A Response to the Chancellor of Washington University in St Louis, on his recent statement on the Paris Accord and the Trump Decision

Original post: June 5, 2017.
Updates: June 6, 2017. Links to additional information.

After Donald Trump declared the US withdrawal from the Paris Accords, the Chancellor of Washington University made a statement expressing "our disappointment".  The statement was followed with a number of declarations about Washington University's commitments to acting on the climate.  Superficially, the statement sounds good.  But beneath the surface it reveals a weak, insufficient, and unsatisfactory response.  In addition it contains dishonest assertions that reflect a failure to enact real leadership on climate.   Some observations follow:

You use the word leader way too often. It is meaningless here.  We have great faculty and great students in the classroom.  However, the university administration and its corporate partners are not leaders in educating the public about these profound transformations.  They are just the opposite.

This is not true.  WUSTL has historically been involved in efforts to mislead the public on climate.  Under the watch of Chancellor Danforth, and then Chancellor Wrighton, the Weidenbaum Center colluded with Exxon to mislead the public on climate science.  This was sustained, systematic, and willful.  It may have been associated with crime.  Until you can be honest about the past, we cannot trust you to be honest about the present and the future.

In addition, WUSTL continues to be involved with various fossil fuel industries, including Peabody Energy and Exxon, in efforts to stage public forums on 'energy issues.'  (One of these has been the subject of an academic publication.)

At these events, the industries systematically lie to the public and/or attempt to mislead the public.  WUSTL is not only complicit, but actively guilty.  (Peabody was in fact declared guilty of lying to the public.  More on Peabody and climate science denial here. If WUSTL were publicly regulated by the SEC, they might be under investigation by now too.  Exxon may be indicted soon.  All of that money is associated with fraud.)  Former Peabody CEO Greg Boyce is finally off the board of trustees, but until Peabody and other coal company and other fossil fuel industry brands are not connected to any of our university efforts, we will not be clean either. The university should publicly disavow and disassociate itself with these companies. That would be leadership.

Indeed, just last year, WUSTL collaborated with Ameren (our coal-burning power utility) on a "Sustainability Conference" at St. Louis University.  Hank Webber, one of WUSTL's vice chancellors, declared there that the university was a national leader in sustainability.  Not only absurd, insulting.  Nothing further from the truth.

Ameren's representatives at the conference declared their intentions to keep burning 70% coal by 2040.  That's criminal intent to do harm to our children.  WUSTL's representatives were happily hob-knobbing with them.  

The WUSTL Medical School says nothing about morbidity and mortality tied to coal pollution, perhaps it is because their corporate boards are interconnected (Ameren & BJC that is) and their kids don't live in the high asthma areas.  Try wind and solar, it's cleaner and cheaper.

This willful intent to mislead the public includes the collusion with the industry propaganda phrase 'clean coal' which actively confuses the public about the possibilities of burning coal without emissions, let alone cleanly.  Neither is physically possible.  There is nothing that can be discovered to make coal clean. Clean coal is a lie.  The Chancellor is dishonest when he says it. Maybe he believes it, like Trump, but that does not make it true.

This would be wonderful, if true.  However, the 'world-class research and education' is again tainted by the influence of the money and the dishonesty of the fossil fuel industry whose hands are involved in many of these efforts.  Take the so-called flagship effort recently renamed InCEES.  It has taken control over Environmental Studies and Sustainability efforts and is advised (and funded) almost entirely by fossil-fuel related interests and industries.  We do not take you seriously Chancellor.  

Chancellor, your own way of treating students, whose lives will be more impacted by climate change than yours, is insulting.  You suggest that the university must do only what the corporate donors want it to do.  This corrupts academic freedom and the entire mission of the American university.  That's not leadership.You express disrespect for students, faculty and staff when you ask us to believe that you are sincere or that this is actually significant. There are good people with the right ideas involved in these efforts.  But they are silenced and controlled because you have handed over academic freedom to the very industries that are at the heart of the problem.  

This is not entirely true.  You can examine for yourself the participants and activities.  Most of them seek to find ways for big industries to do business in times of global environmental crisis. This includes agroindustry, in particular.  Were it a consortium of renewable industries, we might be convinced by this. But it's not.   Nothing against the international scholars, but they are not doing what we really need to be doing on climate.

The next one is the really disappointing one:

This, again, insults our intelligence.  The Paris Accords were ok, but were themselves insufficient. We must go way beyond those reduction commitments and commit to renewables, now. 

"Mitigating the potentially devastating effects?"  You fail to acknowledge what we know and mislead the public about the gravity of the situation.  There are already devastating effects, they are not potentials.  Mitigation is not good enough.
Scientists know that to keep temperatures from rising to catastrophic levels we must leave the vast majority of fossil fuel reserves unburned.  There is no technological fix that will allow us to keep burning fossil fuels.  We must transition to 100% renewables as fast as possible.  We have the technology for that. 

You say the university is returning to 1990 levels?  Who wants to go back to the 1990s?   To say we will return to 1990 levels of C02 emissions by 2020 is to basically say "we are doing nothing."  It would be funny if it were not so outrageous.

What could be done, you may ask?

• We should join cities, states, and countries who are declaring a goal of 100% renewables by 2030 or 2040. This is absolutely possible, with technology we have today.
• We should recognize the truth about climate change and divest from fossil fuels (and start unwinding all of the ways the industry has hijacked the university mission). Over 100 faculty and staff have joined students to demand divestment.
• We should give autonomy to Environmental Studies and Sustainability efforts, so they are not hijacked by the very interests that we must challenge: those of the fossil fuel companies.
• We should have enlightened and renewable-minded industry representatives on our board of trustees.
• We should stop giving the university's name to fossil fuel industry interests.  We should stop using the phrase 'clean coal.'
• We should rewrite the University sustainability plan so that it actually means something, and commits to join with other institutions to push Ameren to shift away from coal.  The current sustainability plan is a plan to maintain the status quo.
• We should push to generate our own electricity.  Design buildings that can incorporate solar.  'Collegiate gothic' is a climate crime, notwithstanding all we hear about LEED.
• Rather than assist in gentrification efforts, we should help neighborhoods in the city set up decentralized solar and wind grids with storage, pursue training in clean tech jobs, push the city and state to support wind and solar.
• We should join other regional advocates – not the dirty industries – to push the Missouri legislature to enact law and policy to transition the grid away from fossil fuels.
• We should really be a leader on public health and acknowledge the links between fossil-fuel burning and public health, locally and globally.  We do not take seriously what you say about public health, because you lie about fossil fuels.
• Our Medical Faculty and leadership should be honest about what their coal-burning power usage does to public health in the region. They should also speak out.
• And we could say more...

There are many real, practical, and meaningful things we could do. What we are doing now is insufficient and unsatisfactory.  WUSTL could lead the St Louis region. Instead it chooses to join a region that follows, and one that itself suffers from a lack of leadership, much of it due to the way that the political class has been corrupted, or at least co-opted by some of the worst corporate polluters in the nation, Ameren being at the top of the list, the coal companies right behind.  

This indeed, is the only hope: the faculty and students who are not bought off by the corporate interests of the fossil fuel companies.  And this is the true heart of the university.  It is the learning and teaching community.  The university is not you, the board, nor is it the donors and companies who have corrupted your ability to speak honestly.   The students are the heart of the university as are those who learn with them, and support them, the faculty and staff.  We are the heart of the university and most of us disagree with you on this.

You use the word 'leader' a lot, but we will not forget your legacy on this Chancellor Wrighton.  Perhaps you just do what the board tells you to do, in which case, they are the guilty party.  In whatever case, until we see real change, we will continue to challenge every untruth that you speak, for our children, and all of the world's children yet to come.

June 5, 2017