Climate-Change-Skeptics

Last semester, I was a part of the coalition of Black, Indigenous, and people of color first-year Barnard students that boycotted a required course called Big Problems: Making Sense of 2020—an act that culminated in a letter written to the Barnard administration. In short, the letter outlined an extensive list of our demands and detailed what our problems with the course were; particularly, its performative nature, the way it catered to white students, and how it depended on BIPOC students to exploit their lived experiences and traumas.

The greatest threat to our country is the precarious state of our democracy. Although there are countless, equally important existential threats, if the institutions of our fragmented government are not rebuilt and improved, the country will remain too vulnerable to turmoil.

On July 10, University President Lee Bollinger announced the opening of the Columbia Climate School. He based the decision on Columbia’s commitment to public life, writing: “We are not free to ignore the issues of our age and pursue whatever we want. We are ultimately responsible to our societies and the world. To that end, we must answer the call to serve.”

High air pollution rates. Toxic waste plants. High temperatures. These are only some of the issues that West Harlem residents face as a result of the ever-worsening climate crisis, coupled with systemic neglect on the part of government officials, the New York City Housing Authority, and the disproportionate number of pollutant-producing entities in the area.

Columbia’s announcement of a new climate school seems like nothing more than smoke and mirrors meant to distract from the fact that the University is still not divesting from fossil fuels, prioritizing carbon neutrality, or adhering to all six R’s of sustainability.

I slouch over my computer in Avery Library, the light of a bright lamp shining on the lenses of my glasses and my keyboard. It is a few weeks before the holiday break and I am planning my finals schedule on a Notes document, figuring out how to best allocate my study hours. I type in my last final’s time slot: December 18, from 10:10 a.m. to 1 p.m., and then I pause. I hold my cheek against my left hand. I dribble my right fingers against the table.

As the most recent step in a years-long battle, faculty and student activists stood in front of an official University advisory committee last Wednesday to call for Columbia’s divestment from all companies “primarily in the fossil fuel and extraction business.”

The consensus on climate change is not new—it is happening now, it is caused by humans, and is worse than we ever predicted. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, bound by the inherent conservatism of consensus-based science, predicts three degrees of warming by 2100. For reference, two degrees of warming is what Marshall Islands’ leaders have called “genocide,” as sea-level rise promises to elide not just countless homes and histories, but also cultures, languages, species, and the people that made them. In order to limit warming to “safe” levels, the IPCC calls for “rapid and far-reaching transitions in energy, land, urban, and infrastructure.” And yet, Columbia University continues to devote unknown portions of its $11,000,000,000 endowment to companies that are some of the worst perpetrators of climate misinformation, often with values that are already crumbling due to the overdevelopment of fossil resources.

Extinction Rebellion Columbia University, a climate activist student group, will propose that the University divest from all fossil fuels in front of the Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing this Wednesday.