The Swarthmore College Board of Managers writes,
Following extensive preparation, analysis, and robust discussion and debate by managers on both sides of the issue, the Board of Managers of Swarthmore College reached consensus not to divest from fossil fuels. . .
The Board is fully committed to addressing the threat of climate change, however. To affirm our commitment, the College will intensify its sustainable practices as an institution. Our efforts will cut across all aspects of College operations including new construction, energy consumption, water usage, and recycling, and also the curriculum and investment practices. We will build upon important environmental efforts that have long been underway and expand upon them.
The email notifying alumni of this decision reads, in part,
The managers of Swarthmore College agree that climate change is the most pressing issue of our time and that Swarthmore College can — and must — play a leadership role in helping to curb the seemingly insatiable appetite for fossil fuel.
I think that a good rule of thumb is that if the board of managers of a college insists that something belongs in the curriculum, it doesn’t.
“climate change is the most pressing issue of our time”
Not, say, energy, for which climate change is simply the supposed (as yet to be identified positive or negative) externality? Bigger than that? Bigger than pandemic? Nobody gets sexual gratification from burning fossil fuels.
I know we know people don’t really believe what they say, but come on.
With the billions of wretchedly poor people in the world, “climate change is the most pressing issue of our time”? And now you will probably support things that will have the effect of keeping them poor. You rich, self-righteous assholes.
Nah, that line ain’t so bad. If you believe, as Swarthmore apparently does, that manmade climate change can have devastating impact on an ecosystem’s ability to support life, then it naturally follows that the environment must be saved ahead of modern economies. No sustainable ecosystem = no modern economy, after all.
If you believe, as Swarthmore apparently does, that manmade climate change can have devastating impact on an ecosystem’s ability to support life…
But that belief is so beyond the consensus as to be laughable. How could they dismiss all the issues that surround millions of people dying per year and billions living in crushing poverty in favor of such a scientifically unsupported opinion? It shows an almost pathological lack of concern for actual humans.
But, hey, it sounds like they care, so they’ll go with it!
MikeP, I am a Swarthmore alum and currently teach at a different university, and my impression from peers and students is that global warming = realistic chance of catastrophic failure of life on earth, so we should be willing to do everything we can to mitigate it now. Imagine taking the evidence posited in this book literally http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/books/review/naomi-klein-this-changes-everything-review.html , or that in Elizabeth Kolbert’s “The Sixth Extinction,” and the policies follow.
But YOU realize that is crazy, right?
Let’s say burning fossil fuels did cause catastrophic warming. We’d stop.
What is the imagined mechanism for unforeseen cataclysmic disaster? Some kind of global Lake Nyos event?
Andrew,
I personally don’t think the evidence justifies that belief, no. I think activists vastly underestimate future generations’ ability to adapt. But I think you’ll find that if you dig a little bit, the activists do have a consistent belief system built around a worst case scenario, mechanisms by which it would happen, and what we should do in the short term to stop it. Here’s an excerpt http://350.org/about/science/
“That “350 ppm” is where 350.org gets its name. “PPM” stands for “parts per million,” which is simply a way of measuring the ratio of carbon dioxide molecules to all of the other molecules in the atmosphere. Many scientists, climate experts, and progressive national governments agree with Dr. Hansen that 350 ppm is the “safe” level of carbon dioxide… Right now we’re at 400 ppm, and we’re adding 2 ppm of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year. Unless we are able to rapidly turn that around and return to below 350 ppm this century, we risk triggering tipping points and irreversible impacts that could send climate change spinning truly beyond our control.
So far, we’ve experienced about 1 degree (Celsius) of warming, and the impacts are frightening. Glaciers everywhere are melting and disappearing fast, threatening the primary source of clean water for millions of people. Mosquitoes, who like a warmer world, are spreading into lots of new places, and bringing malaria and dengue fever with them. Drought is becoming much more common, making food harder to grow in many places. Sea levels have begun to rise, and scientists warn that they could go up as much as several meters this century. If that happens, many of the world’s cities, island nations, and farmland will be underwater.”
And you’ll see on the bottom a bunch of citations.
I think a more productive conversation would come from suspending disbelief for a moment and engaging with the evidence they present. At the moment I don’t have time to do more than a brief review but someday I’d like to.
Anything can happen, but at what point do you think we will know that where we already are isn’t catastrophe?
Seth, I would be interested in a link to someone serious about CO2. Everywhere I look, I see people mouthing how important this is but not following through with a proposal that can even plausibly address the problem.
Dropping CO2 to the replacement level involves about a 90% reduction in total world CO2 emissions, and thus going back to the level of emissions of around 1910. Anything above the replacement level is going to let CO2 keep rising, and thus temperature rising, and thus merely delay any coming catastrophe rather than prevent it. I have not seen anyone put forward a real proposal to drop CO2 to the replacement level; have you?
Alternatively, someone worried about CO2 might allow the emissions to continue, but take steps to either sequester CO2 back out of the atmosphere, or to mitigate the negative consequences of CO2 (assuming there are any). Again, I see very little activity in either of those areas. I would welcome any pointers you can provide on someone pushing for them.
I see neither of the above approaches, which is what I’d expect from someone who consistently believes CO2 is highly dangerous. Instead, everyone who talks about CO2 seems to push the less coherent green policies that have been pushed for many decades, only now with CO2 being used as an excuse for them. Things like ethanol, wind power, electric cars, and trains. I think anyone serious would concede that these measures are all ineffective if CO2 is truly a catastrophic danger.
Others are addressing the scientific question here, so I’ll stick to the policy angle.
How is it even remotely defensible that the governors of Swarthmore so egregiously ignore the scientific consensus represented in the IPCC Assessment Reports? You can cite scientists (350.org) and nonscientists (Naomi Klein) who accept conclusions that go well beyond the science and economics. But why should the governors of a prestigious institution accept those extreme conclusions? Are they all such experts in the field? What does this say about them? About their institution?
Seriously, the very best thing it can say about their institution is that its managers will parrot what they think an overly concerned and undereducated audience want to hear when they’re not thinking seriously. All other conclusions are worse!
Daublin, My cursory investigation suggests that mainstream anti global-warming activists aren’t seriously discussing those proposals, but there may be people in the movement who are, I wouldn’t know. The lack of that discussion suggests to me that global warming plays the part of unifying myth for a cluster of leftist policy goals, a point David Friedman makes well here http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/11/a-revealing-cartoon.html
But the majority of news coverage is just, more carbon dioxide=bad, for instance this piece from USA today http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/05/06/carbon-dioxide-global-warming-climate-change/70881210/ , so unless you’re pretty scientifically literate (the perils of overfitting should be taught to all high school students IMO), motivated to look at the evidence yourself, and by default a contrarian, it’s going to be pretty easy to accept the narrative that CO2 is bad and that the best way to deal with it is to reduce its output.
Bryan Caplan’s theory of policy preferences as an irrational good here makes a lot of sense to me. No one will perceive themselves to bear the costs directly for being overly-pessimistic about global warming. So you can hold whatever beliefs make you feel like part of the club.
There are scenarios where a little more CO2 causes catastrophic “tipping” and significant loss of life on earth. However,
1) they are way outside the consensus;
2) I would respect someone who said, “Things will be really bad with more CO2. For the benefit of life on earth, I am sad to say that the world’s poor must stay poor. And since it is only fair, I am drastically reducing my own carbon footprint.” Garrett Hardin might have said something like that but I don’t hear it from anyone today.
From The Onion
Investment offers a superior moral choice; oil companies putting morals first would be a tremendous improvement.
“most pressing issue of our time…” So, not civil war, not extreme poverty, enslavement of women and children, child soldiers, disease, malnutrition, lack of access to drinking water, nuclear proliferation, rogue regimes……… no, it’s climate change. Wow. How absolutely ignorant and foolish.
“seemingly insatiable appetite for fossil fuel. ” Yes, and who keeps on building new, fancier infrastructures on campus?
Not to pile on, but how ’bout nuclear power. Solar storage. Global warming more pressing than the solutions? Does not compute.
Too bad, I always root for divestment. If by some miracle, they did succeed in driving down share prices, that would just mean higher yields for the rest of us. Just think of divestment as a tax on magical thinking. The more people self-impose, the better.
I admit, however, that I am somewhat unnerved by the fact that it seems like the ever more bizarre nonsense spewed by various members of the academy comes from the more prestigious and selective colleges out there. Some adjunct professor of White Male Repression at Podunk U. doesn’t bother me because I don’t expect much out of those kinds of people, anyway, and their students are just going to wind up working for some low income housing authority in Flyovertown, USA that will leave them disillusioned and cynical by age 35. But the silliness of both the students and faculty at once-proud (and still selective) institutions like Swarthmore, Oberlin, Brandeis, etc., is far more concerning. Their faculty actually have some cultural capital and influence and their students have real brain power and will one day be in positions of authority somewhere. Ye gods.
“Just think of divestment as a tax on magical thinking”
This is a great line.
I wouldn’t think of Swarthmore as uniformly buying into the rhetoric of catastrophe. Here’s a history professor there writing against it http://daily.swarthmore.edu/2015/02/11/against-divestment/ .
A more accurate read of this announcement, I think, is that the only real piece of news is that they continue to not divest, and the rest is just cheap talk indented to placate activists. It’s been a tough few years at Swarthmore, partly due to Title IX stuff http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2014/04/what-have-we-done-to-our-young-men-and-women , a testy fight over Robert Zoellick withdrawing from a commencement speech in 2013 https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/04/08/swarthmore-commencement-speaker-withdraws-over-controversy , climate activists hijacking a BoM meeting two years ago http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324216004578483080076663720 , and some race/power/privilege issues that came to the fore in a particularly memorable act of defacement a few years ago http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/swarthmore-colleges-rude-awakening-to-oppression-in-its-midst/ (piece is written by a very far left professor at Swarthmore, George Lakey).
All these details might not be of interest to an outsider, but I think they’re pretty important for understanding the context of why the BoM has decided to go with such a strident message.
-Seth Green
Swarthmore 2010
No one seems to question that global warming/cooling/change will/would be a 100% BAD thing that must be avoided at all, literally ALL, costs. Might it not also be of benefit to major parts of the planet that, for example, now don’t contain arable land? Perhaps if we just “let Nature take its course,” we’ll all be just fine with gradual adaptation to change?
We also have this, which brings into the realm of massive doubt any and all numbers produced heretofore and hereafter with respect to temperature measurement. How do you maintain any degree (pun intended) of data credibility when you massage your numbers and tout the revised results?
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/05/noaa-caught-rewriting-us-temperature-history-again.php
Accept all of it. Even acceat that it is so important that people like Swarthmore can’t actually do anything about it. Accept everything. Make Al Gore king.
Fail to safe nuclear design, thorium, fundamental research into solar with storage, consumption/pollution taxes, coal carbon sequestration. In other words it is still just an energy problem with energy solutions.
It would be nice if college leaders did not participate in political strawmen.
What does divesting mean? If a bunch of book worms can’t “duvest” it should tell them something. And if they could that would only tell them that they don’t even matter.