Green New Deal at UCSD

Dear Executive Vice President of the UC (Rachael Nava) and Fellow Members of the UC Community,

Thank you very much for meeting with us (on Dec 11th) and engaging in a highly productive discussion regarding how to accelerate UC’s climate action. We came with three asks: 1) Make detailed ‘shovel ready’ electrification plans for the campuses with co-generation plants; 2) Change the language and goal from Carbon Neutral to Fossil Free, 3) Partner with us to present these new ideas to President Drake.

We were so gratified to see the beginnings of a consensus around developing actionable electrification plans for the campuses; plans that would then be ready for financing from Federal Green Recovery funds, or State or philanthropic funds, as so clearly stated by Chief Financial Officer Brostrom. There also seemed to be much agreement that a reframing of UC Climate Action is in order, reflecting its evolution from Carbon Neutrality (with an implied emphasis on offsets) to Fossil Free (with an emphasis on real emissions reductions on the campuses).

We look forward to hearing from you early in January regarding the results of your consultations with your climate action team, and we also look forward, soon thereafter, to jointly presenting this new vision to President Drake.

On behalf of those of us who met you last Friday, the 3500 signers of the UC Energy System Petition, and the UC Green New Deal Coalition. 

Much has been written about the problem of denial of climate change science. But the University of California exemplifies another, possibly much tougher, problem: How do you go from acceptance of the science to action?  … read more here.

The UC is using some of the worst banks and the worst insurance companies when it comes to fossil fuel industry exposure. We need the UC to respond to our request to shift banking, see more here.

In May 2020, Baccher said in a Regents meeting: “…I’m happy to announce that, actually as of today, the endowment, the pension and all of our working capital pools are fossil free at the University of California. In fact, you could extend that to say that our 125 billion dollars of assets are fossil free.”, see minute 17.36 here.