although scientists are rightly concerned about scientific distrust, they should be even more concerned that despite their best intentions, scientists are not always as trustworthy as they suppose. There may be times when people are too trusting. This is where my interest lies as an epistemologist.”
Grasswick then made a case for developing a better understanding of responsible trust and when and why the public should trust scientific experts. She explained that ideally, trust should match the trustworthiness of the provider, and that it is important to focus on what makes a provider trustworthy.
Some scientists and philosophers believe that the solution is the information deficient model, which claims that distrust will decrease when we increase scientific literacy, either by teaching people about specific scientific issues or about the scientific method. This way, the theory goes, people have enough knowledge to judge data and evidence and determine the trustworthiness of a source for themselves.
While Grasswick agreed that increasing scientific literacy is important, she noted that other forces are at play. Psychologists have long known about motivated reasoning, the idea that, given the same information, people with opposing ideologies will interpret data differently, searching for evidence that reaffirms their preexisting beliefs. Grasswick also pointed out that lack of knowledge does not necessarily cause distrust; rather, distrust can occur when the scientific community does not understand a group’s concerns.
Grasswick placed more importance on understanding the idea of a trustworthy testimony, and defined a few components of trustworthiness.
“Someone listening to a testimony will judge whether or not the expert is competent and sincere,” she said. “The sincerity requirement indicates a relationship between the speaker and the hearer, and an attitude toward the person with information. When the knowledge in question is significant to the hearer, the relationship must be more robust to support the depth and breadth of the person making themselves vulnerable.”
The idea of trustworthiness being interpersonal opens up the possibility that different populations could have varying levels of distrust based on their historical interactions with the scientific community. The experience of being marginalized or subordinated could contribute to the warranted distrust of a community. Therefore, it is the character of institutions, and not necessarily the quality of the knowledge they generate, that inspires trust from people.
Emphasizing that the purpose of her presentation was to raise important questions, Grasswick stressed that every issue differed from one another.
“It’s obvious to me that scientific literacy is not the simple solution, because trust in the information is not all that is required,” Grasswick said. “More attention needs to be paid to differences in situation, and whom we are trustworthy to. We need to think about the legacy of the injustices in the history of science. And we definitely need to make sure there are no more failures of trust, or keep their numbers down because they can do huge damage. It gives us one more reason why racism and sexism and other forms of prejudice need to be eliminated from the practice of science.”
(01/20/16 11:57pm)
On January 7, Governor of Vermont Peter Shumlin delivered his sixth and final State of the State address, in which he reflected on his successes in office — and the challenges that lie ahead for Vermont. Shumlin has elected not to run in the upcoming gubernatorial election, ending his five year stretch as governor.
In the hourlong address, Shumlin maintained a proud and defiant tone.
“We started at the trough of the Great Recession, unsure whether we’d be able to build back,” he said. “Soon after, Irene struck. We were down and we got knocked down again. But we stood back up.”
In the beginning of his speech, Shumlin outlined what he saw as the most important goals for the state: a dynamic economy, an improved education system, a renewable energy policy, a reformed criminal justice system, and affordable and effective health care statewide.
Of these issues, Shumlin first addressed the economy. “We added 17,600 new jobs in the last five years,” he began, “and have grown per capita incomes at or above the national rate every year I have been Governor. That has never happened in Vermont’s history.”
Shumlin also described an “agricultural renaissance” that has accounted for 4,400 new jobs in Vermont.
“In the past two years,” he said, “I’ve had the privilege of moving the Best Cheese in America award from one Vermont farm to another Vermont farm. Take that Wisconsin.”
Shumlin warned, however, that without effective education reform, this economic recovery could be hindered.
The biggest problem for most employers, claimed Shumlin, was their inability to find “trained and educated workers to help them grow. They know that our success in moving more low-income Vermont kids beyond high school will determine their success.”
Accordingly, Shumlin’s new budget will include a grant of 250 dollars to every college-bound Vermonter, and 500 dollars for every low-income college-bound student.
The governor also announced a new education program, called Step Up, which will fund a semester of free courses and support services for first generation and low income students.
Shumlin also warned that failing to address climate change could threaten to derail this economic recovery.
“The most tropical Christmas in memory,” he warned, “reminds us that climate change threatens the Vermont we love, from our ski season to our lakes. That’s why we are working so hard to move to green, clean renewable energy that is creating jobs, reducing power rates and putting money in Vermonters pockets while we do it.”
That Vermont has more clean energy jobs per capita than any other state, and solar power has replaced nuclear as the primary energy provider during peak energy hours, are two facts that Shumlin pointed to as indicators of progress.
Yet Shumlin pushed the envelope further, urging legislators to follow California’s lead and send him a divestiture bill.
“[Pollution] sickens our children, creates acid rain, dumps mercury on our forests and in our lakes and increases greenhouse gas emissions,” Shumlin said.
In what he described as “a page right out of big tobacco,” Shumlin slammed ExxonMobil for their complicity in climate change and their efforts to obscure the truth.
“Vermont should not wait to rid ourselves of ExxonMobil stock,” he said. “It has been clearly documented that since the 1980’s, ExxonMobil’s own scientists have long known about the dangers of global warming, and chose to conceal that from the public.”
Shumlin then addressed opiate addiction in Vermont, a topic to which he dedicated his entire 2014 State of the State address. At the time, he said that opiate addiction was a threat to Vermonters’ very way of life.
Shumlin launched a closing salvo at the FDA, which he described as the very root of the problem: “In 2010, we prescribed enough OxyContin to keep every adult in America high for an entire month; by 2012 we issued enough prescriptions to give every American adult their own personal bottle of pills ... The $11 billion-dollar a year opiate industry in America knows no shame.”
In response to this overprescription, Shumlin sought to set a limit at the number of pills patients could bring home after a procedure, to expand ‘take back programs’ to reobtain painkillers, and to prevent addicts from acquiring drugs outside state lines.
Next, Shumlin widened his attack to include not only the FDA and painkillers, but the illegality of marijuana. Citing the state’s relative success in regulating medical marijuana, Shumlin advocated to end the “era of prohibition that is currently failing us so miserably.”
Shumlin explained that he would insist that five things must occur if he were to sign a bill legalizing marijuana. They include finding a way to keep the drugs out of the hands of underage kids, a tax low enough to still wipe out illicit drug networks, using the revenue from legalization to expand treatment programs, increasing law-enforcement capabilities vis-a-vis impaired drivers, and a temporary ban on edibles.
Shumlin used his concluding remarks to address a moral issue facing the state: the acceptance of Syrian refugees.
“I believe Vermont must not abandon its long heritage of being a welcoming state to those who are escaping unimaginable horror to seek a better life,” he said.
“We are blessed to live in a state where so many reject fear and hatred and I pledge to continue to work together with President Obama, our refugee resettlement community, clergy, volunteers, and our mayors to make our state a beacon of hope and hospitality to Muslims, to our Syrian brothers and sisters, and to all who seek to build a better life right here in Vermont.”
He then thanked the Vermont people for the opportunity to serve as governor, and stepped back from the podium.
(12/10/15 4:08am)
So great is the sadness of our times. The recent shootings in Colorado Springs and San Bernadino brought to light a disturbing fact; in the United States this year there have been more days with mass shootings than not in the United States. From Beirut to Kenya to Lebanon to Paris to Syria, the global community is no less spared from violent attacks grounded in racial, cultural and religious discrimination, the need for resources and the desire for power.
Our own campus environment mirrors the turbulence of the world, confirming once and for all that we do not in fact live in a bubble. Just think — if we are so separated from the rest of the world, why does our campus possess the same forms of ingrained racism and widespread mental health concerns that permeate the “outside?” Whether we want to believe it or not, we are firmly grounded in this world and if we are to garner any hope for addressing these challenges, it’s high time we open our eyes and acknowledge the structures of injustice upon which they’re based.
This is essentially the mission of Middlebury’s divestment campaign. Put another way, we at DivestMidd seek nothing if not to raise awareness of the rampant yet often ignored human rights violation of unprecedented proportion: climate injustice.
You may ask – what is climate justice? In short, over the last 300 years, developed nations industrialized via fossil fuel extractive economies. By some disturbing fate of geography, the result of this industrialization – floods, drought, rising seas – have disproportionately affected poorer nations in the global south.
The same goes for the home-front. The consequences of the fossil fuel industry’s actions here in the U.S. – in terms of pollution and economic vulnerability spurred by the all-consuming boom-and-bust nature of extraction – are disproportionately placed on poorer Americans and people of color.
And while rising sea levels, drought and warming temperatures – not to mention the imperialistic practices of the fossil fuel industry itself – have moved into developing countries and stripped the world’s least resourced and most marginalized communities of their lands, livelihoods and cultures. The wealthier countries who caused these devastating effects have done next to nothing. The future of our planet and global peace are threatened as a result.
And nowhere is this more poignant than in Syria. Beginning in 2007, Syria entered a period of severe drought. This period of draught caused the price of food to double and forced millions of small farmers to abandon the countryside for Syrian cities already overcrowded with more than a million similarly desperate Iraqi refugees.
Syria’s representative to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization feared the situation was contributing to a “perfect storm” that could destabilize the country,and desperately pleaded for foreign aid. Yet, the United States and the rest of the global community remained largely unmoved by the Syrian’s appeal. And while the atrocities of Bashar al-Assad’s regime likely trump the destabilizing effects of the drought in terms of causing the war in Syria, it’s probably “not a coincidence,” as Secretary of State John Kerry recently noted, that the war was preceded by four years of failed rains, which scientists cite as a result of human-induced climate change.
Upon accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, Wangari Maathai, the first African woman and the first environmentalist to receive the prize, proclaimed that: “there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground.” At no time has that shift been more necessary than now. Our actions to promote global peace and environmental stewardship must match the gravity of the injustices at hand.
Thus, as we move closer to accomplishing the goal of carbon neutrality, let us celebrate this truly incredible accomplishment, which I may say was a project originally conceived of and designed by a group of student environmental activists. And then let us go forward with the awareness that the severity of our time demands that we move beyond a singular focus on our own “carbon footprint.” In this way we are called to a greater level of responsibility to the global community – the cause of climate justice.
Much of this work begins with awareness about what exactly constitutes climate injustice. In this pursuit, DivestMidd is working closely with President Patton and other members of the administration to bring a series of speakers to campus to educate the community on how we can better align our investments with our environmentally and globally minded values and take new actions to address structures of social and economic oppression that have paved the way for climate injustice.
Our hope is that these forums will spur a broad campus conversation on how we can better work to address the climate crisis by shifting the paradigm of our conception of environmentalism to ensure a just transition towards a sustainable future.
The movement we imagine calls for planetary awareness – the realization that we are all inextricably linked. We seek to address the root structural causes of climate injustice – rampant inequality, the pervasive notion that some lives matter more than others and the idea that the wealthiest can continue to deplete our world’s finite resources at a tragic pace and treat the atmosphere like a garbage dump. It is no coincidence that six of our world’s top 10 wealthiest corporations are involved in fossil fuel extraction.
Some may question whether this movement will be successful. Can we sustain a global climate justice movement, essentially a global movement for justice at its core? A part of me fears the task is too large for us to hold. Even feminist leader Gloria Steinem conceded that women’s liberation would necessarily have to wait until black power was won, though we still seem to be waiting for both to arrive today. From the Chartists and Owenites in Industrial England to the Communist revolution to Occupy just a few years back, movements that have sought such large scale structural changes often fail to achieve their goals.
But a larger part of me fears even more that we don’t have a choice not to try and build this movement, no matter how much we may fail in the process. The seas will rise, disease – spurred by warmer temperatures – will spread rapidly into already vulnerable regions, the rich will continue to profit from the extraction of the poor’s land and labor and the global south will find the consequences of climate change exacerbated and even more difficult to overcome through adaptation. The global north is also now feeling the effects of climate change to an increased degree. This is everyone’s fight. This is not charity. Undoubtedly, we must try to build a successful climate justice movement.
The gravity of our call becomes even more urgent upon the realization that the leaders charged with protecting human society and the planet are doing – this seems to be a trend – next to nothing. The UN climate conference in Paris will likely conclude – for the 21st time since 1992 – without a binding, and therefore effective, commitment from the world’s most powerful countries, who also happen to be the largest emitters. This is because world leaders know a binding treaty is impossible considering Senate Republicans in the U.S. – largely financed by the fossil fuel industry – have vowed to block a binding treaty and any monetary commitment to aid the most affected and least resourced countries in efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change.
As an institution of higher education and a self-proclaimed environmental leader, we are called to inhabit the fullest conception of these identities. Let us see the climate crisis for the human rights violation that it is, and match the urgency of this crisis through grassroots mobilization around education, political change, economic redistribution, restorative justice, socially responsible investment and yet unborn ideas that will enable us to transition towards a more just and sustainable world.
(12/10/15 2:29am)
This year, a US national security report labeled climate change as “an urgent and growing threat to our national security.” While climate change is a natural occurrence, there is much evidence to show that humans have greatly increased the rate of climate change. This increased rate is largely due to the increase of atmospheric greenhouse gases, released by human activity. Greenhouse gases essentially trap heat in the lower atmosphere, which contributes to a rise in temperatures. Climate change is a global issue, one that will affect every corner of the earth. The College has been one of many institutions of higher education to take a leading role in addressing climate change.
A Goal of Carbon Neutrality
On May 5, 2007, the Trustees adopted the Resolution on Achieving Carbon Neutrality by 2016. Carbon neutrality is defined as net zero carbon emissions, which requires that an institution “remove” as much carbon dioxide equivalent from the atmosphere as it emits.
In the resolution, the Trustees wrote that “a goal of carbon neutrality for Middlebury College by 2016, while challenging, is feasible through energy conservation and efficiency, renewable fuel sources, technology innovations, educational programming and learning, and offset purchases after all other feasible measures have been taken.” With 2016 right around the corner, it is time to consider where the College is on its quest for carbon neutrality, and what can still be done to further its environmental mission.
The Climate Action Plan (CAP), adopted in 2008, targeted heating and cooling, electricity, vehicles, college travel, and waste minimization as areas in which the College could reduce net emissions to progress towards carbon neutrality. At the time of the report, heating and cooling made the largest contribution to emissions at 89 percent, travel and vehicles came in a distant second at nine percent, and electricity and waste accounted for only one percent of emissions each. Since the CAP went into effect, the College has made strides to reach carbon neutrality and reduce emissions in each of these areas.
Waste
Emissions from decomposing waste comprised only one percent of the College’s total emissions in 2008. These emissions result from waste decomposing in landfills or being burned, both of which release greenhouse gases.
All of the College’s waste is already sorted in the recycling center, recycling as much as possible.
Recommendations to further reduce waste included integrating waste minimization and sustainable practices into the residential life system, and creating a service requirement for first-years in the dining halls or recycling center to develop an understanding of the waste generated by the College.
To address emissions from waste, the College has increased signage promoting sustainable practices on campus and conducted campaigns to raise student awareness about waste. However, the student body is still largely unaware of the College’s waste because the waste management is so far removed from students. Though educating the student body would be valuable, the low level of emissions from waste have, understandably, ensured that it is not a top priority.
Vehicle Emissions
Vehicle emissions and emissions from travel make up another nine percent of the College’s greenhouse gas emissions. Travel and vehicle usage are necessary for the function of the College, and so these emissions cannot be eliminated within the confines of modern technology. To reduce emissions from travel, the CAP advised increasing education about the impacts of travel, stressing videoconferencing as an alternative to traveling and upgrading the vehicle fleet to more energy efficient vehicles.
Since 2008, the College has seen an increase in greenhouse gas emissions from waste and air travel, but a decrease in emissions from mobile combustion (which include road vehicles and construction equipment).
In 2007, the College estimated that it generated 137 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MTCDE) due to solid waste. By 2014, that number had increased slightly to 153 MTCDE. Emissions from air travel increased more dramatically over this same period, from 1381 MTCDE in 2007 to 2346 MTCDE in 2014. Emissions from mobile combustion have decreased from 408 to 370 MTCDE.
In light of the increasing size of the student body, it is admirable that emissions from waste and mobile combustion have not risen significantly. Air travel is a much larger contributor to the College’s emissions, though, and yearly emissions have increased by almost 1000 MTCDE since 2007.
The College has certainly made progress since 2007, but student awareness about emissions is still lacking and emissions from air travel have increased dramatically.
Electricity
Emissions from purchased electricity accounted for only one percent of the College’s overall emissions in 2008. By 2014, this figure had risen to almost seven percent. This increase in percentage was largely due to a decrease in net emissions from heating and cooling. However, emissions from purchased electricity did rise from 676 MTCDE in 2007 to 864 tons in 2014.
Of the 22 million kilowatt hours of electricity the College uses each year, 20 percent is cogenerated on campus by turbines connected to the central heating plant. The remaining 80 percent of the College’s electricity is purchased from Green Mountain Power (GMP). This purchased electricity accounts for the greenhouse gas emissions from electricity, because the electricity the College purchases from GMP is not necessarily from carbon neutral sources.
Until 2013, 70 percent of Vermont’s power came from nuclear energy, which is carbon neutral. Much of the rest of the state’s electricity came from hydropower, another source of clean energy. The Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, which supplied most of Vermont’s nuclear power, shut down in late 2014. The Entergy Corporation, which operated the power plant, cited economic reasons for closing the plant. Consequently, GMP has had to purchase electricity from other sources.
GMP predicts that only 55 percent of its fuel mix in 2015 will be renewable, coming from nuclear and hydroelectric sources. The other 45 percent will consist mainly of “system” power, which comes from various sources, including fossil fuels. In calculating carbon emissions from purchased electricity, the College must consider the ultimate source of its electricity.
Since 2007, carbon emissions due to purchased electricity at the College have risen by 188 MTCDE, nearly 30 percent. Though only a small contribution to the College’s overall carbon emissions, the College should continue to investigate ways to reduce these emissions. To help reduce net emissions from electricity, the CAP recommended conservation as well as investigating alternative energy sources, such as wind and solar power.
In 2012 the College installed a small 143kW demonstration solar system near McCardell Bicentennial Hall, which consists of 34 solar trackers. In total, the system produces about 200,000 kilowatt-hours annually: one percent of the College’s total electricity consumption. The system generates enough electricity to power Forest Hall.
Solar power is inherently renewable, and thus an excellent option to offset the College’s energy usage. However, current solar technology is not conducive to power generation at the scale necessary for the College. The College should continue to pursue conservation and other efforts to reduce overall electricity usage.
Heating and Cooling
The largest contribution to the College’s carbon emissions comes from heating and cooling. In 2008, heating and cooling constituted 89 percent of the College’s emissions. Most of the emissions came from the combustion of no. 6 fuel oil to heat and cool buildings; the College was burning about 2,000,000 gallons per year, which released 23,877 MTCDE in 2006-07. Another 2,009 MTCDE came from the combustion of no. fuel oil, and 623 from propane.
The CAP clearly stressed the need to use carbon neutral fuel sources to heat and cool the campus if the College is to reach carbon neutrality by 2016.
The College’s $12 million biomass plant, opened in 2009, was a major step toward reducing net emissions from heating and cooling the College. The biomass plant burns wood, which the College considers a carbon neutral fuel source because the same amount of carbon dioxide is absorbed by the trees as is released in combustion. The plant utilizes a process known as biomass gasification to combust woodchips, which is much more efficient than traditional methods of burning wood. The heat generated from this combustion is used to make steam, which is piped throughout the campus to meet the College’s heating and cooling needs.
While the net emissions from the biomass plant are zero, this does not mean it has no emissions. The emissions from the plant are somewhat lower than those from burning fuel oil, and emissions resulting from chipping and transporting the wood to the biomass facility are not factored into the assessment of carbon neutrality.
Unfortunately, the biomass plant is not large enough to meet all of the College’s heating and cooling needs. In addition to biomass combustion, the College still burns 640,000 gallons of no.6 fuel oil each year. To address this issue, the College is undergoing a switch to burning bio-methane instead of fuel oil.
The use of bio-methane was made possible by the approval of the VT Gas Addison Rutland Natural Gas Project (Phase 1). Bio-methane is chemically equivalent to natural gas, and is produced by the digestion of organic waste.
A spur on the new natural gas pipeline from Colchester, VT to the Addison and Rutland area will allow the College to easily transport bio-methane to campus. The bio-methane will be produced offsite, at a local dairy farm. The use of bio-methane to phase out fuel oil is very important because the College considers bio-methane a carbon neutral fuel, and thus its use will greatly reduce the College’s net emissions from heating and cooling.
The College has also made strides to reduce emissions from heating and cooling by improving building efficiency.
In 2007, a survey of buildings at the College indicated that 53 percent of the square footage on campus performed well below current energy code standards. Since then, the College has had two buildings receive Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Platinum certification, and is seeking LEED Gold certification for Virtue Field House.
The College’s efforts have resulted in a 66 percent reduction in net emissions from stationary combustion sources, such as boilers, heaters and ovens, since 2007. From 2013 to 2014, the College emitted a net of only 8,996 MTCDE due to stationary combustion, as compared to 26,509 MTCDE in 2006 to 2007. However, biogenic emissions — those due to combustion of biologically based materials (wood) — from 2013 to 2014 were 21,658 MTCDE. This is not counted in the College’s assessment of net emissions from stationary combustion because it is considered carbon neutral. Though the College may exclude these emissions, the carbon neutrality of biomass combustion is disputed by many.
Our Carbon Footprint
In 2014, the College reported gross emissions of 8,996 MTCDE from stationary combustion, 370 from mobile combustion, 864 from purchased electricity, 2,346 from air travel, and 153 from solid waste. This amounts to total emissions of 12,729 MTCDE. The College also included reductions of 10 MTCDE due to purchase of renewable energy credits (RECs), 550 from carbon offsets purchased, and 9,905 MTCDE from sequestration due to college-owned lands. In all, this amounted to a reported net emissions of 2,264 MTCDE.
The College’s many efforts, especially the switch to bio-methane for heating and cooling, will further decrease the net carbon emissions for 2016. If necessary, the College can purchase carbon offsets in order to meet its goal. In assessing its greenhouse gas emissions, the College employs a custom tool tailored to its needs. It is worthwhile to note that other methods of assessing emissions may yield drastically different results.
Carbon neutrality, though an important step for the College, is by no means an end goal. As 2016 draws closer, it is time to begin discussion of the next steps. The College should continue to demonstrate leadership by further reducing its environmental impact.
The College’s quest for carbon neutrality came about because of the actions of a dedicated group of students, faculty, and staff, who challenged the College to adopt an ambitious goal. Those students have long since left Middlebury and ventured into the world; now, it is our turn to take up the mantle, and push the College to new heights.
It is easy to look at the issue of climate change and give up because it is so daunting, but every great change begins with small actions. It is unrealistic to expect that everyone will consider the gravity of this issue and take action. I hope, however, that we will continue to consider the impact of our actions, from reducing the use of vehicles to turning out the lights. As you go about your daily life, take a moment to consider the following question: What can you do to live more sustainably? Every action, no matter how small, makes a difference.
(12/10/15 12:17am)
Although Vermont is over 3,000 miles from Paris, Vermonters are not letting the distance silence their voices on climate change action. Since the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference began in Paris last week, Vermonters have been engaged in many capacities. Some rallied locally, others went to the State House, and still others, including Governor Peter Shumlin, were invited to speak in Paris.
Right here in Middlebury, 55 to 60 people gathered in Triangle Park on Saturday, Nov. 28, just two days before the start of the Paris climate summit. People attended this rally from as far away as Montpelier and Waitsfield, hoping to send the message that people are watching and expecting results from the climate summit in Paris. They held signs with phrases such as “Middlebury Vermont Supports Paris Climate Talks” and “Climate Justice Now!”
One more elaborate sign read, “This pump temporarily closed because Exxon-Mobil lied about climate (#exxonknew).” The protestor was referring to the exposé this fall, when Exxon-Mobil intentionally funded climate change deniers and hid company research supporting climate change in the mid-1980s.
On Monday, Nov. 30, a coalition of environmental groups gathered at the State House in Montpelier to deliver 180 boxes—containing 25,241 postcards—from supporters of carbon tax in Vermont. Organizers of this event planned for it to coincide with the start of the Paris climate talks, seizing the international event as a catalyst for state-level climate action.
“Our thoughts are with the global leaders who are making important decisions for all of us. But we can’t leave all the work to them. We have to do our share also,” said Fran Putnam, the chairwoman of the Weybridge Energy Committee and a member of Energy Independent Vermont.
Last year, legislators in the House introduced “carbon tax” bills, proposing a tax on fossil fuels sold in Vermont, including gasoline, oil and natural gas. The bill has met strong opposition from both sides of the aisle.
Republican Chairman David Sunderland believes that the carbon tax bill shows that Democrats in Vermont are “profoundly disconnected with the realities of struggling Vermonters.” Opponents of the tax also point out that a carbon tax will cost the consumer the same amount, regardless of income, and will not affect the producers of fossil fuels. The tax could raise gas prices by 88 cents over the next 10 years. Proponents of the tax insist that a carbon tax could mean lower sales tax on other items.
The proposed carbon tax bill calls for a tax on fossil fuels and the creation of an Energy Independence Fund, which would help subsidize home weatherization, solar panels and air source heat pumps. The program would also create jobs in the process.
On Dec. 3, about 150 people attended a debate on the carbon tax. The debate pitted Paul Burns, executive director of Vermont Public Interest Research Group (VPIRG), and Professor John Erickson, from University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, against Rob Roper and John McClaughry, President and Vice President of the Ethan Allen Institute. The institute is “Vermont’s free-market public policy research and education organization,” according to their website.
Don Randall, President and CEO of Vermont Gas, issued a statement expressing support for climate action in Paris. He explained that increased use of natural gas in Vermont has cut carbon emissions.
“The decline in U.S. carbon emissions has been attributable largely to the displacement of higher-emitting fuels by natural gas,” said Randall. “Here at home, Vermont gas continues to bring the choice and opportunity of cleaner, more affordable natural gas to more Vermonters,” he said.
He concluded his statement by pledging to “reduce emissions, increase energy efficiency and expand alternatives such as renewable gas from landfills and dairies.”
Vermonters’ engagement with the Paris climate talks is not confined within state boundaries. Governor Shumlin himself is attending the Paris climate talks as a panelist to discuss Vermont’s renewable energy plans.
“The White House had reached out to us to talk about what states are doing to make a difference,” Shumlin said. “Vermont’s got a great story to tell.”
On Dec. 2, Shumlin was on a panel called “The Subnational (State and Provincial) Foundation for Action” hosted by the Georgetown Climate Center. The panel included other leaders from places in North America that are creating clean energy policies, including Quebec, California and Washington.
Shela Liton and Senowa Mize-Fox, representatives of the Vermont Workers Center in Brattleboro and Burlington, are also attending the Paris climate talks. Linton and Mize-Fox are part of the 100-plus person delegation called “It Takes Roots to Weather the Storm,” a collection of grassroots leaders from dozens of communities in the U.S. and Canada that have been impacted by climate change.
“From Paris to Montpelier, we’re seeing politicians push false solutions to climate change like fracking and carbon trading,” Mize-Fox said in a news release. “We need to recognize the leadership and strategies coming from social movements at the grassroots, who understand the interconnections between racial, gender, economic and climate justice and are calling for system change, not climate change.”
Lastly, as the Paris climate summit comes to a close, Vermonters will fill five buses reserved by 350Vermont and head to Boston on Dec. 5. There they will participate in a rally “to call for bold climate solutions that create jobs, justice and climate action together,” Central Vermont Climate Action stated in a press release.
While the Paris climate talks are a good catalyst for international climate action, the negotiations will by no means result in a comprehensive solution or an end point.
“As the United Nations Climate Conference closes in Paris,” Central Vermont Climate Action’s press release states, “we know we will need to keep building a massive grassroots movement for real climate solutions to move away from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources.”
(12/02/15 9:20pm)
The College joined more than 200 colleges and universities nationwide to sign the American Campuses Act on Climate Pledge to demonstrate support for strong international climate action. President Laurie L. Patton sent the College’s pledge to the White House on Nov. 10 in preparation for the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris from Nov. 30 through Dec. 11.
The pledge reads: “As institutions of higher education, we applaud the progress already made to promote clean energy and climate action as we seek a comprehensive, ambitious agreement at the upcoming United Nations Climate Negotiations in Paris. We recognize the urgent need to act now to avoid irreversible costs to our global community’s economic prosperity and public health and are optimistic that world leaders will reach an agreement to secure a transition to a low carbon future. Today our school pledges to accelerate the transition to low-carbon energy while enhancing sustainable and resilient practices across our campus.”
According to a press release from the White House, all the institutions signing the pledge have already undertaken significant steps toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions, increasing campus sustainability and resilience and incorporating environmental action into academic programs.
One of the goals outlined in Middlebury’s pledge is to displace the remaining use of fuel oil (approximately 650,000 gallons per year) with carbon-neutral biomethane gas from a manure digester on a nearby diary farm. Furthermore, the College promises to “continue exploring ways to add new sources of renewable, carbon-neutral electricity sources to power the campus.”
Dedication to sustainability has been an official part of Middlebury’s mission since 1995, when trustees established a set of principles and objectives for the campus. As of today, Middlebury is on track to achieve full carbon neutrality by the end of 2016. The College has already reduced emissions of greenhouse gases by 50 percent from the 2007 baseline. One of the major milestones toward achieving carbon neutrality was the completion of the $12 million biomass gasification plant, which was installed in 2009.
The pledge also cites the ways in which the College regularly engages in a number of different environmental initiatives and projects. The campus-wide recycling center and compost operation, for example, diverts about 65 percent of waste from landfills each year. In 2012, in partnership with local developers, the College installed solar farms on and off campus, which provides five percent of electricity on campus. In addition, students competed twice in the US Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon competition. The student-led projects to design and build single-family residential homes operating on only solar electricity and heat finished in fourth and eighth places in 2011 and 2013, respectively.
In addition to college and university campuses, about 81 American companies signed a similar climate pledge to show their support for international climate agreement ahead of the Paris conferences.
(11/19/15 4:37am)
The topic of this column — the death of the divestment movement — may appear strange, given that it is coming on the heels of The Campus’ editorial endorsement of fossil fuel divestment a few weeks ago, and moreover, because I am, as avid readers of my column know, an active leader in the Middlebury divestment campaign.
(11/19/15 1:07am)
Because of our remote location, Middlebury students do not often get to directly interact with organizations that they study, especially for majors who study those who currently hold great power. Members of the Environmental Studies and Food Studies curriculums enjoyed an exception to this last Tuesday, Nov. 10, in the form of a lecture titled “A Growing World Population and Creating Sustainable Communities: What role is crop biotechnology playing?”
In the lecture, two representatives from the agribusiness giant Monsanto spoke to students, faculty and community members about genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in agriculture. Monsanto is the leading American producer of genetically modified (GM) seeds, which makes up the bulk of its revenue, and is also a huge pesticide manufacturer, giving it one of the most directly relevant perspectives on issues of biotechnology in agriculture. The talk was given by Dr. Phillip Eckert, an academic engagement lead and former dairy scientist at the company. He was supported by Monsanto scientist Michael Spenzer.
The talk was primarily sponsored by the Environmental Studies curriculum and in particular by William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Food Studies Molly Anderson. Anderson is strongly opposed to many of Monsanto’s practices and beliefs about GMOs, but she sponsored the talk on the basis that “it is important for students to understand both sides of the genetically modified crops argument.” She wanted to present Middlebury students with Monsanto’s side of the GMOs argument, and plans to follow this lecture with other talks addressing the controversy over biotechnology in food from other perspectives.
As the title of the talk made clear, Monsanto’s side of the issue is that GM crops are necessary for feeding a growing population. They also argued that biotechnology would help make agriculture sustainable, citing studies arguing that GM crops reduce land use and carbon dioxide emissions. Eckert argued that this reduction in emissions is made possible primarily because of how some GM crops do not require tilling (which releases carbon sequestered in the soil) and also because they “decrease the number of cultivation passes” that pollution-emitting farm vehicles need to make to spray crops with pesticides and herbicides.
Finally, Eckert argued that biotechnology could help agriculture adapt to climate change. Climate change has decreased the arable land available per person, increased the range of pests and made crops vulnerable to hostile weather, increased drought and natural disasters. In Monsanto’s vision, crops should be selectively modified to increase yields, promote better nutrition and adapt to changing conditions.
The presenters were careful to acknowledge that biotechnology cannot solve food insecurity on its own. Eckert noted that a huge amount of food waste in developing countries comes from a lack of infrastructure, saying that “the solution is not always to just double crop yield.” Poor transportation infrastructure and inadequate storage infrastructure and techniques prevent many crops from getting to market and the failure to sync markets with harvests prevents food from reaching the table.
Eckert also took great pains to portray crop biotechnology as safe. He did not make a blanket statement that all GM crops are necessarily safe for human consumption, but that they are “safe when proven to be.” He contended that the long vetting process that new biotechnology is subjected to by both Monsanto and governmental regulators, which takes an average of 13 years and $136 million per product, ensures that no unsafe products reach the market. This argument drew considerable ire from the audience, who raised concerns about research linking pesticides that are used with pesticide-resistant crops (namely Monsanto’s Roundup and other glyphosate-based pesticides) with cancer, hormone issues, and danger to wildlife.
The presentation met with a deluge of questions from the audience, enough that Eckert was only able to finish two-thirds of his talk. One of the most important questions the audience had about the talk was also the most basic: what was Monsanto even doing at Middlebury, a tiny college that also happens to be a bastion of the environmental movement? Both Anderson and Eckert argued that they were in the business of repairing Monsanto’s reputation. The presenters, two jovial scientists, were not what one usually associates with Monsanto, a name that conjures up images of a shadowy megacorporation manipulating policy through an army of lobbyists. But the choice of representatives seemed aimed to recast Monsanto as a progressive, scientific company instead of a self-interested agribusiness giant.
“Their charge was clearly to get people to feel better about Monsanto,” Anderson said. “They were very carefully not argumentative up there.”
Both presenters and audience members played fast and loose with the various types of GM crops and their many purposes. Audience members and Monsanto representatives were sometimes talking about different GM crops with different purposes or about entirely different applications of biotechnology. For example, in response to claims that GM crops were important for addressing global hunger, an audience member questioned how for aesthetic purposes, like apples that do not brown, helps promote food security. Some audience members were particularly critical of how the presenters never explicitly broke down the distribution of uses of GM crops. Anderson and one audience member accused the presenters of not adequately addressing the fact that most GM crops are engineered for pesticide resistance instead of to adapt to a changing climate or a growing demand for food.
“I didn’t like how they evaded some topics,” Anderson said. “Something like 95 percent of crops that are being used around the world that are being genetically engineered are pesticide-resistant crops, not pest-resistant crops; they aren’t being engineered for the things that [Eckert] talked about.”
The fact that many GM crops are engineered specifically to be pesticide and herbicide resistant was displayed briefly on a slide but not explained by the presenters.
Additionally, there was confusion of Monsanto with the broader GM crops industry, with presenters and audience members implicitly or explicitly attributing the ills or benefits of biotechnology in general to Monsanto specifically. Spenzer pointed out that the aforementioned genetically modified apple is not made by Monsanto, for instance. As he noted, “most genetically modified seeds are not made by Monsanto, but [Monsanto] became a byword for the issue.”
Anderson also criticized what she saw as deliberate obfuscation of the definition of genetically modified crops by the presenters. She argued that they confused hybridization (also known as crossbreeding), which is credited with producing high-yield and drought-resistant crops that enabled an explosion in agricultural productivity in the 20th century, with biotechnology, or the direct insertion of a small piece of DNA into an organism.
“In many ways they tried to make [what] biotechnology [is] less clear,” Anderson said. “For example their assertion that we’ve been genetically engineering crops for ages is a little bit of a red herring. We have been genetically modifying only if you think of crossbreeding things that can naturally cross in nature as genetic engineering, but we certainly haven’t been taking a gene from a fish and putting it in a tomato for ages.”
(11/04/15 7:28pm)
The “million gallon question,” or more accurately, the “640,000 gallon question,” is one of the most significant obstacles in the College’s quest for carbon neutrality by 2016. According to the Climate Action Plan adopted in 2008, 89 percent of the College’s greenhouse gas emissions comes from heating and cooling buildings using a steam-based system. Although the opening of the biomass plant in 2009 reduced the College’s annual consumption of no. 6 fuel oil by roughly 1,350,000 gallons, there still remains 640,000 gallons per year required to meet the College’s heating and cooling needs. Given that this Vermont winter is unlikely to be significantly milder than last year’s (climate change doesn’t happen on that kind of time-scale), how can we either reduce or replace the emissions from burning all this oil?
In order to address this “640,000 gallon question,” the College identified two potential solutions in 2008: the construction of an additional biomass facility, and the use of biodiesel in place of fuel oil to generate steam.
An economic, environmental and social analysis of these two options revealed the construction of a new biomass plant as the better path. Economically, the CAP identified biomass as more affordable given the high cost of production of biodiesel. Biodiesel could also pose an environmental problem because greenhouse gases emitted during the production of the fuel (from fertilizers, irrigation and transport) might exceed those absorbed from plant growth. Furthermore, the growth of corn for biodiesel contributes to deforestation and rising global food prices.
However, a complete switch from fuel oil to biomass also has its own problems. A new biomass plant would be expensive. Energy generated using biomass also takes more time to come online and take offline compared to fuel oil. This makes it difficult to respond to changing demand for steam. Another issue was sustainably sourcing all the woodchips needed to replace 640,000 gallons of fuel oil. The College would also need to account for the greenhouse emissions of transporting the woodchips.
Then in 2010, a far better option was identified: bio-methane produced from cow manure. Originally, the gas would have to be produced offsite by manure digesters on local farms, trucked to a facility near campus, then piped underground to the central heating plant. The use of bio-methane to meet heating and cooling needs has many positive implications for the College’s environmental impact. Methane, or natural gas, has the highest ratio of energy to carbon dioxide output of any fossil fuel because it has the highest density of hydrogen-carbon bonds. In comparison to other fuel oils, combustion of methane releases about 25 percent less carbon dioxide. In addition, the purified gas contains fewer impurities, such as sulfur and nitrogen, than fuel oil, so burning it produces fewer pollutants.
With the construction of the VT Gas pipeline, the College will be able to pump bio-methane (which is chemically equivalent to natural gas) into the pipeline. The biomass plant would be connected to the larger VT gas pipeline, rather than a direct pipeline running from the farm’s digester. So while the biomass plant might not necessarily be burning all bio-methane all the time, the College would be paying VT Gas for all the natural gas it uses as if it were bio-methane. VT Gas would then pay the dairy farms for their bio-methane contribution.
However, the construction of the VT Gas pipeline is still controversial. It will be transporting fracked gas from Canadian tarsands. Fracking also has noticeable environmental impacts on water quality. Despite the controversy of the pipeline, its construction will have an immediate impact on the College’s goal of carbon neutrality by serving as transport infrastructure for the biomass plant.
(10/21/15 8:38pm)
For five decades Middlebury College has been an outstanding leader in promoting environmental studies and international studies and in adopting sustainable operating procedures. Laurie Patton has shared with me her commitment as the College’s new president to build on and extend this admirable record of leadership. Toward this end, she would like to work in partnership with trustees, student groups, and concerned faculty and staff in an effort to identify next steps. This is a sound approach that all in the College community can support. Regarding next steps, this letter highlights one especially significant opportunity. We are at a pivotal moment in the national and international debate over the urgent need for a transition to a clean energy economy. Middlebury has the ability to influence the outcome of this critical debate by taking a public stand with a commitment to join the growing fossil fuel divestment movement. A decision by the College to divest should be viewed primarily as an act of moral and educational leadership at a time when industrial-technological civilization has lost its way and must reinvent itself.
I write this letter as a former Middlebury faculty member who taught at the College for close to three decades, served as dean of the college in the Olin Robison administration, and chaired the College’s Environmental Council during the mid-1990s. My courses included the study of environmental ethics, global ethics, and religion and ecology. I also write as a trustee and former chair of the board of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF), an international grant making foundation that has joined the fossil fuel divestment movement as part of an effort to align its investment policy with its mission and program goals. The Divest Middlebury campaign has set forth a compelling argument, and I write in support of the students who are leading this important initiative.
Scientists working in the field of climate change have turned on the alarm bells. Human development practices, especially the burning of fossil fuels, are altering the conditions on Earth that have made possible the development of civilization over the past ten thousand years. If humanity does not act with all deliberate speed and reduce its global greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050, the consensus among scientists is that the ecological, economic and social damage and disruption could be catastrophic and irreversible. The most vulnerable are the hundreds of millions of people living in poverty, but no one’s life will be unaffected. Already the negative effects of climate change are being felt by communities around the world. In addition, human development patterns have caused a tragic decline in the planet’s biodiversity and natural beauty, and ongoing global warming will accelerate this process.
Since action on climate change is about preventing immense harm and promoting the common good, it is first and foremost a fundamental moral issue. With the risk of dangerous consequences growing with every day of delayed action, it is also an extraordinarily urgent moral challenge. In a recent declaration, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences at the Vatican in Rome stated the matter succinctly: “Human-induced climate change is a scientific reality, and its mitigation is a moral and religious imperative.” A growing chorus of religious leaders, including Pope Francis, the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, and the Dalai Lama, fully support this view. The new Encyclical Letter of Pope Francis on the environment, “Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home,” and the Pope’s addresses before Congress and the United Nations clearly and forcefully highlight the ethical and spiritual dimensions of the environmental crisis and climate change. In response to the initiative of Pope Francis, 333 Rabbis have signed a “Rabbinic Letter on the Climate Crisis.”
This year could be a turning point when the world community forms the necessary global partnership and commits to the collaborative action needed to reduce and eliminate carbon pollution. In December heads of state from the 193 governments that are party to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will meet in Paris to finalize a long delayed, legally binding climate change agreement. The goal of the negotiations is to elicit commitments that will cumulatively prevent global warming from exceeding 2 degrees Celsius since the pre-industrial era. Achieving an effective and equitable agreement in Paris is fundamental to protecting Earth’s ecological integrity, promoting human rights, and fulfilling our responsibilities to future generations. However, again and again governments controlled by short term economic and political interests have failed to address the problem of global warming. Building pressure from civil society, including from leaders in science, religion, education and philanthropy, can make a critical difference.
With the demand for change growing, governments are searching for a way forward. China and the United States, the two largest carbon polluters, have together made meaningful commitments, and many other nations have joined them. However, the commitments made to date fall far short of the reduction in emissions needed. At a special summit meeting on sustainable development this past September, the United Nations issued a path breaking declaration on “Transforming Our World” that adopts seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with 169 targets, which envision the full integration of the environmental, economic and social dimensions of the sustainable development agenda. The SDGs call for radical change, and if governments are serious about achieving the SDGs, a strong UNFCCC agreement is mandatory. By joining the divestment movement, Middlebury College can help to send that message and register its concern that governments be held accountable for fulfilling their obligations under the agreement and expand their commitments in the future as necessary.
The divestment movement has grown dramatically over the past year. A recent study, which was commissioned by the Wallace Global Fund, has found that 436 institutions have made a commitment to divest from fossil fuel companies, representing $2.6 trillion of investments—a fifty-fold increase. These institutions include the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund and two of the largest pension funds as well as foundations, colleges, universities, NGOs and religious institutions. Recognizing the significance of these developments, the Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, Christiana Figueres, has called for more institutions to divest from fossil fuels and invest in clean energy as a way to build momentum going into the Paris climate change meeting. (Clarification regarding the $2.6 trillion of investments is needed, because in some cases the institutions involved are limiting their divestment to coal or to coal and tar sands oil or to some but not all fossil fuels companies.)
College and University trustees have a fiduciary responsibility to ensure that their institution has the financial resources to fulfill its educational mission, and they are rightly concerned to maximize returns on endowment investments and minimize risk. In pursuing its commitment to divest from fossil fuels, the RBF has adopted a phased approach, eliminating investments in coal and tar sands first followed by a gradual elimination of all fossil fuels in a fiscally responsible manner. The goal of the RBF is to be completely divested of fossil fuels by the end of 2017. The Fund’s trustees have not found it necessary to alter their long standing commitment to preserve the purchasing power of the endowment. Middlebury should be able to divest from fossil fuels over several years without suffering reduced investment returns. Moreover, divesting could produce higher returns, because the fossil fuel energy sector is facing complex problems and risks. In addition to the precipitous collapse in the price of oil over the past year, which has caused some firms significant loses in market value, the big oil companies face the long term problem of stranded assets. Preventing global warming from exceeding two degrees Celsius will require leaving most of the known coal, oil, and gas reserves in the ground. In short, the transition to a clean energy economy will in all likelihood make fossil fuels a high risk investment. Many financial institutions are following this situation closely, and the Carbon Tracker Initiative is providing investors with the tools to measure economic risk associated with fossil fuels.
It is also important to recognize that renewable energy is rapidly becoming competitive with fossil fuels on cost and that corporations are coming to the realization that cutting their carbon footprint through improved efficiency and a shift to renewables is both possible and profitable. There is a global coalition of corporations that have committed to the long term goal of operating entirely with renewable energy. The New York Times reports that among the companies that have recently joined the coalition are Goldman Sachs, Johnson & Johnson, Proctor & Gamble, Starbucks, and Walmart. The transition away from fossil fuels to renewables is underway in spite of efforts by the big oil companies to prevent it and deny it. The only question is whether the transition will happen fast enough to prevent global warming from pushing the biosphere over tipping points that involve high risk. In a September Op-Ed, the president of Siemens, Joe Kaeser, announced that his global industrial manufacturing company has pledged to become carbon neutral by 2030, and reflecting on the challenge and opportunity before the business community he writes: “We have the technologies, we have the business incentive, and we have the responsibility. Now all we need is the commitment.” A decision by Middlebury’s board to divest will reinforce this message to corporate leaders, many of whom are listening with a new level of concern for the future of the planet, the global economy, and their companies.
Some argue that it is hypocritical for an institution like Middlebury to divest when the college and American society at large continue to be dependent on fossil fuels in so many ways. Is it hypocritical for someone who is addicted to cigarettes but knows that smoking is harmful and cancer causing to divest from all tobacco company stocks? Divesting is a way to help all of us wake up to the real dangers created by our addiction to fossil fuels and make the change to a cleaner, safer, more secure world.
When the RBF board and its investment committee, which includes both trustees and outside experts, began to consider joining the divestment movement, they were working with a highly skilled and successful investment manager. However, given the way its operations were structured, the investment manager concluded that it could not accomplish the goals that the RBF had set for divestment. Consequently the Fund was forced to change investment managers. Making the change has been a demanding process, but it has worked out well and the Fund now has investment managers with the expertise and flexibility that it requires. In short, there are very good alternatives, if Middlebury finds itself contending with the same kind of problem that faced the RBF.
Apart from major educational issues, as a general rule, it is not the responsibility of a college board of trustees to consider taking an official position on the many issues under debate on campus, and only under exceptional circumstances when there are very compelling moral reasons to do so should a board use divestment to support a protest movement. However, climate change is not just one environmental issue among many others or just a political issue. It is one of the defining issues of our time, and the choices made in response to the challenge will profoundly affect the lives of all Middlebury students and the future of life on Earth.
Middlebury College is a highly respected leader internationally in the field of education and a decision by its president and board of trustees to join the expanding fossil fuel divestment movement will be an act of responsible global citizenship consistent with its mission. It will have a significant impact, inspiring other institutions to support the transition to a clean energy economy and contributing to the outcome we all hope for in Paris.
Steven C. Rockefeller
Professor Emeritus of Religion
Middlebury College
October 12, 2015
Steven C. Rockefeller has had a career as a scholar and teacher, an environmental conservationist, and a philanthropist. His research, writing, and teaching have been focused on the fields of religion, philosophy and ethics. He has had a special interest in the transition to a sustainable future and the development of a relational spirituality and a global ethic for building a just, sustainable and peaceful world community.
Professor Rockefeller is professor emeritus of religion at Middlebury College, Vermont, where he taught from 1970 to 1998 and also served as dean of the college and chair of the religion department. He received his bachelor of arts degree from Princeton University in 1958, his master of divinity from Union Theological Seminary in 1963, and his doctorate in the philosophy of religion from Columbia University in 1973. He is the author of John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (Columbia, 1991; Peking University, 2009) and Democratic Equality, Economic Inequality, and the Earth Charter (Earth Charter International, 2015). He is the co-editor of two books of essays, The Christ and the Bodhisattva (SUNY, 1987) and Spirit and Nature: Why the Environment is a Religious Issue (Beacon, 1992). His other publications include over fifty essays that appear in a variety of books and journals.
Professor Rockefeller and Professor John Elder organized and directed at Middlebury College in 1990 the Spirit and Nature Symposium that included the Dalai Lama and was filmed by Bill Moyers for public television. In the mid-1990s, Professor Rockefeller chaired the Middlebury College Environmental Council. Under his leadership, the Council prepared and submitted to the College president “Pathways to a Green Campus” (1995), a comprehensive environmental report on the state of the college with 22 recommendations. Professor Rockefeller served as president of the Demeter Fund, which created the Charlotte Park and Wildlife Refuge in Vermont overlooking Lake Champlain and the Adirondack Mountains. He is the founding president of the Otter Creek Child Care Center in Middlebury, Vermont.
For over thirty years Professor Rockefeller has served as a trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, an international foundation with grantmaking programs in democratic practice, sustainable development, and peacebuilding. From 1998 to 2006 he chaired the RBF board of trustees. Among the other boards and commissions on which he has served are the National Commission on the Environment (organized by the World Wildlife Fund), the National Audubon Society, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, and the Council of the UN mandated University for Peace in Costa Rica. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Over the past two decades, Professor Rockefeller has been actively involved in the Earth Charter Initiative, which in and through extensive worldwide, cross cultural dialogue has endeavored to identify and articulate shared values that provide an ethical foundation for the emerging global community. From 1997 to 2000, he chaired the Earth Charter international drafting committee for the Earth Charter Commission. A final version of the Earth Charter—a declaration of global interdependence and universal responsibility with fundamental principles for creating a just, sustainable and peaceful world—was launched by the Earth Charter Commission at the Peace Palace in The Hague in 2000. From 2000 to 2010, Professor Rockefeller served as co-chair of the Earth Charter International (ECI) Council. The ECI Secretariat is based at the University for Peace in Costa Rica and has affiliates in 73 different countries. The Earth Charter has been translated into over 40 languages and endorsed by over 5,000 organizations globally, including UNESCO and the World Conservation Congress of IUCN.
Professor Rockefeller lives with his wife, Professor Barbara Bellows Rockefeller, in Pound Ridge, New York.
(10/21/15 8:32pm)
One year ago, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund divested $860 million from the fossil fuel industry. Now it’s our turn.
The philanthropic fund bears the well-known name of John D. Rockefeller, philanthropist and founder of Standard Oil, the company we now know as ExxonMobil. His heirs’ uncoupling from the fossil fuel industry and entrance into the ranks of over 450 institutions that have divested from fossil fuels works to fundamentally shift the way we think and talk about the fossil fuel economy. Steven C. Rockefeller and the other trustees of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund have established that it is simply not enough to promote green innovation; it is imperative to challenge our implicit support of an industry that profits off of the world’s most marginalized communities.
It is well established in climate science and public discourse that there exists an excess of fossil fuels on this planet. Our atmosphere and well-being as a globe will be compromised beyond remediation long before the planet’s fossil fuels are depleted. What isn’t often enough remembered is that the fossil fuel industry knew ¬¬well before the general public that their product was destroying the planet. Indeed, ExxonMobil executives made strategic decisions as early as 1981 based on the established connection between fossil fuel extraction and climate change.
Instead of using early knowledge of climate change to propel research into clean energy or create an awareness of the large-scale dangers of an extractive economy, ExxonMobil chose to fund climate change deniers in an effort to protect the company’s profits. As people across the world labored to extract oil and gas, the majority of the company’s profits funneled back into the United States.
This is where we come in. Not necessarily because we want to be involved, but because we must be involved. We as a nation have been drawn into this conversation by burning oil from across the planet and exporting the effects of our consumption back across the globe. The United States comprises about four percent of the world’s population and as of 2008, we emit about 19 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide. As an institution, we pride ourselves on our efforts towards “sustainability.” With our carbon neutrality goal, we eschew consuming fossil fuels on campus and yet when considering our endowment, fossil fuels are not seen as detrimental to our “greenness” but as diversity in our portfolio.
Here in Vermont, we do not yet feel the most dramatic effects of climate change. Rising sea levels affect island and low-lying nations, volatile “booming” and “busting” economies affect those communities closest to extraction sites, pipelines commonly cut across the lands of those without the resources to fight back. Archbishop Desmond Tutu has called climate change “the human rights challenge of our time” and he’s right. While we, Middlebury students, reach for “global citizenship,” we neglect the true impact of our consumption. As we reinforce “our commitment to integrating environmental stewardship,” as outlined in our mission statement, what do we overlook?
Middlebury is seen as an example of sustainability around the world. We have the luxury to build a biomass plant or go carbon neutral independently from the national energy infrastructure. “Go green yourself” is our message to the world, but our solutions are not accessible to most. The fossil fuel industry is so entrenched in our national and global infrastructure that it prevents a green and just transition for the vast majority of the world’s population. Middlebury’s accomplishments in green technological innovation are laudable, but as a privileged leader on the global stage, it is our obligation to not only improve our own energy consumption but to challenge the credibility of the industries that exploit and perpetuate our global dependence on fossil fuels.
(10/19/15 4:34pm)
Issues of environmentalism and racial justice are inextricably linked, proclaimed Van Jones at his keynote speech for the Environmental Studies 50th Anniversary last Thursday night. Jones, an acclaimed environmental and human rights activist, is best known for his efforts to provide opportunities for people of color in under-resourced, inner city communities with access to jobs in green energy infrastructure development. Much of Jones’ recent efforts work to address the monstrosity that is our country’s military industrial prison complex through legislation to reduce the number of incarcerated nonviolent offenders and cut the prison population by 50 percent over the next decade. In short, the prison system seeks to profit from the enslavement of people of color.
If able to survive passage through our ever corrupt political environment, Jones’ plans would result in a drastic cut in governmental funding for the prison system and open up funds which could instead be transferred to green job programs benefitting people of color who have so long born the brunt of the broken prison system.
The large crowd – composed of students and community members of all stripes, cheered elatedly for Jones’ plans and I too, was overjoyed, in part because of the parallels I identified between Jones’ work and my own as a divestment organizer. For those unfamiliar with Divest Middlebury, we are a group of student activists who seek to compel Middlebury to withdraw all of its investments in the top 200 fossil fuel companies and, similar to Jones, reinvest this money in ways that will support the growth of a more sustainable economy.
But when I speak with people about the need to divest our holdings in the fossil fuel industry I don’t receive the same response as Jones did regarding the divestment of funds from the prison system. Many tell me that divestment is “too negative.” For me, this response signals not the ineffectiveness of divestment as a strategy to instigate action on climate change, but rather the great work we still have to accomplish in stigmatizing the fossil fuel industry so that people will cheer for fossil fuel divestment as they cheered for Jones’ call to transfer money away from the prison system.
Thus, here is the truth of the fossil fuel industry – according to research completed by the Carbon Tracker initiative, the fossil fuel industry has five times more carbon dioxide in their proven reserves than the atmosphere can absorb in order that we may stay below the conservative two degrees Celsius marker, which is largely accepted as the threshold for calamitous changes in our climate. The fossil fuel industry shows no qualms towards burning these carbon reserves and the wave of environmental injustices that will result, such as displacement of millions of people of color in the global south.
What’s more, the fossil fuel industry has sought to hinder the debate about climate change through the promotion of disinformation on their own accord and by membership in trade organizations that work to diminish the findings and suggestions of university researchers and policy experts who have built overwhelming consensus around the idea that the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as a result of the combustion of fossil fuels has and will continue to result in incredibly destructive changes to our climate and must therefore be mitigated immediately.
For an institution of higher education, the fossil fuel industry’s disinformation campaigns should feel especially disgusting and convince us even more of divestment’s importance. As Harvard professor Naomi Oreskes writes: “Why should universities invest in an industry that has deliberately sought to undermine the knowledge that we have produced?”
With this view of the fossil fuel industry, I’m hard pressed to imagine someone who would not deem Middlebury’s divestment campaign, along with the national divestment movement, as partaking in a “positive” step towards changing our culture’s conception of the fossil fuel industry, which proves especially necessary when we realize its most abhorrent of practices – the exploitation of communities of color through the placement of refineries and other health hazards related to the extraction and production of fossil fuels in their neighborhoods. In light of these injustices divestment provides me with the hope that we can rip the fossil fuel industry of its social license to exploit the health and livelihoods of marginalized communities in the same way that the prison system has been dethroned of its license to incarcerate people by virtue of their race and then deem them disposable, a casualty of our throw-away society.
But this is not to say the injustices wrought by the fossil fuel industry are not inextricably connected to those caused by the prison system. Indeed, that was Jones’ whole point, and many of our “reinvestment” options for the divested funds that we take out of the fossil fuel industry are in line with his green jobs programs as I will discuss more in a later column.
(10/07/15 9:36pm)
Two of the areas targeted by the 2008 Climate Action Plan (CAP) to help the College reach carbon neutrality were waste management and travel emissions. At the time of the plan, travel and waste accounted for 10% of the College’s greenhouse gas emissions. The CAP laid out a variety of recommendations for how the College could reduce emissions from these sources, including increasing public awareness and promoting conservation.
Since the CAP was adopted in 2008, the College has made progress in some aspects. How has the College progressed in waste management and travel? How it can still improve? Carbon Countdown examines.
The least significant contribution to greenhouse gas emissions comes from waste. Waste from the College decomposes in landfills or is burned, which releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. This source of emissions is responsible for only 1% of the College’s emissions. The College already sends all of its waste to the recycling center, where it is sorted and, if possible, recycled. In addition to these efforts, MiddShift — a College group advocating carbon neutrality — suggested, among other things, that the College integrate waste minimization and sustainable practices into the residential life system, and create a service requirement for first-years in the dining halls or recycling center to develop an understanding of the waste that is generated by the College.
While there have been campaigns to raise student awareness about food waste at the College, such as Weigh the Waste, during which volunteers collected and measured dining hall food waste before students cleared their plates on the carousel, sustainability is certainly not stressed in the residential life system. Overall campus awareness about waste management is minimal. How the College deals with waste is far removed from the student body; this does not encourage students to think about the waste they generate. Students may be aware of recycling and composting, but rarely go out of their way to help recycle or compost waste. The College manages its waste well, but still needs to increase awareness about waste and sustainability, and encourage the student body to think more about its impact.
Vehicles and emissions from travel account for another 9% of the College’s greenhouse gas emissions. As the CAP makes abundantly clear, these emissions cannot be fully eliminated within the confines of current technologies. Travel for academic, administrative, athletic, advancement, admissions, student services and visitor purposes will still be required, and will necessarily result in greenhouse gas emissions.
However, emissions from travel can be reduced, if not eliminated. The CAP details several strategies by which this can be achieved, including increasing education about the impacts of travel, stressing videoconferencing as an alternative to traveling and upgrading the vehicle fleet to more energy efficient vehicles, such as hybrid cars. It is important to note, however, that the College does not include travel of students studying abroad or faculty and staff commuting to work in its calculations of emissions due to these sources. Including these sources could dramatically change the assessment of greenhouse gas emissions due to travel.
Since the CAP was adopted in 2008, the College’s greenhouse gas emissions from waste and air travel have increased, but emissions from mobile combustion have decreased. In 2007, the College estimated that it generated the equivalent of 137 metric tons of carbon dioxide due to solid waste. By 2014, that number had increased slightly to 153 metric tons. Emissions from air travel increased more dramatically over this same period, from 1381 metric tons in 2007 to 2346 metric tons in 2014. Emissions from mobile combustion (which include road vehicles, as well as construction equipment) have decreased from 408 metric tons to 370 metric tons.
In light of the increasing size of the student body, it is admirable that emissions from waste and mobile combustion have held even or declined. Air travel is a much larger contributor to the College’s emissions, though, and yearly emissions have increased by almost 1000 metric tons since 2007. According to data from the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment (ACUPCC), this increase in emissions is offset by sequestration from college-owned land. While the College has made progress since 2007, student awareness about emissions is still lacking and emissions from air travel have increased dramatically. As the College approaches carbon neutrality in 2016, there is still much room for improvement in these areas.
(09/30/15 9:36pm)
This past week I witnessed multiple students, clad in full business attire, walk silently out of the room in the middle of class. At first I was confused (was there some mid-day ball I was missing?) but then remembered abruptly what week it was; so did the two men sitting behind me as a second student left the room. One whispered to the other, “that’s our competition.”
