Sunrise-Movement

After years of student pressure and internal dialogue, Columbia announced on Friday that it will not directly invest in publicly-traded oil and gas companies for the foreseeable future. The University said it may make exceptions for companies with credible plans for net-zero emissions by 2050.

Accelerating the momentum from a nationally-covered climate change protest at the Harvard-Yale game in November, the Sunrise Movement at Columbia organized a video campaign called #NobodyWins in collaboration with 17 other universities. The video aims to present a unified message that calls attention to the growing strength of the University fossil fuel divestment movement.

Over 100 Columbia faculty members signed a petition in support of the Extinction Rebellion hunger strikers and their demands to declare a climate emergency, reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, and divest from fossil fuel companies by 2025. Extinction Rebellion further calls upon the University to form an assembly of representatives from surrounding communities and University stakeholders in order to address greenhouse gas emissions.

As dozens of students lined up to question members of Columbia’s newly formed Climate Change Task Force at the student town halls this week, many highlighted the urgency for student involvement in conversations around how the University addresses climate change.

Columbia University President Lee Bollinger recently announced the establishment of a Climate Change Task Force through a schoolwide email, in which he asked the Columbia community, “Are we doing enough?”

The Columbia chapter of the Sunrise Movement, an organization which aims to stop climate change, has called on University President Lee Bollinger to sign the UN Environment’s Global Climate Emergency letter and declare a climate emergency by Dec. 1.

It’s a rainy Thursday evening at the beginning of October, and a group of students is hard at work in Hamilton 516, solving climate change. At the front of the classroom, long sheets of bright yellow paper are spread out on the floor as students sketch out an outline of Manhattan with chalk. Soon, that outline will be filled in with black and blue paint, representing the areas of New York City that will be severely flooded if sea levels continue to rise. But 516 and its inhabitants—the Columbia/Barnard Sunrise Movement hub—are far from grim. As Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” (a protest song from the 1960s, the one that goes: “... stop, children, what’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down ...”) threads through the speakers, what you get instead is a sense of hope.

Around 300 Columbia and Barnard students marched in a climate strike with thousands of other young activists—including Swedish teen Greta Thunberg—in New York on Friday as part of a global movement to protest climate change. Strike organizers estimated a turnout of 250,000 protesters in New York while the Mayor’s Office estimated 60,000. Organizers also estimated there were 4 million strikers from over 150 countries worldwide.

Nearly 200 students, community members, and political activists flocked to Low Steps Friday morning as part of a global movement to call for urgent political action on climate change.

Walking into the first set of double doors that lead into the Movement Lab on the lower level of Barnard’s Milstein Center, visitors are greeted by a shoe rack. Only after removing their footwear are dancers, professors, and visitors alike able to walk through the second set of doors, which open up to reveal an unmirrored and largely unstructured space.