Opinion: 'Greenwashing' The Truth About Climate Change In Glasgow And At SDSU

San Diego CA

10 November, 2021

4:24 PM

Description

By Jonathan Graubart, Times of San Diego November 10, 2021 This week world leaders are meeting in Glasgow to address the grave climate crisis. The rhetorical aims of President Biden and others are lofty. Pursuant to the 2015 Paris Accord, they aim to "avoid dangerous climate change" by limiting the warming of the earth to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. To accomplish this goal, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change informs us the world will need a 45% reduction in carbon emissions (compared to 2010) by 2030 and in effect a 100% reduction by 2050. Tragically, neither the Paris Accord nor the ongoing policies of leading countries provide a pathway toward realizing such grand ambitions. The Paris Accord features nonbinding pledges of target reductions. Even if all states were to meet their pledges, carbon emissions would continue to increase while the Earth would be on pace to heat up at least another 2.4 C. Accordingly, the celebrated teen climate activist Greta Thunberg lamented that the Glasgow summit is simply a "greenwashing campaign" for political and business leaders to enable their ongoing complicity. Our best hope, she continued, is to expose the campaign and enable the initiation of a genuine global transformation. On a smaller scale, a comparable dynamic of greenwashing exists at San Diego State University. Two weeks ago, its media relations department issued a press release that trumpeted a new ranking from the Princeton Review classifying SDSU as a "Green College" that is "making exceptional commitments to sustainability." President Adela de la Torre remarked, "We are proud to be recognized yet again for being a dedicated leader in sustainability." Upon closer scrutiny, this accomplishment is not so impressive. In fact, the Princeton Review ranked 420 out of 835 Universities as "Green." Helping this grade inflation was a methodology based on self-reported data from the universities' administrators along with impressionistic student surveys. What then might a serious evaluation of SDSU's green credentials entail? One helpful guide would be the quality of its stated goals and implementation. To date, there appears to have been only one independent effort to evaluate SDSU's Climate Action Plan, which was done in August 2018 by two SDSU undergraduates in public health under the supervision of Dr. Zohir Chowdhury. Like the Paris Accord, the study identifies a sizeable gap between the goals and implementation in SDSU's plan. It aspires to be carbon-neutral by 2050 and talks about equity and input from a range of stakeholders. Already problematic is featuring carbon neutrality, which allows companies to issue dubious "carbon offsets," to enable the maintenance of carbon emissions. More troublesome, is that SDSU fails to identify any concrete steps to advance its goals. It has not developed a plan to either collaborate with marginalized groups or coordinate with local or state agencies. Similarly, the study finds that SDSU includes no schedule or method for monitoring its emission reduction efforts, but simply proclaims that monitoring will be done on a "regular basis." Another reason to doubt SDSU's commitments on the climate is its employment of a cogeneration plant, reliant upon the fracking of natural gas, for supplying most of its electricity. The drilling and extraction of this so-called transitional fossil fuel, combined with its transit across pipelines, causes leakage of methane, a gas 86 times stronger than CO2 at trapping heat over a 20-year period. The process of fracking also has a track record of being highly toxic to local and primarily marginalized communities, including in the Central Valley. Revealingly SDSU acknowledges the need to phase out its cogeneration plan to have any hope of carbon neutrality, but lacks a plan to do so. It has also expressed no intention to discontinue its partnership with U.S. Bank despite the bank's longstanding financing of the fossil fuel industry. Guided then by Thunberg's insight, SDSU's claims of being a green campus should not be simply dismissed as empty self-promotion. Rather its propaganda produces a dangerous complacency that impedes the urgent goal of robust climate activism. To be sure, SDSU is only one small example. Yet for us to have any hope of making the fundamental changes needed in the next decade to reverse our trajectory of self-destruction, it is imperative that all leading institutions of higher education acknowledge their complicity and commit fully to the struggle, rather than persist in a mixture of denial and disingenuousness. For this to happen, we will need to see a profound escalation in activism from below to speak truth to power. Jonathan Graubart is a professor of international relations at San Diego State and advisor for the Center on International Security and Conflict Resolution. Times of San Diego is an independent online news site covering the San Diego metropolitan area. Our journalists report on politics, crime, business, sports, education, arts, the military and everyday life in San Diego. No subscription is required, and you can sign up for a free daily newsletter with a summary of the latest news.