Bryan Alexander

Greetings from COVID containment. My wife and I remain sequestered. We spent Halloween night watching costumed visitors from our bedroom window and watching horror movies.

But COVID can’t stop my work!  Today I’d like to share several stories about global warming and academia.  I think they might be evidence of rising climate action within higher education.

First, students from six campuses – Pennsylvania State University, Tufts University, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania,  Pomona College, and Washington University in St Louis –  filed legal complaints with their respective states atttorneys general.  The charge: “by investing in coal, oil and gas, the schools are violating their obligations as non-profit organizations to prioritize the public interest.”

I found several interesting details in this story.  For one, it wasn’t just students: “Each filing elicited signatures of support from dozens of faculty and staff members, alumni and local, national and international climate-focused groups.”

For another, they charged campus fiscal support of fossil fuel firms to be contrary to institutions’ intellectual missions:

“Fossil fuel companies have long engaged in a well-documented campaign to undermine climate science and distort public debate about how to deal with the climate crisis – including through efforts targeting Penn scientists and researchers,” University of Pennsylvania students wrote in their filing. “The industry’s spread of scientific misinformation undermines the work of Penn faculty and students who are researching and designing solutions for a sustainable future.”

Students also raised this point about consistency:

“If universities say, ‘We’re climate leaders, we stand for justice,’ but then on the other hand financially contribute to the climate crisis, we just see that as unacceptable,” said Moli Ma, an undergraduate student at Tufts, who helped lead the complaint against her university. “There’s an incongruence there. It doesn’t match up.”

“A view of the oil fields from the bluff on Panorama in Northeast Bakersfield, CA – USA”

Not being a lawyer, I can’t offer authoritative comments, but was struck by two legal strategies which look to be nearly universally applicable.  One concerns a specific law, which paying petroleum companies might violate:

Four of Monday’s filings allege that schools breached the Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act, a law adopted by 49 states requiring non-profit institutions to consider their “charitable purposes” in their investments and to do so with “prudence” and “loyalty”.

Pennsylvania apparently stands alone on this score:

Pennsylvania has not passed such a law, so students’ legal complaints against the University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania State University are based on similar regulations that fall under the state’s Decedents, Estates, and Fiduciary Code.

Then there’s this very pragmatic point:

Another key argument in each complaint: investing in fossil fuel stocks not only harms the climate and threatens human health, but also creates financial risk.

“We make the case that fossil fuels from a purely financial point of view are a very bad investment,” said Ted Hamilton, a lawyer with the Climate Defense Project who has worked on each of the legal filings. “This sector is very volatile. It’s been underperforming lately, and especially for long-term institutional investors like universities, it has a very bad value thesis [for] the coming decades.”

The next two stories aren’t purely academic, but include a bunch of faculty and staff.

Several health care groups with large memberships are about to post a joint letter calling for urgent climate action.  Apparently the text is all about the impact of global warming on public health:

“We the family doctors, doctors and health professionals of the world call on world leaders to take urgent action to safeguard the health of global populations from the climate crisis,” the open letter reads.

And the urgency is clear:

The signatories include health bodies from Canada, India, Europe, Pacific nations and the UK, who are demanding all governments end the expansion of any new fossil fuel infrastructure and production, phase out existing fuels, remove subsidies and invest in renewable energy.

“If we are to have any chance of limiting warming to 1.5C and halting the escalation of the climate health emergency, we must end the proliferation of fossil fuels,” the letter says.

Now these are health care practitioners, not all academics, but some of them surely are academics: full time faculty members, medical professionals working as adjuncts, and so on.

Third story: the Washington Post reports on what it finds to be a growing sense of climate emergency among scientists.

Shannon Osaka notes an increasing desperation among scientists to get political leaders to pay attention and take action.

As with the medical associations story, not all climate scientists are academics, but some are, either full- or part-time.

What do these stories signal about academia and the climate crisis?

Overall, I think they point to incrementally rising climate concern among the higher education community. It’s not a radical break, but an advance along a growth curve.

Note the students taking that bold legal and political step. I wonder how many campus presidents and (for private institutions) trustees feel outflanked and irked.  Personally, I admire the combination of student research and practice.

Note, too, the overlap with non-academic professional societies.  They may become a soure of climate energy.

Watch for more stories like this.  See if the students, faculty, and staff around you are following suit.  And hey, you could join them.

(two links via Bill McKibben’s excellent newsletter; crowded oil field photo by Babette Plana; “Just Stop It” photo by Matt Hrkac)

(A short post today. I apologize for the low level of blogging.  That’s due to an explosion of overwork plus the family challenges I’ve shared.)

One feature of the professional futurist’s work is monitoring the present to check how it bears out one’s forecasts, or how it doesn’t.  Either way the futurist has to recalibrate their work, using evidence to inform models.

Today I wanted to share two pieces of evidence from the world having to do with what I’ve been futuring about in terms of academia and the climate crisis. I think each confirms what I anticipated, but am certainly open to other views.

To back up: I started publicly research how higher education and climate might intersect four years ago. Universities on Fire appeared this past March.  In those blog posts and that book, not to mention presentations and social media notes, I’ve warned about two possible impacts we need to plan for: increasing physical damage to campuses and challenges to research materials.

ITEM: the New York Times reports on scholars who are seeing their research materials and subjects dwindle as a result of global warming.  (gift link) They discuss glaciers, coral reefs, Arctic mammals, tropical birds, Pacific Northwest salmon, subsaharan trees, and Argentine penguins.  Read the article carefully, as each researcher offers a different take, as well as varied levels of emotional response.

For example,

How does this impact researchers?  How can they preserve their subjects or find a way to modify their agenda?  At an institutional level, how can a university of college best support faculty, staff, and students confronting such challenges?

ITEM: Hurricane Otis struck Mexico, wrecking swathes of Acapulco, Guerrero, killing at least 27.

How did this impact higher education?   Physical damage is the obvious answer. It’s hard to get good information so far, yet we can note that that state has one major public university, Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero (Autonomous University of Guerrero) with multiple campuses, including one in Acapulco. Wikipedia estimates it has nearly 26,000 students plus faculty and staff.

Guerrero also has significant archaeological sites, some of which might have been damaged.  I haven’t been able to find reports of damage or injuries; hopefully that’s because Otis spared academia.

One datapoint: weather forecasters initially saw Otis as a mild storm, but it underwent rapid intensification a/k/a “explosive intensification,” becoming much more dangerous in a hurry.  As Zoë Schlanger put it,

gaining more than 100 miles per hour of wind speed in 24 hours. Suddenly, the tropical storm became a Category 5 hurricane just before reaching Acapulco—home to 1 million people—at 12:25 a.m. local time. And no one saw it coming.

More:

A short 16 hours before Otis made landfall, the National Hurricane Center predicted that it would come ashore as a Category 1 storm. Jeff Masters and Bob Henson, both veteran hurricane specialists, called that “one of the biggest and most consequential forecast-model misses of recent years.”

We might anticipate that weather forecasts might become less reliable as what I prefer to call global weirding messes with Earth systems and our expectations.

Last note: in my work on climate change it seems that every week offers such stories, along with projections like mine and those whose work I rely on. As a species humanity is wading ever more deeply into the Anthropocene.  Higher ed is unavoidably caught up in the process.  The question I leave you with is: what do we do about it now?

(Universidad Autónoma de guerrero photo by Francisco Mena)

How can academics respond to the unfolding climate crisis?

One was is to organize your campus to think hard and to take serious steps about global warming.  Today’s example comes from upstate New York, with the launch of a faculty and local community group calling itself Cornell on Fire.  (I am personally honored by the namecheck to my Universities on Fire book)

The group’s focus now is getting the university to declare an institutional climate emergency:

We, the members of Cornell and the local community, call on Cornell to publicly declare a CLIMATE EMERGENCY and take immediate action commensurate with the planet-wide severity of the ecological crisis. Declaring a climate emergency will amplify existing campaigns while catalyzing new initiatives. This declaration, when backed up by concrete changes in ALL aspects of the university’s functioning, will restore Cornell to its intended role as a hub of public service, focused on intensive and equitable solutions in the face of accelerating climate challenges.

I’m impressed by their call to transform campus operations, one of the key domains for academic climate action. I’m also struck by their emphasis on the university’s public role (“as a hub of public service”).

Cornell on Fire emphasizes its institutional capacity to drive major change: “When fully mobilized, Cornell University’s vast reserves of resources, knowledge, and power can spark a change in our collective approach to the climate crisis, from inertia and incrementalism to transformation.”

They also emphasize social justice, including the rights of indigenous people: “By foregrounding calls for climate justice put forth by underrepresented groups, we can restore right relationship with Earth and with one another, upon these Gayogo̱hó:nǫɁ lands.”

Cornell on Fire’s signup sheet adds another point, that the campus has a lot of capacity on the climate front:

We have everything we need. Cornell houses countless strands of climate action, research, outreach, and teaching. Local governance and activists are poised to enact transformative climate justice locally. Blueprints are in place for a bold, unified push toward rapid change. [emphases in original]

The same page sees higher education playing a significant role in civilizational transformation: “University action could be an inflection point in our society’s transition to climate resilience.” [again, emphases in original]

That’s a signup sheet.  Cornell on Fire is seeking to grow.

I’m so excited to see a major university community start organizing themselves for the climate crisis.  I’m impressed by their focus (climate emergency declaration) and seriousness (calling for major change, wanting to impact the broader world).

Let’s see more campuses follow suit!

(Cornell photos by Barbara Friedman)