Green New Deal at UCSD

 

Dear Chancellor Khosla,

The recent IPCC Sixth Assessment Report in 2021 showed that the impacts of climate change are widespread, rapid and intensifying. It warned that our current emissions pathway puts Earth on track to breach the critical 1.5 degrees celsius warming threshold as soon as 2030. 

While global warming is happening much faster than many scientists predicted, there is still much we can do to mitigate its worst effects. Above all, there is an overwhelming scientific consensus that WE MUST STOP BURNING FOSSIL FUELS RIGHT NOW. This was argued in the 2021 International Energy Agency report, backed up by numerous high-profile publications in journals such as Nature. This adds even more urgency to the IPCC’s earlier report, endorsed by 195 governments, that prescribed that carbon emissions must be reduced 50% by 2030 from 2010 levels. 

The implications for UC San Diego are very clear: we must stop burning fossil methane on our campus (we currently emit nearly 200,000 tonnes of CO₂ per year), and we must stop indirectly financing oil and gas extraction through our use of specific banks and insurers. In solidarity with the Global Climate Strike of September 24th, we are rallying and marching on campus with our fellow students, postdocs, staff, and faculty to demand swift action on the climate crisis from UC San Diego leadership.

Our Four Demands Are:

1. Reject the UC’s greenwashing carbon neutrality plan and transition to a fossil free energy campus this decade via campus electrification and expansion of on-campus solar energy generation coupled with battery storage.

2. Cut university ties with banking and insurance companies that fund fossil fuel extraction, and instead contract with banks and insurers that have avoided or withdrawn from the oil and gas sector. Further, the University must support a policy that requires all researchers, institutes and departments receiving funding from fossil fuel interests to declare it as a potential conflict-of-interest in any public presentation or publication.

3. Care for our biosphere must extend to care for our people. Support student well-being and workers’ rights on campus, including making every effort to decrease the outrageous cost of graduate student housing and to facilitate UC bargaining in good faith with union workers who are the backbone of our university. 

4. Support the recent faculty commitment to provide a General Education requirement for all undergraduate students at UC San Diego to be taught about the climate crisis and climate justice.

Given the utmost urgency of the climate crisis, we respectfully submit that these demands are timely, reasonable, and necessary. The world is shifting; so must we. We ask that UC San Diego leadership prioritize our students’ futures and follow the science! 

With Regards,

The Students, Postdocs, Staff, & Faculty of the Green New Deal at UCSD

Our exposé of the University of California's climate (in)action is published in the @sacbee_news.
Carbon Neutrality – which relies on offsets – is a scam.
The UC must instead make a fossil free goal – to power its campuses from increasing wind & solar. https://t.co/3bJjdFDTaZ

— UCSD Green New Deal (@ucsdgreennewde1) June 19, 2021

We have attained important data from the UC system via freedom of information public record requests. These data provide some information about who is making decisions. They also show that smokestack emissions for the campuses have, in some cases, increased. They also clarify the nature of the biomethane and offsets projects that the UC is relying on instead of Getting Off The Fracked Methane Gas.