Fri 15 Jun 2007
Think that global warming is a major problem and that, therefore, the College’s Climate Action initiative is a good idea? Read this (pdf) for a contrary view.
My complaint is not so much that the science of global warming is oversold or that the College has as much (or as little) responsibility toward climate change as it does to other issues (say, malaria). The issue is the rampant hypocrisy which pervades the Williams community. If the College were really concerned about carbon emissions, the faculty offices in the new Stetson would not be huge (300 square feet). Previous discussion here.
Also, stuff like this is absurd.
Amy Johns, environmental analyst at the Center for Environmental Studies, has been crunching the numbers to determine the environmental impact of travel by families and friends to attend Commencement ceremonies.
“A rough estimate of CO2 associated with running the campus for Commencement is 118 tons,” Johns said. “The estimated impact of family and guests’ air travel is about 650 tons and car travel about 50 tons.”
“One way for the college to promote sustainability is through the purchase of carbon offsets for the energy expended in running the campus during, and for family and guests’ travel to, Commencement,” said Boyd.
The college will purchase approximately $8,600 worth of offsets from Owl Feather War Bonnet Wind Farm, a 30 megawatt wind farm being developed by the Rosebud Sioux Tribe in South Dakota and from the Wanner Family Dairy Farm Methane Project in Narvon, PA. The anaerobic methane digester on the dairy farm is estimated to produce approximately 2,000 kWh of electricity a day.
Alas, time constraints prevent me from investigating these offsets (see the original article for links) but 95% of this stuff is bunk. At least, that is what my smart left-wing sources tell me.
Carbon offsets are the modern day indulgences, sold to an increasingly carbon conscious public to absolve their climate sins. Scratch the surface, however, and a disturbing picture emerges, where creative accountancy and elaborate shell games cover up the impossibility of verifying genuine climate change benefits, and where communities in the South often have little choice as offset projects are inflicted on them.
This report argues that offsets place disproportionate emphasis on individual lifestyles and carbon footprints, distracting attention from the wider, systemic changes and collective political action that needs to be taken to tackle climate change. Promoting more effective and empowering approaches involves moving away from the marketing gimmicks, celebrity endorsements, technological quick fixes, and the North/South exploitation that the carbon offsets industry embodies.
Think that sending money Owl Feather War Bonnet Wind Farm — I swear, I am not making that name up! — helps the environment? Educate yourself. Read the report. Anyone know anything about the two projects that the College just sent your alumni donations to? Interested readers would like to know.
If the College were serious about this topic, it wouldn’t have 1/3 of the meetings of the Executive Committee of the Society of Alumni in locations like Portland. Think of the carbon that this sort of air-travel generates! Two years ago, everyone went on a fun junket to London. Cry for Mother Gaiea!
Now, my position is that global warming is neither certain nor necessarily harmful, but I have been having that fight with fellow Ephs for two decades. Maybe my opponents will be right someday! Stopped calendars and whatnot. In the meantime, the College should not involve itself in partisan disputes outside of its core mission.
June 15th, 2007 at 9:55 am
While I agree that good natured people are being duped by the “modern day indulgences” that are carbon offsets, I strongly disagree with your statement that the college has the same degree of responsibility when it comes to climate change as it does to malaria. That’s just plain silly. Day to day operations of the college are not a contributor to the problem of malaria, but they might be a contributor to climate change.
Additionally, trying to hide behind the idea that this is a political issue that the college should not touch is a poor argument. Issues of climate change have become highly politicized, but to imply that any stance the college decides to take on the issue of its environmental impact must be one of politics is unreasonable. The college shouldn’t avoid doing things to be more environmentally responsible just because there are strong political opinions on both side of this issue.
That said, I think there is a definite danger here for the college to put their efforts into high profile and useless ideas, like offsetting the carbon emissions of everyone who comes to graduation, instead of less sexy but more effective initiatives.
June 15th, 2007 at 11:01 am
let’s not get too serious/righteous/focused about an expenditure of $9000 by williams. This is a cute marketing move because climate change efforts are popular (not that it is good or bad, but this is a drop in the williams bucket of environmental efforts).
it’s a nice page, it looks good, and it was a good way to get a large group of people to consider the small changes (local foods, actively recycling, etc.) that can make a change in our attitudes toward how we treat the environment. color me skeptical of any bitching coming out of this press release type website.
And in looking at the green graduation, want to point out exactly what in its page was “partisan”. You’re creating an issue where there isn’t one. What exactly is partisan about:
-buying local food
-recycling plastic
-buying carbon offsets (its a market based solution. the type i thought conservative free-marketers like)
In other words: David, where’s the beef?
June 15th, 2007 at 1:09 pm
The root causes of climate change have not been what we conventionally think of as “political.” That is to say, the government has not been creating the greenhouse gases that are now warming the planet and increasing the occurrence of extreme climate events (to give an Argentine example, Buenos Aires and the littoral regions have experienced more floods and rainfall in the last year, leading to the appearance of dengue, while the sub-Andean regions are undergoing a severe drought). Rather, it is private institutions - certain industries, many individual consumers, and organizations such as Williams college - who have been doing so.
Read this way, climate change is not a political event. It’s a consquence of our scheme for economic development/consumption. Of course, the private sector has not (currently) provided a solution to climate change. It’s a market failure; the old tragedy of the commons thing. And that’s the point at which many people think that it should become political - that the government needs to step in and correct the market failure.
Williams’ involvement in climate change is not political. It, as Rory points out, does not involve an entanglement in national politics. It is a thoroughly private-sector enterprise - an attempt to correct the original, non-political cause of climate change through non-political means.
Your attitude, that Williams should do nothing on this issue, would be superficially more comfortable. But if Williams does nothing, the climate crisis will eventually become too severe to ignore - and at that point, we will see it manifest itself as a full-blown political crisis. If the private sector doesn’t take initiative now, the end result will be that the government will be forced to take serious regulatory action a few years down the road. That would, ultimately, entangle Williams in politics far more firmly than a non-political commitment to reducing emissions does.
Please note that I don’t particularly agree with these divisions of “private” and “political”. They’re convenient and no more.
June 15th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
I agree that Owl Feather War Bonnet Wind Farm is a hilarious name, and David should feel free to get his knickers in a twist about certain hypocritical aspects of the college’s environmental policy if it makes him feel better. But as everyone here has pointed out, none of that means that the college shouldn’t be doing its utmost to undertake green-friendly efforts wherever it can, in on-campus construction, consumption, wherever. I think, and the college claims, it’s already doing this at the moment — David has a hypothesis otherwise with regard to the capital carbon costs, but nobody agrees with him.
That doesn’t mean he’s wrong! But, and no offense David, telling people to educate themselves on the environment and then suggesting you’ve been winning a 20-year argument on climate change isn’t a way to make your assertions any more believable. How about educating yourself on what’s actually happened to, say, the climate over the past 20 years, and then getting back to us? (Hint: start in the upper latitudes.)
June 15th, 2007 at 2:59 pm
There’s a component to all of this that goes beyond the specifics of carbon emissions: that it is presumably desireable for a college to encourage student inititiatives and engagement in the issues of the day. Therefore, there may be educational benefits to such initiatives (divestment, environmental issues, genocide, and so on and so forth) that derive from the process itself, independent of the specific initiatives. Of course, this idea rests on the notion that we believe a college’s mission is to prepare students for a life of civic engagement and leadership.
As for this specific initiative, I think you’ll find that Williams is hardly unique. Swarthmore students and alumni organized a similar initiative for Alumni weekend. They tasked an Energy Analysis engineering class (ENG 4B) with the project of calculating the carbon footprint of alumni weekend. The class came up with a “cost” of $8 per person. They then set up a voluntary carbon offset contribution for each attendee, with the money going into a fund. Instead of buying the carbon offsets elsewhere, the class came up with a proposal to spend the donated money to make improvements on campus, specifically converting incandescent “EXIT” signs in campus buildings to low-energy LED signs. As part of the class project, the students calculated the costs and savings of converting the EXIT signs. A link to the assumptions and Excel spreadsheets used by the class is available from the webpage cited above.
To me, these types of initiatives, such as the Wiliams commencement effort, can be valuable “teaching opportunities” independent of any underlying political views on global warming. I think it’s important that college administrators respect these initiatives and not discourage them out of hand with responses that sound to students like, “NO…because I’m the Daddy.” A proper response, IMO, should be to express a receptiveness to the idea and a challenge to the students to do their homework and make their case. This requires a good faith belief on the students’ behalf that, if they present a well-researched, logically-supported, persuasive argument that addresses the costs and benefits, the administration will be responsive.
June 15th, 2007 at 4:51 pm
While we’re on the subject of bunk, David’s claim in the original post that faculty offices in Stetson-Saywer are 300 sq ft each is incorrect–not even close, in fact. They are 160 sq ft. The new buildings will be substantially more energy efficient than the ones they replace. That doesn’t completely offset the carbon cost of building them, but it helps.
June 15th, 2007 at 5:10 pm
1) Thanks to Professor Brown for the correction! I could have sworn that I heard the 300 sq foot figure from somewhere reliable. Are there example plans available? It was my understanding that every office contained enough room for a table and chairs for holding tutorials. Is that false?
2) And, fortunately, my point still stands! 160 square feet (heated all winter and cooled all summer) is big. My office is smaller and I share it. Shrink the offices in half and you would shrink the carbon emmissions. Or don’t you care about global warming?
Again, I want my friends Michael Brown and Joe Cruz and Peter Just et al to have big beautiful offices. I just don’t want to have to listen to hypocritcal preening from the College about carbon emissions.
The new Stetson-Sawyer will emit much more carbon than the old one and the contruction process will emit untold tons of carbon as well. In fact, the College refuses to even ask the contractor for an estimate of the total emissions. (Feel free to check this claim with Stephanie Boyd.)
You can preen about carbon emissions. You can have a new Stetson-Sawyer. You can’t do both.
3) The beef is that carbon offsets are a joke, a scam, a delusion. Buying carbon offsets does not remove all the carbon pumped into the atmosphere by the private jets of rich trustees as they jet to commencement. The carbon is still there. But Chief War Bonnet is happy. The political statement that I object to is spending money on offsets, both because it accomplishes nothing of substance and becaise the money could be spent elsewhere.
4) As documented, the debate I had with an Eph 20 years ago was not about temperature changes, it was about sea-level rises. He claimed that the Florida coastline was doomed, within ten years. His Eph descendants still claim that! Maybe one day they’ll be right . . .
June 15th, 2007 at 5:44 pm
Strawman!
June 15th, 2007 at 5:58 pm
Bias has been drilled into you for every conceivable type of issue. You have graduated from school thinking you have all the answers and that there are no open issues that need to be debated. In other words, you think the establishment is all-knowing.
All your life you have been taught by people inside the “establishment” and you have been taught that what the “establishment” teaches is true, and you have been taught what is wrong with the “intolerant ones” and you have been taught not to listen to them.
Rather than give the public a huge range of data, they pick specific data. Thus, by using generous assumptions, I can assure the reader that in some cases, the assumptions they make with the data amounts to 99% of the “evidence” used to reach their final conclusion.
Did it ever occur to you that you have not been taught by “truth-seekers,” but rather you have been taught by “benefit-seekers?”
We have been conditioned to believe that an “open-minded” person is someone who absorbs the propaganda of why the establishment is always right, and defends the storyline propaganda of why the “intolerant ones” are always wrong.
Thus, you are a member of the establishment and a certified “defender of the faith” of our good science.
“Education … has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.”
G.M. Trevelyan
People are taught from birth to assume and expect that those in the “establishment” (such as the schools, the news broadcasters and newspapers):
1) Have no vested interests or conflicts of interest,
2) Have perfect intelligence,
3) Have all the facts for both sides of the fence,
4) Are totally neutral and unbiased,
5) Have perfect integrity,
6) Have your best interests in mind, and
7) Are truly open-minded.
And above all, you are never, never allowed to think that money or power (i.e. benefits) could possibly influence what the establishment teaches you.
June 15th, 2007 at 10:53 pm
“Bias has been drilled into you for every conceivable type of issue. You have graduated from school thinking you have all the answers and that there are no open issues that need to be debated.”
Can anyone who graduated from Williams honestly say that this describes their reality?
Please.
June 16th, 2007 at 1:23 am
The subject is not about Williams College. The subject is global warming and CO2 emissions. About the crisis management and the subsequent stress created. The subject is mind control. For example: drudgereport.com’s recent posting: “Maine fourth-graders issue climate report: ‘Global warming is a huge pending global disaster’…” (http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=113600) This headline alone along with media channels and political figures who write books that support such outcomes.
June 16th, 2007 at 1:29 am
Read drudgereport.com’s latest entry: Maine fourth-graders issue climate report: ‘Global warming is a huge pending global disaster’…
http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=113600.
This is not about Williams College. This is about the global warming crisis and the media channels that create consensus through reinforcement of messages. This is about Albert Gore and all those “experts” on CO2 emissions and how WE CAN DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.
June 16th, 2007 at 2:03 pm
LOL at the repetition of subject matter, the use of drudgereport.com as a good source of information, and the mindless condescenion in these last couple of postings.
I notice these troll-type comments have been more and more popular ever since rob s. near-nazi experience on this blog (can I call it that? too bad…I just did!). coincidence?
June 16th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, at least it’s an ethos!
June 16th, 2007 at 9:57 pm
Rory@2:03 –
I THINK NOT.
Wow, that felt good.
June 18th, 2007 at 11:52 am
i just had to say that “Owl Feather War Bonnet Wind Farm” is named after a real person. i could imagine what we could say about your names. Native American names are a rich tradition that we are proud of. So you college educated people should give more respect to people then you do.
June 18th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
Sorace sounds like an Italian/Sicilian surname. You’re as “Native American” as Chris Columbus!
June 18th, 2007 at 5:49 pm
My father is sicilian and my mother was full blood Sicangu Lakota (sioux for you white people).
April 15th, 2008 at 10:45 am
Sicangu Lakota…?! Did she grow up on the Rosebud Reservation?
On a Sicangu Lakota-related topic, Williams bought some renewable energy credits from the Sicangu Lakota last year, I believe.