Dear President Simmons and the Board of Trustees of the Brown Corporation,
The Corporation will soon be hearing from Chris Powell, Brown's new energy manager, about options that Brown has for innovative, forward-looking energy solutions. We write to you because the emerging climate crisis caused by greenhouse gases from fossil fuels like oil and coal will be the greatest challenge that faces our generation. Creating a new energy future and preventing climate change from exacerbating existing global problems of poverty, disease and oppression will be a defining aspect of public policy for the rest of our lives.
The Empower Campaign is committed to working with the Energy and Environment Advisory Committee that Powell chairs to help Brown craft the very best energy plan possible. We appreciate the University's interest in new ideas for its energy use, and its public commitment to new clean energy policies by the end of the Spring 2007 semester. But in light of resounding evidence of the dangers of continued carbon emissions, we feel compelled to call for a University that - as our home, community and extended family - acts as a global leader. It is a moral imperative that Brown recognize its own contribution to climate change and take the necessary steps to eliminate it.
Within this context, we call on the University to adopt, in its next budget cycle and no later than 2008, a policy of climate neutrality: net-zero global warming emissions. We can take immediate responsibility for our emissions by purchasing "offsets" for 100 percent of Brown's carbon emissions. This should be followed by beginning an aggressive plan to reduce Brown's actual emissions, which add up to 10.1 tons of carbon emissions per student per year. In formulating a long-term goal, Brown should adopt the recommendations of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - a reduction in global warming emissions to 60 to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.
A multi-faceted approach will make these reductions possible with solutions that pay for themselves over a matter of years and will provide increased stability in Brown's energy costs. This includes maximizing Brown's energy efficiency, switching to low-carbon and no-carbon fuels for the University's co-generation plant and vehicle fleet, purchasing wind power for electricity needs and making all new construction green buildings.
In order to create this plan, we further call on the Corporation to extend maximum support to the EEAC and to use the opportunity of the EEAC's deliberations to identify the strategies that Brown can use to make fast and financially smart reductions in global warming emissions.
The University is taking enormous strides to reconcile its moral values with its historical impacts, most notably those of its association with the slave trade. No examination of the University's role in society can be complete without looking at its impact on the future. With a scientific consensus about climate change long established, we see taking the step of immediate climate neutrality as the only option for an institution of Brown's wealth and influence. In America today, there exists no moral alternative.
Already, over 100 U.S. colleges and universities have taken steps to reduce their carbon emissions and support clean energy. Over a dozen purchase 100 percent clean electricity. These schools are reducing our addiction to oil, creating jobs in the new clean energy economy, and showing the world that solutions are possible. The small College of the Atlantic in Maine has already adopted climate neutrality, while the University of Florida and Oberlin College in Ohio have announced the intention to do so. The entire University of California system is currently reviewing a sustainability advisory committee's recommendation to become climate neutral "as soon as possible."
Climate neutrality is made possible by "offsetting" carbon emissions - investing in projects that prevent carbon emissions elsewhere. Immediate 100 percent offsets for all of Brown's carbon emissions from electricity and heating could cost as little as $350,000 annually at their current level and as Brown reduces its carbon emissions, the cost of offsetting remaining emissions will go down accordingly.
We see climate neutrality as an essential step for Brown because the effects of continued emissions are becoming clearer with each passing year. Consider the effects of "business as usual" emissions:
- The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will predict in its 2007 climate assessment report an increase in global temperatures of up to 4.5 degrees Celsius by 2100 if carbon emissions continue unabated.
- The recent Stern Report, commissioned by the government of the United Kingdom, predicts that unmitigated climate change would result in trillions of dollars of economic losses and an impact on the global economy comparable to the Great Depression and the World Wars.
- Should the IPCC's predictions become reality, melting ice caps would raise sea level by several meters during the coming century, which would flood coastal cities around the world.
- Increased drought would exacerbate already growing global shortages of clean water, especially in Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Shortages of water will affect human health and food security across the developing world.
- Higher temperatures would change the face of the American landscape. New England's famous fall colors become a thing of the past as tree species migrate toward Northern Canada. Shifting climate zones may mean the disappearance of whole ecosystems.
- As we have seen in New Orleans, it is low-income communities and communities of color that are most vulnerable to climatic disasters. Global warming's severest impacts will be on the globally poor communities that have contributed least to the problem.
- The effects of global warming are already being seen. This includes expanding ranges of malarial mosquitoes in Africa and rapidly melting Arctic sea ice and shifting Arctic ecosystems that are devastating to the traditional ways of life of Inuit peoples.
In light of these and other predictions, we can only conclude that global warming poses an existential threat to our prosperity, security, health, communities and future.
We also see this as an issue of justice. The quality of life that we enjoy is due in no small part to having had the ability to exploit fossil fuels for over 200 years without fully addressing their environmental and human costs. Today's developing nations do not have this luxury. By reducing our emissions we make more room for those who have never contributed to the problem - the poorest communities in the world - to gain easier access to the energy services we take for granted without endangering our collective future.
Therefore every ton of carbon emitted by Brown is a ton of carbon that people in India, in Mozambique or in Nicaragua cannot emit safely in their efforts to reach a quality of life similar to ours. And by the same token, every ton of carbon emitted by Brown must be considered a sandbag off a levee in New Orleans, a shovelful of dirt off a dike in Bangladesh. But today Brown has an historic opportunity to be a global leader on this defining issue of our time, and can help right this global injustice and protect our future.
We hope to see Brown take this urgent step in the coming months, and we plan to engage students, faculty, staff and alums across the University to achieve this goal. Although we are confident that dramatic improvements in Brown' s energy policy and climate impact can be made with little or no long-term cost to the University, we implore you to consider not only what climate neutrality may cost Brown today, but what not adopting climate neutrality will cost us, your students and your children, in the future.
Signed,The Empower Campaign Committee
Christopher Hardy '10, Zindzi McCormick '09, Mollie West '09, Kirsten Howard '09, Tess Hart '09, Aden Van Noppen '09, Julia Beamesderfer '09, Katie Okamoto '09, Al Carter '09, Kate Stoughton '09, Stephen Salisbury '09, Annie Banducci '08, Lindsay Hagamen '08, Nathan Wyeth '08, Jonathan Magaziner '07, Ian Gray '05
