Faculty and Staff for Climate Action

Many people on campus care deeply about climate change. Following from Adam Aron’s seminar last year, we’ve been talking about ways to act on climate concerns with the goal of coordinating interests to prompt action from NU. If you might be interested (at whatever level that might mean to you), please leave us your name and email address using this link https://forms.gle/bCZ6MUdPxBhUHoFq9. Feel free to share this message, and thanks for considering it.

Northwestern Faculty and Staff for Climate Action

Mission: To use our voices to advance climate action at our university.

• We aim to coordinate our efforts with community groups like Climate Action Evanston and student groups like Fossil-Free NU and ASG’s Sustainability Committee.
• The university could play a leading role not only in innovative new strategies but also in lowering the university’s carbon footprint. To keep global heating under 2° Celsius, dramatic cuts in fossil-fuel use are necessary not in some far-off time but now. Institutions can be slow to change, but maybe our encouragement can help. NU already missed its own sustainability goals (from Evanston’s 2018 Climate Action and Resilience Plan). Stanford, Princeton, the University of California, Smith College, Carleton College, and other institutions are already taking big meaningful steps, steps that are initially expensive but cost-effective over a few years.

2024 Platform (subject to adjustments as the group is formed):

1 Decarbonize the campus energy system. NU must promptly make plans to end its reliance on fossil gas for campus power generation. We need to invest in green campus infrastructure, retire the turbines, replace steam technology with hot water, maximize local rooftop solar, ground-source heating/cooling, district heating, and electrify. More energy efficiency is needed along with a plan for closing our CoGen plant that annually emits 106 kilotons CO₂.
How can this be done without sapping annual operational costs? The answer is: use some of our $14B endowment, which is dedicated to the goal of securing the university for future generations of students—NU won’t be here for them if we don’t act wisely now. The current pace is too slow and tech breakthroughs won’t save the day. If big steps to decarbonize are not taken soon, the world will reach a tipping point, nullifying the goals of the endowment.

2 Transparency. There should be transparency in fossil-fuel use and fossil-fuel investments within the endowment (including oil industry and banking). We ask for a commitment to sell investments in fossil-extraction companies and issue new RFPs for banking services.

3 Curriculum. Develop new educational and research initiatives directly addressing the ongoing environmental crises and global efforts to mitigate the worst possible outcomes. Establish requirements for a climate curriculum for all undergraduates.