The True Stanford Challenge (op-ed)
// news / daily - october 19, 2006
http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2006/10/19/opedTheTrueStanfordChallenge
By Zach Dembo
Last week, President Hennessy unveiled the Stanford Challenge. For those unfamiliar with it, think of it like the Fast Food Challenge, only substitute gobs of money for menu items, and Stanford for the fast food patron. Upon hearing about it, I was initially optimistic.
An organization I’m involved with, the Climate Change Campaign of Students for a Sustainable Stanford, seeks to put the University on the road to carbon-emissions neutrality. “What greater vehicle for that lofty goal than something called ‘the Stanford Challenge,’” I thought. Eagerly looking over the official Website, I found that the program does allot $250 million to “helping to ensure that current and future generations can live well on our planet.” This seems an admirable, if nebulous, goal, with very little to argue against. They seem focused on harnessing Stanford’s expertise to help the rest of the world live in a more sustainable fashion. However, I could not find one cent devoted to fixing the problems in our own backyard, not one sentence discussing how Stanford would lead by doing instead of by telling. Given what I knew about Stanford’s utter lack of action on climate change mitigation, this was sadly just another piece of the puzzle.
Earlier this year, representatives from the Climate Change Campaign met with President Hennessy and asked him for an institutional commitment to reduce emissions 10 percent below 1990 levels of greenhouse-gas emissions by the year 2020. This was by no means a radical request, reflecting the relatively conservative goals of the Kyoto Protocol and other prominent climate change agreements. The group was told that more discussion was necessary, and was sent a follow-up letter telling them to have a good summer. In other words, the administration was not prepared to undertake any action on this matter. For many who follow environmental policy trends, this seems a staggering non sequitur.
In April, Stanford’s very own Woods Institute released a poll to be included in a publication entitled “America’s Report Card on the Environment.” The poll revealed an astonishing 86 percent of Americans said that they wanted “a great deal or a lot to be done to help the environment within the next year.” This September, Governor Schwarzenegger of California signed into law the most aggressive carbon-emissions reduction bill in the United States. The bill commits the state to a cut of 25 percent by the year 2020, and 80 percent by 2050. Events like this are becoming increasingly commonplace, showing that Americans are restless for action to combat global warming. Nowhere is this more evident or fervent than California.
National and statewide trends make President Hennessy’s decision seem out of place, but events at Stanford itself make it seem positively against the grain. Stanford is one of the centers of progressive thought and liberal discourse within the state. Students, faculty and staff alike have been addressing sustainability issues for many years. Specific interest on climate change remains high. Two recent showings of “An Inconvenient Truth” were so heavily attended that the venues could barely contain attendees. You may remember that Al Gore himself came to deliver his famed climate change presentation a little more than a year ago. This bulk of evidence would leave an outside observer to conclude that Stanford must be at the vanguard of climate change mitigation. As was made abundantly clear last June, that is not the case. Why is there a discrepancy? Sadly, it seems a lack of will to act, something not usually in short supply here.
What justifies this timidity, I do not know. What they would say justifies it, however, is sadly predictable: the age-old argument that environmentally responsible policy and economic growth are mutually exclusive, and that the latter is more important. Stanford is in a period of prodigious expansion, they say, and we cannot afford to restrict this growth by limiting it or diverting resources to deal with its consequences. (If it seems that the goal of emissions reductions is too weighty for a huge research institution, it should be noted that Harvard and Yale agreed to such reductions several years ago, and Princeton has a movement similar to ours underway as we speak.)
The most exigent incarnation of this “growth at any cost” attitude is the Stanford Challenge. It would be the acme of hypocrisy to tell developing nations how to become more environmentally friendly while our paradisiacal campus continues blithely burning more and more fossil fuels with no end or moderation in sight. Shouldn’t we mend our own fences first before telling others to do so? Shouldn’t we start by becoming as sustainable as possible, especially when we are in a climate so amazingly conducive to environmental progressivism?
To answer these questions, and many others, I hope you will attend a campus-wide meeting on climate change policy at Stanford this Sunday. Sponsored by the Climate Change Campaign, it will be held in Bechtel International Center at 6 p.m., and dinner will be provided. Hopefully, this forum will provide us the tools necessary to affect change and ensure that Stanford makes good its obligations as a flagship institution and global citizen. That should be the true Stanford Challenge.
Zach Dembo is a senior majoring in history and a member of the Climate Change Campaign of Students for a Sustainable Stanford. For any questions about the meeting or the campaign, he can be reached at zdembo@stanford.edu