On Earth Day, President Sian Beilock announced the Dartmouth Climate Collaborative. The strategy is part of Beilock’s previously stated goal to use the College’s vast resources to not only address emissions and climate change on campus but also to direct its scholarly energy to research potential solutions for the broader issue. Of course, we must recognize and remember the difference between a detailed plan—one that offers tangible and achievable results—and an announcement replete with buzzwords and grand ambitions meant merely to appease the climate crowd. In reading this announcement, it seems more likely that this Dartmouth Climate Collaborative is more of the latter.
The highlight of the announcement is a promise to invest more than half a billion dollars to reduce emissions from the campus’s physical plant. The plan sets lofty standards, insisting that emissions will be reduced by 60 percent by 2030 and 100 percent by 2050. To achieve this Dartmouth’s infrastructure will need to undergo significant upgrades, including transitioning from steam to hot-water heating and installing geo-exchange borefields and high-capacity heat pumps.
On the scholarly side of things, the Climate Futures Initiative, a year-long effort led by anthropology professor Laura Ogden, will “identify Dartmouth’s strengths and opportunities for climate scholarship locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally.” The initiative will apparently consist of three colloquia which will bring faculty together to discuss the progress in their respective fields.
I’m quite skeptical that these “conversations” will be something more than public relations spectacles to prove to the student body that the College is working diligently to save planet Earth. What exactly are these supposed to contribute to the academic sphere? Like most of the College’s initiatives and events, I’m willing to bet that these will merely offer the chance for professors to virtue signal and compete with each other to be the most environmentally-enlightened. That is, we’ll get a waste of an afternoon.
As an aside, this Climate Futures Initiative will also seek to include academics in the humanities and the arts. I’m not exactly sure what a scholar on Tolstoy or the music of Bach will be able to contribute to a conversation on emission reductions. They are taking this “interdisciplinary collaboration” a bit too far. Hopefully they don’t write and perform a play about carbon dioxide’s destruction of the planet. I should be careful—I might give them ideas.
Anyway, this Dartmouth Climate Initiative employs the typical language that we’ve been hearing from College administrators for a while now. It sounded remarkably similar to Beilock’s commitments in her address at her inauguration in September, repackaged in different language but effectively saying the same thing.
Last fall she called for increased investments toward campus decarbonization efforts and pledged to “apply our unique understanding and our sense of place, especially around cold-weather climate solutions.” So, the email that we received on Earth Day was not news, nor did it promise anything that hadn’t been mentioned before. The plan was given a fancy new name and professors to lead it, but that was really it.
Beilock has also faced criticism from the perpetually-malcontented activists on this campus for not doing enough (a few days later these “revolutionaries” would give her even more grief for sending the cavalry at them, so let’s all thank her for fighting on multiple fronts). The Dartmouth ran an opinion piece claiming that “The climate crisis is rooted in colonialism, extractivism, notions of human superiority over ‘nature’ and incentives to exploit people and land for profit,” and that “Beilock’s climate response lacks an explicit prioritization of justice and upholds harmful structures that exacerbate climate injustice and apartheid.” I’m struggling to understand how promising to update infrastructure upholds apartheid, but what do I know? Apparently vowing to eliminate all emissions in the next few decades isn’t enough. It’s clear that improving the environment is not the priority for many of these activists; rather, climate change is just one more vehicle through which to fight the anti-colonial war.
All in all, let’s recognize this announcement for what it is: simple PR meant to appease the climate hawks. If the College can actually take steps toward improving campus infrastructure, great, but there’s really no need for all these random initiatives and colloquia. Beilock is simply giving the progressives what they want. Still, her email wasn’t enough to mollify the climate justice crusaders—but really, what more can she do to make these recalcitrant activists happy?
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