(Update: On 11 Oct 2021 the Reed College Board of Trustees announced its decision to divest the college’s endowment from fossil fuels. Read about it here.)
I just read Bill McKibben’s “Climate: Will We Lose the Endgame?” (NY Review of Book, 10 July 2014). The article reviews three documents: a book on Antarctica, a report from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (fyi – I’m a member), and a US government document (the 3rd Nat’l Climate Assessment). The news is not good:
“slow-motion collapse [of Antarctica’s ice sheets], which will occur over many decades, is “unstoppable” at this point, scientists say; it has “passed the point of no return.”
Of course, what everyone knows is that, as the ice melts, the oceans will rise, ravaging coastal communities and ecosystems that are home to so much of the planet’s human population. Passing “the point of no return” promises a dire outcome, but what’s to be done if the tipping point to catastrophe already lies somewhere behind us? McKibben offers a ready answer:
“It doesn’t mean we should give up efforts to slow climate change: if anything, as scientists immediately pointed out, it means we should ramp them up enormously, because we can still affect the rate at which this change happens, and hence the level of chaos it produces. Coping over centuries will be easier than coping over decades.“
Many powerful institutions in our society, Reed College among them, believe that climate change, as bad as some might make it sound, is really just a political matter. Just 7 days after McKibben’s article appeared, the College’s Board of Trustees rejected any and all types of financial disengagement from the rewards of fossil fuel consumption (“Reed College Board of Trustees Chairman Responds to Fossil Free Reed,” Roger Perlmutter, 17 July 2014). In the Board’s eyes, taking any action in this regard would threaten “academic freedom” and would only be justified “where the action taken reflects widely-held, perhaps almost universally held, social, or moral positions.”
With all due respect, I can assure the Board that climate change is a global phenomenon that will be “almost universally” experienced. What we choose to do, or not do, will also have universal consequences.
That’s how physics works.
