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(04/08/15 3:43pm)
As this column has emphasized before, global environmental and climate trends will hinge on the emissions of the developing world. Just this month, China’s largest oil refiner, China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (Sinopec), has indicated to the world that China may reach peak oil and gasoline consumption much quicker than previously predicted by western energy companies and consulting groups. For instance, the esteemed Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) has forecasted that China’s oil demand will most likely increase through 2040. This is a massively different time frame than the official predictions by Sinopec. China sees peak diesel consumption in 2017 and peak gasoline consumption within the next 10 years.
These Chinese predictions are a sobering revelation to any oil-bull. The common theme among energy companies is that demand trends in India and China will remain positive for decades to come — supporting global oil markets in the process. This Chinese-Indian demand is essential for stability in the oil market given the very real slowdown in oil consumption from developed nations. Exxon-Mobile, the world’s fourth largest oil company, predicts that from 2010 to 2040, gas and diesel energy needs in the 32 countries of the OECD are projected to fall about 10 percent. However, Exxon believes that these needs are expected to double throughout the rest of the world.
The signs are already evident that these IEA and Exxon predictions may be overly enthusiastic. In China, diesel demand declined last year, and growth in crude oil consumption has shrunk. Crude oil use is projected to rise about three percent this year, less than half the rate of the total economy. These declines in growth rates are symptoms of very powerful forces from within China. For instance, the political leadership in China is trying to transition the economy away from debt-fueled real estate investments and heavy ‘smoke-stack’ industries towards service industries and increased domestic-consumption. This will limit the need for energy-intensive investments and stymie the growth of petroleum use.
Even Sinopec itself, with 30,000 gas stations and 23,000 convenience stores, is prepping for a future in which selling fuels is not its primary business plan. As a microcosm of the Chinese economy, it hopes to rely on the consumption of goods and services at its shops and filling stations. Sinopec Chairman Fu Chengyu is quoted as saying, “In the future, fuels will become a non-core business of Sinopec … petroleum or oil and gas will continue to be a major energy source in the future, but they won’t be the only source; more emphasis will be put on our new energy and alternative energies.”
China is the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter. As such, the policy decisions made in Beijing will have a greater effect on global climate change than any other unilateral announcements. According to the World Bank, China accounted for roughly 24 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2014. Within the country, roughly 16 percent of greenhouse gases are emitted from the consumption of petroleum products. It appears that through Sinopec’s retail plan, China is signaling that it is committed to meaningful reductions in emissions. However, there can always be more progress and greater efficiency. It will be illuminating to follow China’s path to peak gas and diesel over the next few years.
(03/19/15 12:04am)
Terracotta hexagons tessellate the floors at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Washington D.C., where I intern. Soles pat, dignified, across them as agents flood in and out of the aisles office to office, a loose collared dance. My desk, flush with the copier, features an Escher print, a portrait of my parents and soft stones I collected on California’s coast. I doze watching swarms of foot traffic in the corridor, which evokes a Southwest terminal moments after deplaning. One of the pebbles warms in my fist.
The internship started Monday, but my mentor is out West for the next two weeks. I do not have a badge for building clearance yet – they say two weeks, though the office veterans add six – and my computer setup has been tortoise-pace. I am the youngest in the building, probably on the whole block.
I am here in search of meaningful work. Two years into college and back from the honeymoon, disenchantment set in. The outcomes for my Middlebury 60-hour work week were letters and numbers, not social reform or justice. In the age of the climate refugee and Black Lives Matter, thousands were sounding the alarm, and meanwhile, I was unresponsive, a bovine bumming around greens under snow, spouting facts like broadsheet and nightly holed up in a dusty inglenook of Axinn.
Last fall, I met with Dean Hanson, asked for temporary leave and so started my gap semester, a season released from routine, hypothetical coursework and doused in rough-and-tumble “real” life. I was interested in enhancing lives, not proceeding with mine.
My time away did, however, start inward at a Buddhist monastery in the orchards north of Escondido, California. I lived under the rules and regimes of practicing monks of the olden Thai forest tradition. As a layman for one month, I attended morning and evening chants, prepared meals, swept paths and hiked to the groves down in the foothills to collect fruits – avocadoes, oranges, kumquats – to trade in town. The experience nursed my inner self. I read, wrote and meditated insatiably. I found sustentative calm, millennia-old wellsprings of wisdom, and more distilled notions of what I hope to accomplish this year, decade and century.
Days after leaving Metta Forest, I was back East, attending the weekly roundtable brief for EPA’s Climate-Ready Water Utilities (CRWU) Initiative, the office in which I now sit. CRWU is a program within the Water Securities Division that develops climate change risk assessment tools and strategies for water utility infrastructure operators. Picture an extreme weather remediation panel, though specific to the water sector, scaled nationwide and tailored by U.S. region. So far as glimpsed by the intern, there seems to be an overwhelming amount of impactful work conducted here. The CRWU Initiative’s efforts directly protect water treatment and transport infrastructure around the country, for decades and for millions.
In the thick of my semester away from Middlebury, I see clearer. Not in the sense of waning astigmatism or wearing prescription lenses, but in the sense of understanding. I can hear a procession of gridiron coming-together: intelligibility. So inexorable are our bounds today from college to employment that my generation’s youths – particularly, those of the nation’s college elite – are losing sight of themselves. College-age millennials are wearing blinders, and as I have come to discover, it has meant stepping away from schoolwork to lower them, take another look and gain finer resolution. That mental image we sustain of how we are supposed to go through our education should not, and cannot, blind us. College “conditioning” can wait. It is time to know – precisely and concisely – what we are doing in college in the first place. As the globe gains weight, its temperature rises slowly and sprawl persists on the scale of continents, I cannot proceed listlessly, without genuine purpose or anchorage. In the light of the heat, this is my time to reassess. I welcome you to join me.
What our Connected Generation understands and a warmed world portends do not agree. There is a mountain range of evidence without manifesto and we are complacent, afraid to ask fresh or difficult questions – to look diagnostically at the old – because we do not want to see what we will find. Do not trivialize the importance of introspection. Evaluate and reevaluate. Critically review the armature of your plan. Consider time away, and take a closer look: it is the only way to create a climate tolerant of and furnished for reform. The view is not all bad.
(03/12/15 2:44am)
It was a harsh Vermont winter in December 1963 and, in the midst of the subzero temperatures, a landmark student life initiative had also frozen over. “The ‘question of honor’ at Middlebury College seems to have plenty of support as an ideal and not so much as a working system,” read a December 5 front-page Campus article. The article, which included student concerns about a code’s implications, foreshadowed the proposed Honor Code’s defeat in a student vote for the second time that May.
Over the past year, the Campus has investigated the untold story of the creation of the Honor Code. Although the story of the origins of the Honor Code at Middlebury is often that of a system fashioned by students and for students, the historical picture is much murkier.
A lengthy search in the College Archives and interviews with those who witnessed the process firsthand reveal that the Honor Code had a slightly turbulent history from the start.
It was a story that dominated the early 1960s at the College: a group of students and administrators who saw the Honor Code as an important opportunity for students to take ownership over their education. And yet, they received surprisingly strong pushback from students on the language and specifics of the proposed code.
The code’s proponents even dropped a compulsory peer-reporting clause, a hallmark of honor systems at Princeton University and elsewhere, from the Middlebury Honor Code in order to ensure its passage via a student vote. Moreover, after two failed student referenda on the Honor Code, evidence found in the Archives shows that at least one administrator recommended enacting the Honor Code without a student vote of support. However, in March 1965 the Code received sufficient support in a student vote to pass. Faculty opted for a streamlined approval process to avoid sending the Honor Code back with revisions to be subject to another student referendum, which they thought could be tantamount to its defeat.
The question of student votes on the Honor Code has renewed relevance of late. On Sunday, the Student Government Association (SGA) Senate voted in favor of amending the Honor System’s Constitution to put the code to a biennial student referendum with the options to maintain, revise, or eliminate the Honor Code. The amendment now must receive 2/3 of the vote in a referendum in which 2/3 the student body votes and must also be ratified by the faculty.
Change in the Air
Middlebury’s academic Honor Code, far from a lone initiative, was the product of social changes on campus that created profound shifts in student life during the 1960s. The College of the 1930s-50s was on its way out in several ways that precipitated the creation of an Honor Code.
Historians of the College have written much about the changes that took place in the 1960s. Among these reforms were major social changes to the institutional rules surrounding student freedoms. The influential Dean of Women Elizabeth ‘Ma’ Kelly oversaw a period in the ’60s when the ground shifted under students’ feet regarding their freedoms and rights as young men and women.
In the ’60s, parietal hours — the now seemingly antediluvian rules that governed when men and women could visit opposite-sex dorms —were gradually phased out. The College began to offer help to students with questions about birth control and sexually transmitted diseases. Finally, the fraternities and sororities, long the bastions of the social life of yesteryear, became less and less of a mainstay of the campus party scene.
Historian of the College David Stameshkin said the ’60s were a period of remarkable change, bar none.
“Students wanted to be treated as adults. The administration wanted to treat the students as adults in certain ways but not others,” Stameshkin said in an interview. “It was incredible how things changed in the time [James] Armstrong was President.”
These changes, taken together, amounted to a climate of dramatically increased student responsibility in social life. Naturally, this trend simultaneously made its way into the academic realm.
As discussions were underway about a potential code, the Campus polled 254 students in October 1962 and found 80 percent approved of a code in theory. The newspaper also polled students and found that 35 percent of those surveyed had experience with an honor system at their high school. However, “a majority indicated they would not speak directly to a student if they found him cheating.”
The first instance of bringing the Honor Code to a vote occurred on November 19, 1962, when it failed. Harold Freeman ’62, the Student Association (SA) President, informed the Campus that the vote to inaugurate an Honor Code was defeated, 623-512, a combination of students voting “no” as well as “No-with-Qualification.” 235 voted no, 388 voted no with qualification and 512 voted yes. The students in favor did not reach the 85 percent threshold of “Yes” to send the measure to the faculty for a vote.
However, Freeman gave hints that the fight for a code was not over. “Freeman observed that by adding together the Yes and No-with-Qualification votes, almost four-fifths of the students were in favor of at least some form of Honor Code,” reported the Campus. Nonetheless, it would not be easy to convince the students who voted No-with-Qualification.
The SA, in a postmortem, theorized that a main cause for the defeat was the clause requiring students to report observed violations. This clause was considered a hallmark of longstanding honor codes at universities, including Stanford and Princeton.
Peer-Reporting Controversy
These qualms about the code reared their head repeatedly in the next two years. Surveys revealed approximately 80 percent of students supported an honor system as an ideal, but blanched at the proposal under consideration. “The main objection was to the obligation to report an offense committed by another person,” reported this newspaper.
Helen Gordon, president of the Panhellenic Council, “agreed that an honor code would be a benefit to Middlebury, but thought reworking of the ‘obligation’ clause necessary,” according to the Campus.
Gordon said, “It’s unrealistic to assume that human nature will [report others] but I don’t think they ought to leave out entirely this kind of an idea because it denies the opportunity to a person who’s really honest.”
The peer-reporting requirement would remain an issue through the end of the 1960s and beyond. As the clause became a sticking point in the debate, those in support of the Honor Code pushed back on the idea that peer-reporting meant “tattling” or being a “rat.”
In a December 1963 issue, Campus Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey J. Joseph opined that “whenever one brings up the subject of an Honor Code, the listener politely nods, makes a disparaging grimace, and quickly manages to say something like: ‘You going to the hockey game tomorrow night?’”
For all of the social life changes happening contemporaneously with the Honor Code debate, a large number of students felt comfortable enough with the status quo to stymie any efforts at instituting an honor system. Joseph explained that many students thought of the proposed Honor Code as either a way to end fraternities or to increase social code regulations and theorized that these factors led to its defeat.
“Let’s face it,” he wrote, “if someone wants to cheat, he cheats. If someone wants to ‘tell’ on him, he should be allowed to ‘tell.’ It is important to realize that a provision for ‘telling’ on someone is not included for the main purpose of making enemies out of friends. It is there to protect every honest student by presenting to the cheater a possibility that he will be caught. If you have any qualms about ‘telling’ on your buddy, keep your head down in your paper where it belongs.”
Despite the support of students like Joseph, the SA leadership began to contemplate foregoing the peer-reporting requirement. The Vice President of the SA was reportedly “willing to drop the stipulation that students report others, adding that ‘the maturity of Middlebury students ought to be able to make an honor code successful.’”
In December 1963, the chair of the student Honor Code Committee, Michael McCann ’65, cautioned against pushing the code too vigorously without almost unanimous student support. Two months later, the SA polled students on a potential honor code in what would be the run-up to a second push to pass it via a student body vote. A point of particular emphasis in the questionnaire was intended to gauge how students would feel about peer-reporting. The article stated that “McCann stresses the importance of questions dealing with student and faculty reports of offenders.”
The survey occurred concurrently with the 1964 election of a SA President, in which candidates weighed in on an honor code. Both John Walker ’65 and Peter Delfausse ’65 made an honor code a part of their platform.
Delfausse, who would win the election, said to a Campus reporter, “We on this campus are treated as adults in everything but the integrity of our academic work. Shouldn’t this be the first area in which we should be trusted? Nothing can force the student body into accepting something which isn’t wanted, but if an honor system is desired, we will find the right words with which to express it.”
Nevertheless, concurrent discussion about combating student apathy regarding the SA gives the impression that the Honor Code was an issue important to the members of its committee, but perhaps was less relevant to the wider student body. Richard Hawley ’67 was the Editor-in-Chief of the Campus, and said other issues captured the student body’s attention more than the Honor Code, particularly parietal hours — although he nonetheless appreciated the code when it was instated.
“I remember feeling a kind of relief,” Hawley said in an interview. “What a relief it was to take your exam to the library and do it there. I remember thinking, ‘This is wonderful.’ But I don’t remember student passion about it.”
Princeton on the Otter
Within the next few months, a figure who would be pivotal to Middlebury’s history weighed in on the code. College President James Armstrong, who had stepped into the position in 1963, approved of the proposed Honor Code in a meeting with McCann.
Armstrong said in a comment to the newspaper in April 1964, “Herding of students into the fieldhouse like animals, with proctors standing over them like jailkeeps, is not in keeping with the ideals of a liberal arts education.”
The influence of the college president and other key members of his administration may have been crucial to the Honor Code’s passage. Before arriving at Middlebury, Armstrong had spent his entire academic career at Princeton, an Ivy League school with one of the nation’s oldest academic honor codes — passed in 1893, with an obligatory peer-reporting clause. Armstrong earned his B.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton and then served as a faculty member and dean until he was appointed Middlebury’s 12th President.
“When Armstrong came as president from Princeton, he started bringing people from Princeton,” Stameshkin said in an interview. “In fact, the joke on campus was it was ‘Princeton on the Otter.’ That’s what they used to call Middlebury during the ’60s because Armstrong kept bringing people there.”
Another Princeton man, Dennis O’Brien was previously an assistant dean there before arriving at Middlebury in September 1965 to serve as the Dean of Men. His experience with the honor system at Princeton impacted his view of a potential Honor Code at Middlebury.
“Because myself and Jim came from Princeton, we had lived with it and we found it comfortable,” O’Brien told the Campus in a recent interview. “It seemed to establish a different relationship between faculty and students. Faculty were not always snooping over students’ shoulders to make sure they weren’t cheating; we were more like mentors. To suddenly switch over from being the person who is teaching someone to someone who is monitoring your honest behavior seemed not to be the image the faculty wanted to have.”
On top of a Princetonian as president, Middlebury’s stature as an institution was on the rise during the ’60s. O’Brien believes the Honor Code was part of the improvements.
“I think there was clearly a kind of an upgrade in terms of the quality of the students and the quality of the faculty that we were able to attract at that time,” he said, “and so it seemed like a much more senior, adult institution than one having proctored exams.”
The desire for an upgrade to Middlebury came from both above, with the administration, and also below, from students of the ’60s, particularly those who were tired of the fraternities’ hold on campus life.
“There was a genuine feeling that there should be more seriousness at the College intellectually,” Stameshkin said. “And the same thing was happening at Williams and other schools. This idea that there should be more intellectualism and more feeling of scholarship was also happening in the early to mid-60s.”
Nonetheless, the vocal support of Armstrong and O’Brien did not help the Honor Code at the ballot box at first. The proposed code failed in May 1964 to clear the 85 percent hurdle of students voting in favor, and the referendum did not receive even half of the student body’s participation. The result was devastating for those students who had worked tirelessly on behalf of a code.
“After two full years of preparation, an academic honor code was put before the student body Monday via a yes-or-no ballot – and failed to gain the needed support,” said a front-page article in the Campus. The measure received 69 percent “yes” votes from the 45 percent of the student body that voted. The rejected code included “that the test-taker pledge that he had neither given nor received aid” and that students report those they suspected of cheating within 48 hours.
The aforementioned Honor Code Committee displayed dogged, even stubborn, persistence to pass the measure. McCann told this newspaper, “This year’s balloting was far more encouraging than last year’s and there will be another honor committee next year trying to get this thing through.”
Victory, at a Cost
Despite McCann’s optimism, the outlook was grim: two votes and two defeats for an Honor Code within three years. But finally, in March 1965, the Honor Code was approved in a landslide. With 1,000 “yes” votes to 313 “no” votes, it was a marked improvement from the previous two tries in the fall of 1962 and the spring of 1964.
However, the code approved by students contained no compulsory peer-reporting clause such as that of Princeton, due to the fact that the committee viewed the clause as the reason for previous defeats. The Middlebury code stated that students with knowledge of an infraction should confront the student and if he or she does not report themselves to the honor board within 24 hours, the observer should. In O’Brien’s words, it was a passive reporting clause, with no teeth to punish a student who observes cheating and does not report it. The code that passed, unlike the previous versions, said students “should” report those they observed cheating, not “must” or “shall” of previous drafts.
The compulsory reporting clause had also been under fire in the opinions pages of this newspaper. In a Letter to the Editor on Feb. 25, 1965, William Michaels ’66 wrote: “Under the present system of exam proctoring, the College denies us the privilege of attempting to live up to the ideals of moral responsibility … this would also be the case if an honor code were passed which possessed a mandatory student reporting clause, since the student is not thus delegated the responsibility of looking after his own morality: it is merely shifted from the proctors to the other students.”
It was also a significant change that the threshold for victory was lowered to 75 percent from a lofty 85 percent, what it had been in 1962 and 1964. Some students grumbled about the idea of voting for an Honor Code for a third time, suggesting that other factors may have been at play in its success. A joke printed in the Campus poked fun at the code’s long-awaited victory. “Did you favor the Honor System at the recent election?” a student asks. His friend replies, “I sure did. I voted for it five times.”
President Armstrong was understandably pleased following the successful vote, as it was an initiative he had supported since the past spring, and he immediately set to work assigning administrators to it. In an October 1965 letter to the four members of the new subcommittee of the Faculty Administration Committee on the Honor Code, including Dean of Men O’Brien, Armstrong said, “Although I do not think you will be called upon for heavy duty quantitatively, I know you understand how important I believe the Honor Code is for the College and that a guiding hand from the faculty will be important and possibly crucial.”
Armstrong also probably worried that a lack of faculty support might end the last chance for the Honor Code to become a reality. He was present in a meeting of the Faculty Educational Policy Committee (EPC) in March 1965, after the code had been approved by the referendum.
“The honor code statement worked out by the students and brought to us with a large supporting student vote … was discussed,” states the meeting’s minutes. “It was felt best not to subject the statement to the scrupulous kind of inspection the EPC would normally employ in surveying a faculty document, but vote on it yea or nay as it stood; some felt that return of the document for a second student consideration and vote would defeat the proposal. Vote was a unanimous pro.”
It appears the EPC’s worries about the Honor Code failing in the student body led them to streamline its approval process, despite reservations that undoubtedly existed among the faculty.
The faculty also approved a key word choice in the code in April 1965. During the faculty meeting in which they approved the code, according to the article in the Campus, the faculty “did not demand a change to ‘must’” in the reporting clause.
Students Not Sold
There is a small piece of evidence that the College may have enacted an honor code regardless of the student vote. Dean of the College Thomas H. Reynolds wrote in his annual report dated July 1, 1964:
“There is an excellent chance that an almost unanimous student vote will be achieved next year. In the event that this kind of a program does not succeed next year, I recommend the College take some action towards bringing an academic honor system into effect.”
While Reynolds never ended up having to make that recommendation, O’Brien disagreed with his premise.
“I don’t think you should impose it without a successful student vote. I think that would have been a mistake to try to do that,” O’Brien told this reporter. “I think the whole idea of an honor code, to a certain extent, is to get away from the high school syndrome of, ‘You have to be proctored and not entirely trusted.’”
The following year, as new Dean of Men, Dennis O’Brien’s first annual report was pessimistic, illuminating the reasons why Reynolds or others might have pursued an Honor Code if the student body would not.
“By the time the student reaches the last half of his college career we have pretty much either got him involved intellectually or we have lost him for good … they may be active in fraternity life, extracurricular life, athletics, they may be valuable citizens in other ways, but academically they run along on minimal requirements seeking the gut courses and paying only lip service, if that, to the intellectual community,” wrote O’Brien in his annual report in June 1965.
He went on in that report to comment on the lackluster implementation of the Honor Code.
“The Honor Code was approved by students in early March,” O’Brien wrote. “I may have missed something, but I think no further initiative toward its implementation came from students until practically exam time, if then.”
O’Brien also observed how the administration was involved from the very beginning and that students were not yet invested in the code:
“Many students are far from ‘sold’ on the Honor Code. They feel that the Administration has been determined to have an Honor Code here no matter what and that the students finally let the Administration have its way. These students have a sort of uninvolved, ‘play it cool’ attitude. They intend to wait and see how ‘they’ will work it out. If students who felt that way could see the minutes of the Ad Hoc Committee on Honor Code for May 27, 1965 they would feel that their perception was largely confirmed. These minutes make it clear that the Honor Code Committee, chaired by the Dean of the College, consists of several professors and administrators and that to the meeting of this committee were ‘invited’ several specified undergraduates.”
O’Brien also cited a study from Columbia University that said for honor codes to be effective, the motivation should come from students and should appear to be coming from students. The difference between the honor codes at Princeton and Middlebury, he told this newspaper in October 1965, was not Princeton’s “obligatory clause for reporting, but a strong and firm belief in the system by faculty and students.”
Of the code, “it was held with a great deal of pride,” O’Brien said. “Most complaints of the new Middlebury system that I have heard have not been substantive, but procedural. And I think there are some false expectations about the system by a few students.”
A Reversal in Student Perception
Two years later in another report, O’Brien suggested that the honor code might have already backfired soon after its implementation.
“The Honor Code seems to be functioning well although there is still a certain amount of feeling against signing the pledge,” he wrote. “I personally feel that the distaste for the pledge grows out of a hypersensitivity on the part of students today that they are not trusted. As they are not trusted to close their dorm doors during parietal hours, so they feel they are not trusted in the matter of honor in examinations.”
This reversal in opinion was extraordinary. The push for the Honor Code, at least from students, was based on the idea that it would give the students more responsibility and was in the same spirit as a move away from parietal hours. Based on O’Brien’s report, the code had the opposite effect, making students feel like the administration trusted them less than before.
Whether the code was truly being followed is difficult to assess based on available records, but O’Brien writes that “a student was convicted of a violation of the Honor Code this year and suspended for a semester,” a low number of convictions by any standard.
Although during the 1960s the social rules at colleges and universities like Middlebury were being chipped away from all sides, it still took a great deal of effort on the part of members of the SA to pass an honor code via a student vote. Additionally, the faculty minutes and annual reports of the College show that at least one top member of the administration was ready to intervene to institute an honor code and held back probably because of concerns of its effectiveness if instated and operated by Old Chapel.
O’Brien’s 1967 assessment is revealing. There had been two unsuccessful votes from students amid vocal support from the administration and faculty; as a result, many students identified the Honor Code as an administrative device. A corollary explanation is that the social changes in the 1960s cut both ways on an honor system: while these sweeping changes helped make the code a possibility, they also changed the way a code was viewed in the years afterward. Increased freedom for students allowed them to pass the code; however, the perception of the code after 1965 was that it was an administrative measure — not a student-owned freedom.
“It’s very important that the students read the honor code as an administrative imposition as opposed to something that boiled up from the students,” Stameshkin said. “The students felt often as if the administration was kind of the enemy. They wanted to be adults and they felt the administration was treating them like children—you have to be in at this hour and all that — it wasn’t paranoia, but the students felt that way about a lot of things.”
The Campus reported in March 1968, three years after the code passed, that the student Honor Board was worried about the new system’s efficacy. The board had only heard six cases since 1965, and three of those were in the 1967-68 year. Two cases resulted in convictions, and only one of the six cases was because of a report submitted by another student. “This the board felt suggests either that only two students have cheated in the last three years, or that students have not accepted the responsibilities implicit in the system,” reported this newspaper.
The Honor Board, as a result, began to consider changing the constitution of the new Honor Code from passive acceptance of the code to hold responsible a student who did not report a violation.
A decade later, in January 1976, the student body approved by a landslide the revisions proposed by a committee on the honor system. There were dual changes: students now had a moral obligation to report cheating, moving away from the ambiguous language of the original code, and also proctors would be allowed in some cases with the specific authorization of the Judicial Review Board. Even under the best of circumstances, O’Brien said in a recent interview, getting students to report their peers may be asking too much.
“My guess is that [peer-reporting] never works terribly well, unless you’re in a highly codified organization like the military academy,” O’Brien said. “I’m not even so sure how well it worked at Princeton … it’s a nice thing to have: there’s a certain moral responsibility, and I love the idea of going up to somebody else and saying, ‘You shouldn’t have done that.’ But I suspect it doesn’t happen very often.”
It is difficult to assess whether the code cut down on cheating, as suggested by research that shows colleges with an honor code have less self-reported cheating by students. On that front, Emeritus Dean of Advising and Assistant Professor of American Studies Karl Lindholm ’67 said the Honor Code did not hurt and probably helped.
“I remember thinking it was a great idea. I don’t think there was any greater level of cheating than when the exams were tightly proctored,” Lindholm said. “It was almost a challenge to see if you could beat the system then,” with stories of notes written on hands and crib sheets hidden during an exam. “With unproctored exams, I don’t recall any greater level of cheating,” he said.
Approaching Another Vote
In a January survey by the SGA, 33 percent of the student body said they support the Honor Code in principle but that there need to be changes. 59 percent of the 1438 survey respondents said they support it in its current form and about 7 percent said they don’t support it.
Additionally, the Campus published (“Cheating: Hardly a Secret,” Oct. 30, 2013) the results of a survey by Craig Thompson ’14 for the course Economics of Sin where 35 percent of 377 students surveyed admitted to violating the Honor Code at least once in the 2012-13 academic year. 97 percent were not punished.
On Sunday, the discussion came to a head when the SGA Senate approved, in a nearly unanimous vote, the decision to move ahead with a bill that would subject the Honor Code to a biennial student referendum. Per the Honor System's Constitution, 2/3 of the student body must vote, and 2/3 vote in favor, for the change to take effect. The amendment would then need to be ratified by the faculty at large. If the amendment passes, a spring 2016 referendum would give students three options: to vote to maintain the honor code as it stands, to eliminate it or to revise it. A majority in favor of revision would cause the Honor Code committee to survey opinions during a two-week revision process. Students would then vote on the revised Honor Code to either approve it, to maintain the original code, or to eliminate the code.
Student Co-Chair of Community Council Ben Bogin ’15 was an impetus behind the SGA proposal and said fighting atrophy was a goal. “The idea behind our method is to encourage people to continue talking about the Honor Code after they sign it as a first-year,” Bogin wrote in an email. “The Honor Code only works if it’s a living, breathing document that people cherish and take seriously. We’re trying to breathe a little more life into it.”
SGA Director of Academic Affairs Cate Costley ’15 added that the idea is to reclaim the Honor Code as a document students care about and take ownership of.
“Through conversations and debates, we settled on a schoolwide vote to try to solicit the voices of our peers and to see what they think,” Costley said. “And having an edge to it with the possibility of eliminating the Honor Code is to say to people, ‘Let’s not take this document for granted.’”
Vice President for Student Affairs, Dean of the College and Assistant Professor of the History of Art and Architecture Katy Smith Abbott said she believes discussion has also been sparked by the decision in the Economics Department to proctor exams in introductory classes starting last spring.
“It’s not that proctoring hasn’t been an option for faculty — it has been — but it’s required a certain kind of approval process that most people thought was not necessary or wasn’t in the spirit of the Honor Code,” Smith Abbott said. “And I think when that decision was made (thoughtfully, and at great length) by the Economics Department, it meant that a larger number of students were being exposed to the question of whether the Honor Code is working.”
Smith Abbott also said that the code could possibly fail in a referendum, based on what she has heard from students.
“I think some of my lack of a firm sense of how it would go is based on the variety of opinions out there right now about whether or not the Honor Code is working,” she said. “I think if we have entered into a period where more students, through their own experience or inherited wisdom, think the Honor Code isn’t working, we could see it fail.”
Several on Community Council, according to Smith Abbott, have raised doubts about the wisdom of a biennial survey in which the Honor Code could be eliminated.
“I think a lot of folks on Community Council — and I have mixed feelings about this — felt that those are insurmountable odds that, if two years later, you have two classes of students who have never lived with an Honor Code,” Smith Abbott said. “What’s their investment in bringing it back? Why are we putting that on them by saying, ‘[An honor code] worked for some people and didn’t work for others, but it’s on you to decide to overwhelmingly vote it back into existence?’”
Bogin, however, said that that he is not worried about failure and that the discussion of the code’s relevance is worth having through a referendum.
“I think that it’s incredibly unlikely that the Honor Code would fail in a vote. According to our most recent student survey, in which about 60 percent of the student body voted, 92 percent supported the continued existence of the Honor Code,” Bogin wrote. “I also think that it’s important to say that if something isn’t working, and everybody agrees, we should be able to get rid of it. It’s hard to say that the Honor Code is student owned if students don’t have the power to get rid of it.”
Hawley, who was at Middlebury during the Honor Code debate, said renewed attention to the code is not a bad thing.
“I think the cycle of concern is probably the best thing, whatever the outcome, because it’s heightening student awareness of how it’s my responsibility to do my own work. I don’t think there’s anything that would prove that a certain kind of honor code produces more honor,” Hawley said. “It’s sort of what Jefferson said about the American Constitution: it should be revisited; there should be at least a thread of revolution every 20 years to keep attention fresh on what the values are. I think raising the climate of concern about it is probably the most important thing with respect to honor, not necessarily what code you have written down.”
(03/11/15 11:23pm)
Middlebury may have lost control over its investments. In his Report On The Recent Board Of Trustees Meeting, President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz wrote that our current investment strategy “raises questions about sharing authority with more institutions and therefore having less say in how, where, and with whom Investure invests.” The review of our investment manager that Liebowitz proposes is the first step towards regaining control over our investments, and with that control the ability to divest.
For the past ten years, Middlebury has outsourced our investment office to Investure, a company that manages our billion-dollar endowment along with those of a dozen other institutions. Because this structure responds to so many different institutional interests, those who hold responsibility for the College’s long-term success have little direct say over where our endowment is invested (go/endowment101). Over the past three years of campaigning for Middlebury to divest our endowment from fossil fuels, Divest Middlebury succeeded in raising the President’s concern over this shortcoming of Investure’s structure.
Divest Middlebury is part of the global movement to divest from fossil fuel companies, because we believe we should invest in the future we believe in, not contradict our efforts of carbon neutrality. We are asking for Middlebury to immediately stop buying new positions in the top 200 publicly traded fossil fuel companies and get out of any current investments in these companies within five years. Because of Investure’s current model, however, we can’t do that.
Whether or not the College can keep Investure and divest from fossil fuels is unknown. Last November, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund left Investure in order to divest its $860 million endowment from fossil fuels. Their departure suggests that the probability of divesting within Investure is slim.
“It is paradoxical for environmental grant makers to fund climate solutions while investing in companies that are accelerating climate change,” states DivestInvest’s mission statement, an organization of divested institutions that includes the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. “We can get good, safe returns while helping to build a new energy system.”
It’s also possible that Investure might adapt to give us more control. In 2010, Investure created a way to dedicate some of our investments to renewable energy. Investure launched the Sustainable Investments Initiative with funds from Middlebury, Dickinson College, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. At the time of its launching, Middlebury committed one fifth a percent of our endowment to these “green” investments. After Divest Middlebury’s first year of campaigning, the College agreed to up our position to five percent of our college’s investments. Clearly sometimes Investure can customize their offerings, and then in some ways we can have a say over where our endowment is invested.
Whether we stay with Investure or leave, we can collaborate with other investors who share our values. If Investure creates a “fossil fuel free” option for Middlebury, Dickinson College and other like-minded clients can join it. Otherwise, Middlebury and our peers should form a new investment-consortium with a manager who has expertise in environmentally and socially responsible investing.
The consortium model of investing has worked well for Middlebury, financially. As Liebowitz said in his February 2nd email, “Investure... continues to generate excellent endowment returns that place Middlebury in the top quartile of colleges and universities.” Of course, as students who appreciate all that this College offers us – from financial aid and top-notch academics to Real Food and biomass energy – we don’t want to see the College get lower returns on investments. But we believe that fossil-fuel-free investing can make equally good returns, and that, in fact, investments in fossil fuels may pose an investment liability in the form of stranded assets. Our belief is founded on well-documented research, solid numbers and resounding expert opinion. go/endowment; go/rbf; go/divestment
When the College concludes the review of Investure, how will we know whether we have enough “say” in our investments? What are the particular questions this review will ask, and what do the answers mean for us? Divest Middlebury knows one question this review should ask: Through Investure, do we have the power to screen certain sectors or companies from our portfolio? If yes, we might stay. If no, we’re out.
Let’s start customizing our investments to match our mission, beginning with fossil fuel divestment.
(03/11/15 11:20pm)
What will our government do going forward? This issue serves as more than mere content for nightly news shows. It is on the minds of students at Middlebury who want to see something done about the issues that our country is facing. While it is discussed among friends sitting around a table at Proctor, unfortunately, the debate and discussion usually stops there.
The American Enterprise Institute club began at Middlebury as a way to extend this debate. The American Enterprise Institute, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington D.C., does research and analysis on the political and economic situations of the United States. At Middlebury, AEI provides a platform for open debate and discussion on issues ranging from the economic situation of America’s middle class to the possibility of U.S. military intervention in Syria. Through weekly meetings, discussions of articles, books and movies and bringing speakers to campus, AEI hopes to facilitate the much-needed open debate that is missing on Middlebury’s campus.
Today, Republicans hold control of both the House and Senate, while President Obama is in the White House. As politically responsible citizens, we are driven to ask – how will our government function under these conditions? A divided government will not only affect what bills are passed, but also what bills are brought to the floor. When looking at the issue of divided government we are really looking at the future of the immigration debate, tax reform, the issue of climate change, as well as many other issues that affect us in the present as well as after college.
The vast effects of divided government on the American populace as well as the Middlebury student body must be discussed and debated. For this reason, the topic of AEI’s first policy conference, to take place on March 14, will be divided government and what it means for both the constitution and the legislative process.
Professor Shep Melnick of Boston College will give the conference’s keynote address. Melnick, who currently teaches courses on American politics, is a scholar of the Constitution and examines the intersection of law and politics. In addition to giving the keynote address, Melnick will be sitting on the first of two panels, which will focus on divided government and the legislative process.
The first panel also features former governor of Vermont, Jim Douglas. Governor Douglas, now an Executive in Residence at Middlebury College, started his career in Vermont politics as a representative in the Vermont House of Representatives. He has also served as Secretary of State, State Treasurer and Governor of Vermont. Professor of Political Science Matt Dickinson and Chair of the Political Science department and Professor of Political Science Bert Johnson will also be sitting on the first panel.
The subject of the second panel will be the legislative agenda of the 114th Congress. This panel features Governor Douglas, Melnick, Assistant Professor of Political Science Adam Dean and Stan Veuger, currently a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Veuger’s research focuses on political economy. He is also a frequent contributor to The Hill and the U.S. News and World Report among other publications, and writes on a range of topics including health and tax policy.
AEI’s policy conference will begin at 11:00 a.m. this Saturday, March 14 in Wilson Hall (formerly the McCullough Social Space). It is open to the public and is intended to serve as a platform for debate and discussion on a wide variety of issues that affect America in the present and future. Whether you are interested in politics and economics, or you simply want to learn more about an issue, this conference will be the first step towards sparking a larger conversation about the future of America at Middlebury.
(02/26/15 1:50am)
“We strive for 105% support,” chuckled first-year Taylor Cook after reading the section of the most recent Campus feature regarding students opinions on divestment from fossil fuels. Cook’s comment referred to a large info-graphic, which allegedly claimed in bold that, “55% of students support divestment from fossil fuels,” and “50% of students are not for divestment or have no opinion.”
I was not a star on my high school’s math team like Cook, but it didn’t take me long to realize that 50 + 55 do indeed equal 105 and that to have data on 105% of the student body’s opinions on fossil fuels divestment is impossible. I too started to chuckle.
This light-heartedness was soon clouded by motivation to uncover truthful data on students opinions, however, as I realized this issue — divestment — is too important to be reported on inaccurately.
The data purportedly used to create this info-graphic and provide substance for the text alongside it came from the recent SGA student life survey. Lucky for me, I am on the SGA and was able to access the information easily.
I found no errors in the SGA data; all of the categories added up to a clean 100%. Thus, my first order of business is to rectify the data and its portrayal. According to the survey, 55% of students support divestment, 15% of students do not support divestment, and 30% of students have no opinion. Rock-stars Krista Karlson and Day Robins have provided this new info-graph which for one, adds up to 100% and two, does not lump together the “no opinion” and “not for divestment” categories which we feel was an arbitrary and misleading combination.
Unfortunately, my concerns with the quality of the reporting presented in this section of the feature do not end here. The article interviewed two sources for comment on the results of the survey, and despite the fact that a majority of students are in favor of divestment, both sources were highly critical.
In order to make up for the imbalance in the reporting I would like to challenge the thinking of source one, who was quoted saying that, “divestment doesn’t have a shot in achieving what a carbon tax or cap and trade can achieve in reducing emissions.” To this I would say that we are by no means advocating divestment instead of other means of addressing carbon emissions. To the contrary, divestment works to raise the saliency of issues related to climate change and expose and undermine the inordinate power and exploitative practices of the fossil fuel industry so as to build a movement powerful enough to push the carbon emission reduction legislation source one suggests, through our fossil fuel funded legislature.
For those who question whether a divestment movement is really necessary and believe that Congress will pass meaningful carbon reduction legislation just by looking at the facts, let me remind you: we live in illogical times. This past year, 2014, was the warmest year on record. Let’s repeat that: 2014 was the hottest year to date. And yet, Congress has yet to pass a carbon tax or institute a cap and trade program for carbon emissions. And when we look to history, we can’t deny that the most significant pieces of legislation in the last century could not have been achieved without a powerful movement, often with forceful student support, pushing them forward.
In continuation, the second source quoted in the feature displayed concerns about the financial risks of divestment. I have written extensively about the financial argument for divestment in previous op-eds that you can access on the campus website, but to recap: socially responsible investment, and in this case fossil free investing, in fact provides higher-risk adjusted returns. Additionally, in this discussion of costs and benefits I would also like to bring awareness to the costs Middlebury is already accruing by not divesting in the form of damage to our brand and reputation as an environmental leader, and donations to the school from alumni who are unwilling to give money as long as we are invested in fossil fuels.
The section of the feature about which I have been referring had no ending, it merely stopped in the middle of a sentence, an obvious mistake which I can’t help but feel was a little meant to be as it has allowed me to fill in the parts of the article I felt missing. In the same way, I hope everyone in the Middlebury community challenges themselves to learn about and engage with divestment as we move into the next few months of the campaign, as the world burns.
(02/25/15 7:10pm)
The inception of the Rohatyn Center for Global Affair’s Student-Led Conference was only a little over a year ago, and yet this year’s “Apathy and Action: Exploring Youth-Driven Movements” conference had the appearance of being a long established event on campus. Last year’s conference, entitled “Immigration in the Neoliberal Age,” set a precedent for progressive and internationally-relevant themes, which continued into this year’s conference.
Seeking “to put the latest youth-led movements in perspective and look to the future, aiming to determine the key factors that will be responsible for either bringing or deterring social change,” according to the event’s online description, students Gabbie Santos ’17, Bilal Khan ’18, Forest Jarvis ’15 and Karen Liu ’15 applied to lead and organize this year’s conference. Members of the Rohatyn Student Advisory Board (RSAB) selected the “Apathy and Action” proposal and other than financial support, Santos, Khan, Jarvis and Liu have been entirely responsible for orchestrating the conference. Their months of hard work and commitment to exploring the topic of youth-led social action were evident at last week’s conference.
After two days of guest speakers, discussions and screenings, the event concluded on the evening of Feb. 20. The conference addressed pertinent topics that were divided into the following five sessions: “Between Protest and Powerlessness: The Startling Ubiquity of Student Activism”; “The Radical Mind”; “Combatting Apathy”; “Collective Action and Strategy”; and “The Climate Movement.”
Compelling guest speakers, such as Shannon Galpin, founder and director of Mountain2Mountain, Marcela Olivera, the Latin American coordinator for Water for All and Alexandra Barlowe, outreach coordinator for Fossil Free Yale, supplemented each of these sessions — some traveling from as far as Bolivia to attend. In addition to these speakers, Schumann Distinguished Scholar Bill McKibben and Associate Professor of Sociology Linus Owens also imparted important knowledge and incited meaningful conversation.
Attendance and engagement was impressive. The Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs (RCGA) Director Tamar Mayer found the event “very successful” and attributed some of the conference’s success to the thoughtful ordering of the discussions, “starting with an academic discussion about protest and radicalism and continuing with practitioners.”
Thinking back the organizers’ involvement in the planning process, Liu was initially drawn to their preliminary conversations.
“These were not just conversations, they were dialogues that we could translate into something larger — something that could engage the entire community and broaden the scope of participants,” Liu wrote in an email.
Santos also expressed a desire to have the conference act as a means to “engage the community in thinking about what our roles might be as youth, in the context of social movements, from the spectrum of apathy to action.”
Similarly, Jarvis expressed witnessing “a lot of high-profile student-led events and protests here [at Middlebury], which have been met with varying levels of success … it seems to be about finding a ‘happy medium’ between drawing people’s attention and getting people on campus to care about relevant issues and not being too divisive or aggressive about the movement.”
“If our students will move to organize around a topic, which is close to their hearts, and mobilize to bring change, this conference’s impact will last for a long, long time,” Mayer said. “Wouldn’t that be the ultimate success?”
With youth-driven activism sweeping the globe, it is likely that the success Mayer speaks of and the intention of the conference — to provide students with the opportunity to reflect on how to “affect and support change in the real world” — is well on its way to being realized.
(02/18/15 9:58pm)
Last week, Vermont Gas announced that due to a nearly 80 percent price increase in the past six months, the company has terminated Phase II of their two-part pipeline extension plan, which means the plant will no longer extend from Middlebury to the International Paper plant in Ticonderoga, N.Y.
Skepticism began to rise over the summer when Vermont Gas released that the projected cost required for Phase I would surpass the predicted $86 million, and likely reach $154 million. As a result, the Public Service Board asked for a remand from the State Supreme Court in order to investigate the price jump. Although this request materialized in a 30-day examination of cost-related developments, the project was allowed to continue without much scrutiny.
When an updated cost estimate for Phase II was released, which predicted a required $105 million instead of the former $74.4 million, plans to complete Phase II, the International Paper plant, which had previously agreed to cover a portion of the cost, no longer found the project commercially worthwhile and withdrew from the deal.
In an interview with the Addison Independent last month, Chris Recchia, the Commissioner of the Department of Public Service (DPS), shared that the more recent budget increase would be examined more carefully than the one in July. Although the DPS initially supported the pipeline project, the department has grown wary of the exploding costs due to its loyalty to ratepayers and landowners along the pipeline route who bear some of the burden of greater construction costs.
Louise Porter, member of the DPS counsel, wrote in a statement that, “the department strongly urges the board to investigate whether the Phase I project remains in the public good in light of the revised cost estimate.”
Porter further notes that a “cost increase of this magnitude” is reason to revisit Vermont Gas’ Certificate of Public Good, a requirement for utilities infrastructure and services, and urges the board to look into “all relevant changes to the project to date,” not just financial ones.
In line with the department’s request, the Vermont Supreme Court has granted regulators unlimited time and scope concerning the second investigation, unlike the previously limited examination of cost-related developments. Although Vermont Gas rejects the need for increased breadth, the South Burlington-based company has stated it accepts the push for a second project inspection.
Despite the pipeline’s recent setback, the company continues to assert that the pipeline will provide cheaper, more environmentally friendly energy to customers.
Don Rendall, president and CEO of Vermont Gas, insisted in his interview with VT Digger, “this is still a good deal for the customers in Addison County and will be a good deal for the state of Vermont.”
Governor Peter Shumlin told the Burlington Free Press that he is supportive of both the pipeline extension plan and the Public Service Board’s new position as overseer.
Governor Shumlin states, “I am gratified Vermont Gas will be putting a renewed focus on offering strong public benefits and a choice for Vermonters of natural gas service through its ongoing expansion to Middlebury and continued exploration of how to drive farther south to Rutland. I know that the Public Service Board and Department will provide vigorous oversight. The state’s interest and mine has always been in getting the choice of affordable natural gas to more Vermont residents and businesses, to help expand economic opportunity.”
Unfortunately for Vermont Gas, few are as encouraging as the governor. The termination of Phase II has reinvigorated protests against the pipeline.
The opposition coalition, comprised of groups such as Just Power, Rising Tide Vermont and 350Vermont, stated to the Burlington Free Press that the Vermont Public Service Board should “revoke the Certificate of Public Good for Phase I in light of the near doubling of Phase I costs, the stark climate impacts of fracked gas, and impacts on landowners in the path of the pipeline.”
Similarly, Greg Marchildon, the Vermont State Director of AARP, commented, “the public deserves to know what the additional costs are, how they are being justified, and if the project is still viable given that the projected cost has now gone from $86 million to $154 million in just a matter of months.”
Paul Burns, Executive Director of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, who also opposes the pipeline, admits that it would be “astounding” if either Vermont Gas or the PSB terminated Phase I. Burns insists however, “I think it’s a very real possibility.”
Despite the uncertain fate of Phase I, Vermont Gas plans to continue construction after winter under its currently valid Certificate of Public Good.
(02/11/15 2:59pm)
The Vergennes solar project just completed its first year of operation, but energy output results were not as great as its developers had hoped. In 2012, the city of Vergennes leased land by its wastewater treatment plant to Encore Redevelopment, which installed a solar array in that area with the value of $500,000. This array began producing energy on Dec. 31, 2013.
As one might expect, Vermont is not the sunniest place around, especially not this time of year. On average, Vermont has a 51 percent chance of seeing the sunlight during daytime hours. Not only are solar panels inhibited by the lack of sun, but they are also blocked by several inches of snow that may pile up over the winter. Despite the lack of ideal weather and climatic conditions, Vermont continues to prioritize the solar power industry. The Vermont government has instituted policies to incentivize solar for individuals, businesses and municipalities.
Throughout the first year of operation, the Vergennes solar array was expected to produce about 200,000 kilowatt hours of electricity. However, the actual output fell short, producing only 176,502 kilowatt hours, which was 88 percent of what was expected. The city of Vergennes was estimated to save between $4000 and $5000 annually, but only saved $3960, leaving them just shy of the initial estimate.
This lower-than-expected energy output may be due to uncontrollable variables, such as weather, snowfall or shading from nearby trees. However, engineers can predict this outcome given their ability to predict energy yield with high levels of certainty.
“Generally, a bad year and an exceptional year do not vary a tremendous amount,” said Nathaniel Vandal, co-founder of GreenPeak Solar, a solar development company out of Waitsfield, VT aimed at reducing the cost of solar energy for customers.
“Typically there is a 90 percent probability that the generation in a given year will meet or exceed the estimate,” Vandal said. Given this statement on the accuracy of estimates, 88 percent production does not appear to be too far off target.
Ironically, while solar panels are an effort to reduce carbon emissions and slow climate change, the very effects of climate change may actually be stifling the production of solar power in New England. Climate change models predict that New England will experience more cloud cover and precipitation.
(01/22/15 1:14am)
We all know fossil fuels are contributing to Climate Change, but do you know how much power they hold in Washington?
Generally, our democratic system allows for voters to communicate with and affect those who represent them in Washington by writing letters, fundraising and voting. Unfortunately, the fossil fuel companies have rigged the system such that the normal pathways are blocked to the average citizen. Divesting our money from fossil fuel companies is the one route we have left to limiting their power and sway.
The government awards billions of dollars to fossil fuel companies every year in the forms of tax breaks, lower interest rates and price control incentives. These companies receive between $10 and $50 billion every year, much more than the entire budget of the Environmental Protection Agency. Rather than giving this money to companies contributing to climate change, it could be channeled into improving this problem or even alleviating the national debt. The president has, time and time again, brought this matter to the Congress but it has yet to change anything.
According to several polls, the majority of the general public agrees on cutting off fossil fuel subsidies. Nevertheless, our lawmakers continue to provide huge benefits to these companies. Why? Because of the large campaign contributions that fossil fuel companies provide.
Clean energy sources played a huge role in the discussion surrounding the 2008 elections. As a result of concern about dirty energy spending, environmentally friendly actors spent 1.5 times more on ads than fossil fuel companies. By 2012, the situation had completely reversed. This time around, fossil fuel companies spent four times as much as clean energy groups. The combination of drastically increased spending by fossil fuel companies and the stalling of climate change legislation in Congress left many people feeling powerless. The Climate Reality Project decided not to buy any ads in the 2012 election because they felt any money spent would only be a washed-out waste in comparison to the vast swaths of money fossil fuel companies poured in. Currently, coal, oil, and natural gas corporations are playing a huge role in Congressional decisions by supporting the campaigns of policy-makers aligned with their goals, lobbying in Washington, and running ads all over the country.
In 2014, the fossil fuel industry injected over $721 million into electoral races across the country. With so much money to throw around, it is not surprising that they have, more or less, gotten their way in the political realm. Even the engaged citizen cannot dream of swaying the government to the extent that the fossil fuel industry can.
How did this change come to pass, you might ask? Well, in 2010, the Citizens United v. FEC court case changed the rules on campaign finance. The Supreme Court ruled that, under citizens’ First Amendment right to free speech, corporations are now allowed to engage in the political process by spending exorbitant amounts of money and drowning out public opinion with misleading media content. Despite two previous Supreme Court rulings, which upheld citizens’ rights over those of corporations, the 5-4 decision opened the floodgates to the past six years of corporate rights. This ironically entitled shift has allowed for an increasingly corrupt political regime and a Citizenry that, even when United, remains disenfranchised in comparison to the pull that fossil fuel companies now possess.
Ads put out by the Natural Gas Alliance and Piedmont Natural Gas promote a heart-warming vision of American families benefiting from natural gas supplying cleaner energy throughout the country. What they neglect to mention is the harmful effects that fracking has on communities surrounding drill sites, and this obfuscation manipulates public perception.
With fossil fuels controlling the media and the government, and with common forms of political engagement largely unavailable to us, we turn to divestment as our last opportunity to speak. Many other divestment campaigns have come to the forefront in the past but none more powerful than Divest from South Africa of the late 1970s and 1980s. At that time, divestment grew to the point where corporations such as IBM and General Motors felt the impact on their business and withdrew their factories and contracts from South Africa. Eventually, with the added pressure of US legislation, the isolation of the apartheid regime resulted in its falling apart.
Keeping South Africa in our memory backpack, the environmental movement carries on, chugging away at our opposition. In just the past couple of years, 18 colleges, 64 religious institutions and a number of cities and other organizations have all taken the pledge to divest from fossil fuels. Oil, gas and coal are starting to feel the pressure, and every day we gain sway in their rigged system. Divestment signals to politicians the importance of climate change issues to the public, forcing them to act on these matters so vital to our lives. As Ghandi said, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
Emma Ronai-Durning ’18 is from Salem, Ore., Kate Johnson ’18 is from Bedford, Mass. and Amosh Neupane ’18 is from Queens, N.Y.
(01/21/15 11:06pm)
“On Tuesday, January 13, about 45 people gathered in front of Mead Chapel for a ‘rejection rally’ against the Keystone XL pipeline, joining over 130 rejection rallies nationwide. Encouraged by 350.org and 350 Massachusetts, rallies took place all across the country in the wake of Nebraska’s decision to allow the pipeline to pass through.” - The Middlebury Campus, “Students and Vermonters Rally Against - and For - the XL Pipeline,” Jan. 15
***
For the last five years, since the commissioning of the Keystone XL pipeline, there has been spirited debate from every imaginable sector of the American public as to the pipelines benefits or lack thereof. As the 114th Congress prepares to push the pipeline through and President Obama threatens to veto any such order, it would appear that the debate is continuing its familiar path. However, one variable in the Keystone XL pipeline debate has changed since the issue came to the forefront of the news cycle: oil prices have undergone a sustained drop in price. So instead of picking an ideological side to the pipeline debate I am going to ask how lower oil prices affect the economic and emissions development of the Keystone XL pipeline.
Informed discussion has mainly revolved around the State Department Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS). Though the study concluded that the pipeline would not substantially increase greenhouse gas emissions, there was one major exception to this statement. If oil prices hovered around the $65-$75 a barrel range, then the reduction in transportation costs accrued from the pipeline would tip the economics of Canadian oil production from red to black — thus increasing emissions. Now that oil is currently in the $45-$55 a barrel this point of discussion seems meaningless.
However, it is not the current price of oil that decides whether or not this project makes sense in terms of economics or emissions. It is the long-run price that determines the effect of a pipeline that could be in service for decades. The absolute impact of Keystone XL on both price and emissions depends on how global producers and consumers react to the oil price increase or decrease caused by the pipeline’s completion or lack thereof.
Lower oil prices reduce both the costs and the benefits of approving the Keystone XL pipeline by reducing the odds that it will ever be fully built or used. If prices are kept at their current low level, there is a very small chance that the Keystone XL pipeline will never get built because of the economics. This is highly unlikely though, because if Canadian production does not grow, the chances of sustained low prices decreases. The more realistic possibility is that the pipeline is approved and utilized. In this case, lower oil prices reduce the economic benefits without changing the climate effects of the pipeline.
However, the biggest takeaway from this debate is that both the climate damages and the economic benefits from Keystone XL are small in the grand scheme of climate change and the U.S. and global economies. A Keystone XL decision will not drastically alter the current science behind climate change or drastically affect the U.S economy. The debate says more about how we as a nation feel about the economy and climate change than what the science or economics says about this topic.
(01/21/15 7:49pm)
On Jan. 17, alumni from the Sunday Night Group (SNG) and 350.org held a ten-year anniversary reunion for the conference “What Works? New Strategies for a Melting Planet.” SNG is Middlebury’s first environmental activism group, and 350.org is the largest international campaign for climate action.
Ten years ago, this conference helped establish SNG. Three years later, SNG alumni and Scholar in Residence in Environmental Studies Bill McKibben co-founded 350.org. In celebration of the conference’s 10-year anniversary, alumni returned to campus to reflect on what has worked and to generate new ideas for the local and global climate movement .
Co-organizers Jeannie Bartlett ’15, Hannah Bristol ’14.5 and Teddy Smyth ’15 opened the event. Alumni shared their stories and held roundtable discussions.
Executive Director at 350.org May Boeve ’06.5 reflected on SNG’s founding in 2005.
“We were beginning to experiment on campus like lowering the thermostats in dorms and changing light bulbs. But then we marched in Montreal with 40,000 people, the largest climate demonstration that had ever happened up to that point. And we got this infusion of energy we brought back to Middlebury,” Boeve said.
“It’s one of the most wonderful feelings to be back here with all of you in this community and to remember that the relationship between Middlebury and the world beyond Middlebury is so alive,” she added.
According to Boeve, the capstone of this was the People’s Climate March in September, the largest to have ever occurred.
“If history is any guide, there will be other, larger marches because we need every large climate march we can get. We are in a race against time,” she said.
In addition to sharing their experiences, the alumni also discussed their thoughts on current events.
U.S. Policy Director at 350.org Jason Kowalski ’07 spoke about fighting the Keystone Pipeline.
“One cool thing coming back to Middlebury is seeing the carbon neutrality goal. That was a campaign we were pushing [when I was a student here]. Now it’s something the campus has bought into,” Kowalski said.
“Just last week I had 30 different senator staffers asking for talking points. We have produced a sea change with this campaign that is really similar with what’s happened with carbon neutrality on this campus. We started on the margin, and we’ve dragged the mainstream to our position. Bold ideas can have power in Washington, and that to me is what carbon neutrality and SNG is all about, and that to me is what the keystone campaign is all about. That’s what I’m really excited about.”
The manner in which language and psychology influence how people view climate change interested Hilary Platt ’12.5, an environmental policy and psychology major.
“A study found that the most effective strategy was to say, ‘Save energy in your home; your neighbors are saving energy too.’ This study led to [the founding of] a company called Opower, where I am working today…we are using behavioral science to impact the way people use power in their homes and reduce consumption. We saved enough energy to take all the homes in Hawaii and Alaska off the grid for a year. Together we’re making a big impact on the climate,” Platt said.
Alumni reflected on their efforts to have fair-trade coffee available in the dining halls by reducing food waste and saving money.
“The path to victory is often not what you expect. People are beginning to do that with climate change. People thought that we would get one big climate bill out of Congress and the world will be saved. Clearly that was never going to happen,” said Communications Director at 350.org Jamie Henn ’07.
He continued, “The solution is going to be diverse and come from different directions, it’s not one beautiful linear from problem to solution. The media doesn’t get it and politicians can’t track it, but I think that’s part of our generation. There’s innovation out there and people are beginning to realize that we can piece it together.”
He added: “What I’m excited about is how do you tell that story. It’s a harder story to tell but it’s a more exciting story and it will require more people telling it, not just one voice.”
Henn explained the mechanics of getting a message out.
“One of the things we’ve learned is that if you’ve set up in the right way, what you’re really doing is finding many different messengers who can then speak to their community in a way they already know how. We can expand the messenger base and find people that can speak to their own communities about climate change and provide resources to support them,” Henn said.
Greta Neubauer ’14.5 spoke on how the movement embodies a lot of historical privilege.
“One thing we’ve been thinking a lot about in the divestment movement is with Black Lives Matter happening, and how we can not just go to rallies and then come back to our own movement and do our work independently, but really see those [efforts] as being connected. We can be proud of being climate activists but also do the work of being allies,” Neubauer said.
A roundtable group suggested creating a map linking different movements such as social inequality and racial inequality with current activism and demonstrating it in a visual manner.
Faculty Director of the Center for Social Entrepreneurship (CSE) and Professor of Economics Jon Isham expressed his enthusiasm for seeing alumni interact with current students.
“What I can do as a faculty member is provide a certain kind of support just by encouraging them to try things and not get frustrated. But the best part of SNG is not only that its 100% student conceived, but it remains 100% student run. And that’s exactly one of the many reasons it’s so effective. I guarantee you some of these ideas will see fruition,” Isham said.
“Our goal was for current and past SNG students to meet each other and create these connections so we can continue to share ideas across generations and different places in our lives,” concluded Bartlett.
(01/15/15 7:16pm)
This January is set to be a big month for the Middlebury Divestment from Fossil Fuels Campaign, otherwise known as DivestMidd, as we lay the groundwork for a presentation to the members of the Board of Trustees in the spring, when we will ask them to once again to consider and vote on divestment. In order to achieve success in the spring, the Middlebury community must unite in support of divestment to signal to the Board of Trustees the necessity of our ask.
We as DivestMidd realize, however, that in order to unite in support of divestment we must all understand the reasons for divestment, at least to the extent that one feels he or she can have an informed decision on the subject. Thus, in pursuit of an “educated electorate” on divestment, we are holding three “teach-ins,” or information and discus- sion sessions, each one focusing on a different pillar holding up the argument for divestment, which include financial, political and social justice reasons.
The subject of this article and of the first teach-in, which was held yesterday, is the financial argument for divestment. In many ways, this is a great place to start in launching Divestment 2.0, for the financial argument proves the surprising and well-substantiated reasons why we’re advocating for divestment. To those who think supporters of divestment are just ignorant tree-hugging environmentalists whose sole goal is to save the Earth, be warned: the financial argument for divestment is sound, even independent of environmental concerns. So listen up. We know our stuff, and we think you should too; we just might save the planet in the process.
For starters, one of the great myths surrounding divestment is that the elimination of investments in the top 200 fossil fuel companies from our endowment would necessarily result in lower returns and subsequent budget cuts in areas such as financial aid. In fact, the investment literature repeatedly shows that fossil free portfolios have higher risk-adjusted returns.
So, what does this mean? Essentially, fossil fuel companies generally have more risk due to their presence in often politically and economically volatile countries. Additionally, the increased costs fossil fuel companies would have to incur as a result of new legislation placing a price on carbon would prove substantial in adding costs to production. And, a price on carbon sometime in the near future is not farfetched considering recent advances in discussions related to climate change and international agreements on carbon emissions, not to mention the growing urgency due to climate impacts.
Yet we don’t even need a price on carbon for divestment to make financial sense. As a matter of fact, one of Blackrock’s numerous iShares ETFs (with the ticker DSI) is composed of 400 companies with positive environmental, social, and governance practices (compared to industry competitors), includes only one of the top 200 fossil fuel companies, tracks the S&P 500 Index, and, since inception in 2007 has outperformed the S&P 500 by over 3 percent. This is sub- stantial, as the S&P 500, which includes 14 of the top 200 fossil fuel companies, is considered to be one of the broadest benchmark indexes of large U.S. publicly traded companies. In this way, DSI has steadily demonstrated high returns in spite of, or rather because of, a lack of reliance on the most impactful fossil fuel companies.
Furthermore, we are not advocating divestment because of some antiquated obsession with peak oil. Of course, fossil fuels are a finite resource and thus a theoretically unsustainable resource, but we’re not kidding ourselves. We know that recent technological advances have shed light on enormous reserves of oil. Total reliance on this fact, however, may lead us into dangerous territory. Oil companies are valued by their proven or predicted reserves, which means that if these reserves cannot be burned or taken out of the ground for a variety of reasons, such as carbon pricing or water constraints, the value of these compa- nies would see a significant negative impact. For oil companies, reserves in the ground are future revenue streams, and if reserves cannot be drilled, refined, and sold, revenue will be hurt. Shocks to revenue would lead to changes in profit- ability, which impacts stock prices and returns to shareholders.
Just because oil companies have the knowledge that reserves are available, that doesn’t mean that they’re easily accessible or necessarily worth the cost of extraction. This could be due to a number of factors including the changing resource landscape to shale gas and phosphate or the falling costs of clean technology costs, especially for solar PVs and onshore wind. In this way, we may be grossly over-evaluating fossil fuel companies, an idea commonly known as stranded carbon asset theory, which essentially predicts the presence of a carbon bubble that when it breaks, could result in severe losses for owners of long positions in fossil fuel companies.
If that’s not reason enough to divest from fossil fuels, let’s consider the fact that fossil fuel companies are still vehemently spending enormous amounts of money on capital expenditures (CAPEX) to develop and discover new reserves that have the potential to become unburnable, a prospect which, according to a 2013 Carbon Tracker Initiative report, could result in up to $6.74 trillion in wasted capital investments by the top 200 fossil fuel companies over the next decade. Why, you ask, are fossil fuel companies not investing more into research and development of clean technologies? One would assume fossil fuel companies are rational actors and would obviously want to increase efforts at developing clean technology sources that, given our concerns above, are most likely to prove profitable in the energy market of the future. These companies, however, are also stuck in their ways and have a hard time imagining a world not dependent on fossil fuels. But we at Middlebury, on the other hand, should certainly have within our capacity the ability to imagine a world powered by clean technologies and should therefore have the foresight to divest from fossil fuels and reinvest in clean technologies.
Finally, if we were to divest, the process of selling off our holdings would not be done in a haphazard manner that could in any way endanger our financial performance. In all likelihood the process would take between two and five years, which proves even more reason to announce divestment from to top 200 fossil fuel companies as soon as possible.
In sum, it makes clear financial sense to divest from fossil fuels. If you agree please sign the petition at go/divestmidd and come to the next divestment teach-in on Wednesday, Jan. 21 at 4:30 p.m. in BiHall 438!
SOPHIE VAUGHAN ’17 is from Oakland, Calif.
NATE CLEVELAND ’16.5 is from Devon, Pa.
(01/15/15 3:49am)
Have you seen the movie Boyhood? I watched it on my plane ride back to school this January — United had free movies for once, shocker! — and the film left an impression on me.
For those who don’t know, it follows a boy, Mason, over a twelve-year period as he grows to be an adult. Boyhood therefore doubles as a sort of societal documentary, spanning from 2002 to 2013. That chronology aligns perfectly with my own growing up. I, and all other 90s babies from the year of the dog or year of the pig, experienced our righteous tween and teen years during that period.
While I was able to appreciate the expired trends the movie brought back to life — 1990s Volvo station wagons, Soulja Boy songs and the iPod Mini just to name a few — the final product, an 18-year-old Mason, evoked a less empathetic response from me.
Mason embodied a sentiment my generation seems all too familiar with: ambivalence. Whether it was seen through his low number of smiles and laughs or his lack of involvement and interest in activities and people, Mason didn’t bring a whole lot to the table, and what’s more, he didn’t seem to care.
I asked a few of my friends if they knew this type in real life — the kid vegging out on Thursday afternoon, Netflix remote in one hand and cellphone in the other. He texts “LOL” back to a friend without actually cracking a smile. The sun beats into his bedroom, highlighting the dust on the TV screen that his mom asked him to clean a few days ago.
Seem familiar? Seem sad? The image does not preview that generation of change-makers for which our predecessors have stressed a need. Gone is the generation of dreamers, replaced instead with a level of contentedness and lethargy we have not yet earned for ourselves.
Our planet’s temperature rises with each passing day, technology poses increasingly dangerous threats and our American government remains as called upon as ever, yet historically unproductive. These unsustainable trends make our generation the linchpin of progress; we just need to take on the challenge.
Some events have recently demonstrated clear social objectives, like the climate march last fall. These social uprisings are reminiscent of past student protests — civil rights, anti-Vietnam War, et. cetera — and they are one way to counteract the ambivalence that runs rampant in our generation.
There is, however, another, even easier way to stay involved in public life: voting.
For some reason that I cannot fathom young people (aged 18-24) have had historically low voter turnout rates since gaining the right to vote in 1972. In 2012 only 41 percent of young people came out to vote. This is no small thing — the “Millennial generation” makes up a quarter of the electorate! — stressing the potential influence young people could have.
So, we return to that dude watching Netflix and texting in his room. I can’t tell you the number of my peers who were that guy this past midterm election, too lazy or “busy” to vote. I myself came close to being that guy after seeing the paperwork, trips to the post office and research involved with voting by mail.
But then I remembered the outcome of voting. I remembered that I might not be deeply impassioned about that proposition on medical malpractice suits or even who the lieutenant governor of my state was (am I the only one who doesn’t know what they do?), but doing a little research and casting my ballot kept me in the game of democracy. Voting on (sometimes seemingly unimportant) issues might not have changed my life, but it helped make sure that I lived a life that could one day incite change. Because it all comes down to this: when we do not vote, we disenfranchise ourselves; individuals lose their say in political life and extremist groups accrue concentrated power.
This wasn’t exactly a partisan political argument, as is normally the nature of this column, but I felt it an important enough issue to set the tone for this new year of writing. While I myself cannot claim to be above this youth ambivalence that I have laid out, I still want to highlight it. As Middlebury students, we all like to think of ourselves as educated, involved world citizens, but I think we must also keep in mind the privilege and ease of living that we experience in this 14-square-mile New England utopia. While it’s great to push the Real Food movement through campus, partner with Divest Middlebury and the like, let us not forget about an even more basic yet overlooked way to stay involved: the civic duty of voting.
(01/15/15 1:52am)
The Vermont Yankee Nuclear power plant shut down its operations at 1:04 p.m. on the 29th of December, and is no longer sending power to the New England electric grid. The 604-megawatt plant was responsible for producing 71 percent of all electricity produced and 35 percent of all electricity consumed within the state in its 42 years of operation, according to the Energy Information Agency.
The plant is not expected to be dismantled until the 2040s. According to the final Site Assessment Study, it will be decommissioned even later if dismantling and decontamination with fuel is going to occur on the site.
“I know this is hard news for the many Vermonters who have relied on the Vermont Yankee plant for employment and economic opportunity in Windham County and beyond,” Governor Peter Shumlin said in a statement. The plant employs about 550 people currently, and that number is expected to drop to 316 immediately. By 2016 the workforce will be further reduced to 127 people.
“My administration will continue working with local communities to ensure that the Windham County region grows jobs and economic opportunity as operations wind down at Vermont Yankee. We will also continue to work with Entergy [the parent company] and community partners to ensure that decommissioning happens as promptly and smoothly as possible,” he said.
Shumlin hailed the closure as “a positive step for our state and our energy future” and is optimistic that “Vermont’s energy future is on a different, more sustainable path that is creating jobs, reducing energy costs for Vermonters and slowing climate change.”
The closure marks the end of the protracted legal battle between Vermont and Entergy Corporation. The collapse of a cooling tower, radioactive tritium leaks and misstatements from plant executives in the years 2007 to 2010 drew heavy criticism from environmental groups across the country. Vermont had tried to close the plant in the wake of the events but Entergy Corporation - a Louisiana-based energy company - successfully sued the state claiming that it did not have the authority to force a shutdown in 2011.
Entergy officials maintain that the reason for the closure is that the plant is no longer economically feasible due to availability of cheap natural gas from US shale fields. Entergy will give Windham County $10 million over five years beginning this year for economic development, reported the Sentinel Source. No such agreements exist with New Hampshire or Massachusetts, homes to the second- and third-largest employee bases for Vermont Yankee.
The regions of Cheshire County and Franklin County in Massachusetts and Windham County in Vermont will lose more than 1100 jobs and $480 million as a consequence of the shutdown, says a study released from the UMass Donahue Institute of Hadley, Mass. The jobs span diverse fields such as leisure and hospitality, education and health services, professional and business services and construction.
Vermont Yankee is the fourth nuclear power plant to retire in the US. The total number of functioning nuclear power plants is now less than 100. Five new nuclear reactors are currently under construction in the country, with an expected combined capacity of more than 5,000 MW.
“We are moving full speed ahead with local, sustainable no-carbon renewable in Vermont,” said Vermont Public Service Commissioner Chris Recchia on the day the plant closed.
The Independent System Operator of New England, which oversees Vermont’s electric power system and transmission lines, is less optimistic about the closure. The organization released a statement saying that while it “does not favor any fuel or technology, the retirement of this large nuclear station will result in less fuel diversity and greater dependence on natural gas as a fuel for power generation.”
(01/15/15 1:34am)
On Tuesday, January 13, about 45 people gathered in front of Mead Chapel for a “rejection rally” against the Keystone XL pipeline, joining over 130 rejection rallies nationwide. Encouraged by 350.org and 350 Massachusetts, rallies took place all across the country in the wake of Nebraska’s decision to allow the pipeline to pass through.
The purpose of the ‘rejection’ rallies was to continue to show opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline that would carry tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada to the Gulf Coast in the hope that President Obama will veto Congress’s decision to allow the pipeline.
Middlebury’s rejection rally was lead by a combination of individuals and groups on campus, including Sunday Night Group, Divest Midd, Zane Anthony ’16.5 and Emma Ronai-Durning ’18.
“I helped organize this rally because I think it’s really important that Middlebury be part of a national movement against the Keystone pipeline,” said Michael Shrader ’18. “While this one is not necessarily local, the affects are global and affect us here at Middlebury, so people have a right to know more about it.”
In addition to students, a number of protesters in the crowd were members of local communities and organizations.
“I definitely support the cause here,” said Jennifer Vyhnak, a resident of Bristol and an environmental activist. Vyhnak condemned the “dinosaur fuels” of the past, and stressed the need to usher in a new era of green energy.
“We really need to be supporting the energies of the future, the energies that do as little harm as possible, and allow us to live on this good earth with respect for one another,” she said. “It feels like its time. It’s time for us to grow up.”
In contrast, Phil Hoxie ’17 and the College Republicans held a rally in support of the pipeline and in support of the jobs it would create. The rally was called ‘Students 4 Jobs’ on its Facebook page.
“We want to reassure people who have dissenting views that there are other people who share [them],” Hoxie said, “and that they are worth expressing – especially in an academic context.”
One of the signs that the students opposing the pipeline brandished irked Hoxie.
“I was kind of upset by ‘Middlebury College rejects Keystone XL’ as a blanket statement,” he said. “That’s supposed to cover the whole student body. It doesn’t. [We] are here to remind the students of Middlebury that there is a dissenting opinion, which is very important in any debate. It’s important to have two sides.”
The rejection rally began on Mead Chapel steps with opening remarks by several students. Michael Schrader ’18 stated their purpose of the rally as “urging President Obama to stand up against the interest of foreign oil companies” by vetoing the Keystone XL pipeline.
“Tar sands development spells increased pollution, greenhouse gasses, heavy metals, polluted aquifers, and climate chaos,” Schrader said.
He encouraged people to rally for the good of all Americans.
“Not just Americans,” a voice yelled from the crowd, to cheers and clapping. “All kinds of people!”
“We’ve all been fighting this pipeline for a ridiculous number of years,” Hannah Bristol ’14.5 said in her opening remarks. “We’ve had the largest climate march in history – and then beat that record and had another largest climate march in history,” Bristol added to laughter and more cheers.
“Many of us here have been arrested. I don’t know how we can possibly say any louder that this pipeline is bad news. But the Republicans in Congress don’t seem to get the message,” Bristol said.
Phil Hoxie ’17.5 disagreed, and stated that the pipeline would relieve a strained American economy.
“The green energy market is not a competitive market,” he said when asked about funding green energy instead.
“I want to see incentives for companies to invest in greener technologies – companies like Tesla, by boosting demand for those items, not necessarily through [direct investment].”
Alexander Khan ’17, who was unable to make the event, agreed with Hoxie in a prewritten statement: “The pipeline will provide jobs which in turn with strengthen our economy. Only with the help of a robust economy will the United States be able to solve the problems that the world faces.”
Most importantly, Hoxie stressed that no matter what the United States did, the tar sands were likely to be used regardless.
“Whether the United States builds this pipeline or not, that oil is coming out of the ground and there’s no way for anybody to stop that,” Hoxie said.
The Chinese will buy it up in a second. The Canadians are still waiting for their ideal situation – for the pipeline to go through the United States, for it to be refined in the United States, and be sold through the port of Louisiana to it’s final destination, wherever that may be.”
Participants in the rejection rally certainly did not believe their efforts were in vain; the excitement among the demonstrators was palpable.
Many of them were demonstrating for the first time to such an event.
Max Greenwald ’18 acknowledged that he normally doesn’t show up to rallies like this, because Middlebury is such a “liberal and environmentally conscious school.” However, something caused him to change his mind.
“I saw some people were actually having a counter rally to this,” he noted, referring to the ‘Students 4 Jobs’ rally that had occured minutes before the march began.
“Clearly there is some division on this issue, so I thought I’d show my support. You can’t always expect someone else to do it. When you see crowds on TV supporting something that you care about, you have to be one of those people in the crowd if you expect your movement to gain any momentum.”
As students and townspeople milled about by Mead Chapel sharing stories of their inspiration to attend the rally, and their experiences with past climate activism at events locally and in Washington DC. Ross Conrad, a local beekeeper, attended the rally.
“I feel like I need to apologize for my generation because we have failed to deal with this issue and we’re dumping this on your laps, and that’s not right,” Conrad said. Conrad likes the format of these local rejection rallies, rather than one centralized rally.
“Everything’s going to have to be more localized, more decentralized, if we’re going to be better stewards of this earth, in my view,” Conrad said.
Anthony and Ronai-Durning led the procession down Mead Chapel hill with a banner that read “Middlebury Rejects KXL” with a picture of a pipeline dripping black oil. The crowd consisting of students and members of the Middlebury community followed behind in groups of twos and threes carrying candles and signs. As they walked down to Old Chapel, people chanted “Barack Obama, yes you can! Stop the dirty pipeline plan!” and “Tar sands kill! Pipelines spill!”
In front of Old Chapel, the procession stopped to for a photo with their signs, as did many other rejection rallies. The rejection rallies across the country followed a very similar format, as most were developed from a toolkit provided by 350.org. The picture “will join a national mosaic of these pictures, banners, et cetera to be broadcast to various larger news outlets,” Anthony said.
Following the photo, the procession walked back up Mead Chapel hill chanting and into Proctor. The procession walked into the serving area and through the dining hall. On Proctor Terrace, the group gathered for one last picture and dispersed.
(11/19/14 11:57pm)
In my last article, I focused on China’s plan to convert a number of coal-fired power plants to power stations running on synthetic natural gas. The premise of the article was the huge increase in greenhouse gas emissions this shift would create and the apparent indifference of Chinese leadership to climate change and carbon emissions targets. I would therefore be remiss if in this week’s piece I did not dissect the recent, and monumental, U.S-China climate announcement.
As the world’s largest and second largest carbon emitters, China and the United States, respectively, had to come to an agreement on cutting carbon emissions in order to ensure other countries would agree to mandatory cuts in emissions. What this pact ultimately means for emissions, of course, will be determined over many years and is subject to wild variations. However, there are a few major points to take away from the agreement as a whole.
From a big picture standpoint, China’s plan calls for emissions to peak “around” 2030, with a stated intent to attempt to beat this deadline. It also expresses a goal of boosting non-fossil energy to 20 percent of Chinese fuel by 2030. The real question might not be when emissions from China peak but at what level do emissions actually crest. Do they peak at 50 percent above current levels, 25 percent, 5 percent? Due to the sheer size of China’s carbon emissions, that single number makes an enormous difference for global emissions.
On the other hand, the United States promised to set emission levels at 26 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. The proposal includes language that specifies a planned attempt to get to a 28 percent cut by 2030. If the United States hits its current target laid out in previous emissions plans — 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 – on the head, it will need to cut emissions by 2.3-2.8 percent annually between 2020 and 2025. This will require a much faster pace of emissions decreases than what is being targeted through 2020. This is an incredibly demanding goal, barring some unforeseen technological breakthroughs. Given that the Obama administration claims that the targets can be met using existing laws, realistically, the goals may not fail legally but politically.
The most interesting takeaway from China’s numbers is that they are original. By this, I mean that in the past China’s emissions targets have been nothing but “business as usual” economic and environment practices. These new numbers signal a concerted shift towards active emissions management and will require China to depart significantly from the path that most analysts have expected Beijing to take. In addition, just the fact that China is announcing climate related goals with the United States is a dramatic shift away from the norm. In the past China has gone out of its way to unilaterally announce these kinds of plans and establish autonomy from the international community. This newfound approach will hopefully lead to a closer and more productive relationship between the world’s two largest economies — a relationship that is imperative if there is to be any meaningful global change.
(11/19/14 11:53pm)
We are in a different place than we were last time. During the last public divestment from fossil fuels campaign, that is. Personally, as a first-year last year, the word “divestment” seemed taboo on this campus and I could not fully wrap my head around it. On the one hand, it was sullied because of its connection to previous activist events and a strong, but divisive, campaign that rocked the campus the year before.
However, whenever I spoke with students about the idea of divestment or related issues, we could almost always agree it was an important step to take. In fact, in a student survey administered by the Student Government Association last year 70 percent of student respondents agreed that Middlebury should not be invested in the fossil fuel industry.
Throughout the year I participated in the Socially Responsible Investment Club (SRI), which successfully held a weeklong event with speakers from the business and financial sectors. Additionally, we worked behind the scenes speaking with administrators, Investure (Middlebury’s money manager) and the Investment Committee of the Board of Trustees to figure out how we can better invest our endowment in a way that retains comparable returns while considering environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors.
The necessity of divestment from fossil fuels, however, continued to haunt me and many others in SRI as we realized a saddening truth: we were letting our perception of the last divestment campaign cloud our understanding of, and commitment to, the plain and simple goal itself: divestment from fossil fuels.
The Sunday Night Group (SNG), an environmental group here on campus, has also been working to reboot the divestment campaign. One of several active first-years in SNG Hazel Millard ’18 explains why she was drawn to join the efforts:
“As a senior in high school, I applied to Middlebury College because I wanted to be a member of an institution that was thinking about the immediate and global environment. As a freshman in college, I joined SNG because I wanted to be part of a community on this campus that wanted to impact change.”
Divesting Middlebury’s endowment clearly is the next step. On the brochures I read last year, the claims of “carbon neutrality by 2016” and “one of the most sustainable campuses in the United States” encouraged me to learn more. A logical addition would be “divested from the top 200 publicly traded fossil fuel companies.”
We, SRI and SNG, have joined forces in pursuit of divestment and ask that the students, faculty, staff, alumni and administration shed any preconceived notions about what divestment means and see it for what it is. It is too important not to.
Divestment means taking ownership over our collective future and not abiding by the status quo of the fossil-fuel economy. It means acknowledging that our reliance on and consumption of fossil fuels is causing damage to the climate and marginalized populations around the world. It means having the audacity to envision a sustainable future and harness our power as students to the fullest extent possible to send a message to politicians, markets and the broader community that we must divest from fossil fuels and invest in the foundations of a healthy economy.
Much has changed in the last two years. We as student activists are collectively stronger and bound by a set of principles for this new movement. Additionally, the national movement has progressed tremendously. Cities, foundations and other colleges and universities, such as Pitzer and Stanford, have already committed to divestment. Investment literature has continued to prove that socially responsible investments that screen out fossil fuel companies have higher risk-adjusted returns.
So we ask that you sign the petition to divest Middlebury’s endowment from the top 200 publicly-traded fossil fuel companies (go/divestmidd) and put an orange square on your backpack in solidarity with Divest Midd. Become an active ally in this movement and help us encourage President Liebowitz to not pass up this opportunity to establish his legacy as an important leader in this movement.
We can do better. We can claim our future together and work to make sure that it is marked not by the consequences of our passivity, but by our adherence to a more just, environmentally sound and ultimately prosperous economy and society. For this, we must see clearly: go fossil free, divest.
(11/19/14 11:51pm)
Millions of years ago our common ancestor with chimpanzees made an extraordinary decision. It gradually took its knuckles off the ground and began to walk on two legs. Of course, this was not actually a conscious decision. Evolution selected for this occurrence because, for some arcane reason, it was more advantageous to be a biped than a quadruped. That’s one conclusion, but it’s not very satisfying so I’m going to pretend you’re interested and delve further.
Our quasi-chimp ancestor abandoned invaluable traits that benefit chimps. Those seemingly innocuous animals are much stronger than humans. They are also masters of climbing, which is an excellent evasion skill. With strength and the ability to evade predators, chimps do okay for themselves in the competitive animal kingdom. Thus, a frail biped must have some uncanny ability because evolution doesn’t make mistakes. Nature wouldn’t select for our bipedal predecessor if it couldn’t survive in its environment.
The transition from four to two feet brought about anatomical changes that may explain the bipedal advantage. Our early ancestor, known in science as Australopithecus afarensis, developed protruding butts, arched feet, and Achilles tendons. All these traits are lacking in chimps and superfluous in the process of walking. However, they are essential for running. Butt muscles give us power when we run, our foot structure allows for balance, support, and comfort, and Achilles let the foot flex freely throughout our gait. Furthermore, by standing upright, we began dissipating heat much more efficiently. We resided in a very hot climate several million years back and the sun’s rays struck the entire back of all our quadruped friends. But we, as bipeds, only felt the sun’s heat on our shoulders and heads. We were able to stay cooler much better and body temperature regulation is also crucial to running. This leads to the next clue: we can sweat and other animals cannot. Sweating is our homeostasis when our body temperature is getting too high, but all other animals have to inefficiently pant out the heat. It’s much easier to run if you can sweat than if you can’t.
In order to synthesize these random features into a meaningful claim, I’ll need to mention two other remarkable differences between Australopithecus afarensis (us) and chimps. Archeologists have found that as we stood erect our heads and jaws shrunk, our brains grew, and we began eating meat. Our new diet that included meat gave our brains nutrients for it to grow. Meat is also not as tough as the roots and herbs chimps eat so we no longer needed big heads and jaws to chew through those veggies. To eat meat we had to kill the meat, but archeological digs have determined that we did not create weapons for another million years.
The answer is persistence hunting. We chased animals over vast distances until they passed out. Our butts, Achilles, stature, sweat glands, and feet all enabled us to run very efficiently. We are better at distance running than any other animal. Running was the bipedal secret that gave birth to what distinguished early-man from its chimpanzee counterparts.
We evolved to run and use that skill as a predatory technique to help get meat, which made us more human than we could ever imagine. Our brains grew and our heads shrunk because of what we ate but we could only eat meat because we could kill prey by running them to death. Running is essential to our evolutionary history; it is part of our genetic code. There’s something undeniably natural and cathartic about going out for a few miles in the morning or a nice jog at sunset. Running is part of how we came to be and continued to thrive; it made us human.
Artwork by TAMIR WILLIAMS
JOSH CLAXTON '18 is from Summit, N.J.
(11/19/14 9:44pm)
Students, staff and community members gathered in the Robert A. Jones conference room on Nov. 12 to discuss the feasibility of creating a “microgrid” on Middlebury College’s campus.
A microgrid is a smaller, more localized version of a larger power grid that brings distributed energy resources (e.g. wind, solar, natural gas) closer to where energy is being used. In this case, the larger power grid in the area is operated by Green Mountain Power (GMP), which currently supplies approximately 80 percent of the College’s electrical demand.
The creation of a microgrid would allow the College’s electrical system to better withstand extreme climate events. For example, if a storm were to cause a large-scale power outage, then the College would be able to disconnect from the main grid operated by GMP and continue to operate with the electrical generation available on campus.
Panelist speakers included Michael Hightower from Sandia National Laboratories, Jito Coleman from Green Toolbox Consulting and Josh Castonguay from GMP. The three shared their experiences working with microgrids and discussed successful implementation strategies.
“Microgrids are the future of energy distribution — they’re cheaper, better for renewables, more local and more resilient,” said Isaac Baker ’14.5, who helped organize the panel with Director of Sustainability Jack Byrne. Baker will be teaching a Winter Term course analyzing the feasibility of College microgrid from a financial, regulatory and logistical standpoint.
As a part of his independent study, Baker has been speaking with microgrid experts and researching the implementation of microgrids on college campuses across the country that are similar in size to Middlebury. Baker formed the idea for a microgrid while attending the Middlebury School of the Environment during its inaugural run last summer.
Baker said, “As a part of the sustainability practicum course, we were put into groups of four and matched with Director of Sustainability Jack Byrne. Our task was to assess climate vulnerability for Middlebury College, and the vulnerability my group identified was extended power outages due to extreme weather.”
Baker stated that a microgrid will give more resiliency to infrastructure at the College, most significantly through the ability to go into “Island Mode,” where the microgrid can fully power the College if the main grid operated by GMP goes down.
Princeton University and Wesleyan University are currently among the rising number of schools that have successfully created their own microgrids. Princeton’s microgrid gained recognition two years ago when it successfully went into Island Mode and kept power running to the school through Hurricane Sandy.
“Once you have a microgrid, another benefit is that you’re you’re able to act as a point of aid for the college and the surrounding community during disaster scenarios,” Baker said.
Baker added that both schools he has been focusing his research on — Princeton and Wesleyan — have seen significant savings since” implementing a microgrid
He said, “The way it works economically is that [the microgrid] operates in parallel with the larger power grid, so at any moment we can take power from the grid or sell some of it back. This means we wouldn’t have to invest as much in storing our electricity.”
Additionally, the microgrid fits in with the College’s goal toward achieving carbon neutrality.
“Our goal is to figure out how and if we can make the College more climate resilient while achieving other essential institutional goals,” Baker said. “We probably won’t go forward with the project unless we can both decrease the amount of carbon in our electricity and also decrease the cost of that energy.”
A more detailed analysis of the economic costs and benefits of a Middlebury microgrid will be conducted in Baker’s winter term course.
Baker said, “The general outline is that we will be spending the first week examining our campus infrastructure and understanding the system we have here as best as we can. The next three weeks will go into developing a proposal for the project — how much it will cost and its feasibility from a regulatory standpoint.”
He continued, “If our findings show that a microgrid is something we should be considering, then we will be refining our ideas and start planning a presentation for the Board of Trustees.”
Baker added that the course — which has been filled — will contain a good sampling of students, from first-years to seniors. He said, “If [the microgrid project] goes through, it will inevitably be a multi-year project.”
Baker said, “What inspired me to do this project is that we have so much of the infrastructure already in place: we own our own power lines, we already produce a great deal of energy on campus, and we have access to two stable, inexpensive, and carbon-neutral sources of energy, wood chips and biomethane.”
He added, “We know we’re on track to hit carbon neutrality in 2016. Once we get there, the question will be how do we move forward and make carbon neutrality a visible reality here on campus? The College has been hailed as an environmental leader because we’ve made strong commitments in the past… building a microgrid now would put us ahead of the curve and show once again that we can walk the walk in the face of climate change.
