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Dear Cornell on Fire, April was “Sustainability Month” at Cornell, and it was frankly unbelievable. Here’s a roundup of Cornell’s real, unexaggerated accomplishments over the course of the month: Sustaining their Gas Plant’s Right to Expansion. Cornell got a jumpstart on Sustainability Month by lobbying to indefinitely expand their use of fracked gas in a presentation to the Tompkins County Climate Protection Initiative (TCCPI) on March 28. Faced with the fossil-fuel phaseout on new construction mandated by Ithaca’s green energy code, Cornell’s Sustainability and Energy Transition teams have tirelessly lobbied for a carveout. Their goal? To ensure that Cornell can keep expanding load at their gas plant on the false pretense that gas-fired heating generates less emissions than building electrification. A recent white paper by faculty experts and Cornell on Fire pointed out that Cornell’s methodology and conclusions are both incorrect and replicate Big Oil’s misinformation. Rather than correcting course, Cornell staff invented new arguments to support the foregone conclusion that their gas plant should be free to expand burning fracked gas. At their March 28 presentation, the Cornell team deployed contradictory lines of reasoning to advance this narrative. The last straw was the Sustainability Director’s proposal for unequal treatment under the law: the correct method of “long-run” rates would apply to all of Ithaca’s standalone buildings, such that they are required to comply with the law, whereas the unconventional (and incorrect) method of “future short-run” rates would apply to Cornell’s district energy system, such that they are exempt from the law. This proposal: (1) is preposterous because it embodies a double standard; (2) is doubly preposterous because it proposes an incorrect method for Cornell; (3) is self-contradictory because it clashes with the simultaneous claim by Cornell’s Associate Vice President of Energy and Sustainability that long-run rates are invalid “hypothetical [carbon] offsets” (not true).* Expert observers who followed these proceedings were boggled. Sustaining Their Inadequate Climate “Action” Plan Against the Student Assembly’s Evidence. On April 8, Cornell’s Sustainability Director partnered with President Kotlikoff to issue a nonresponse to the Student Assembly’s unanimous passage of Resolution 20 to improve Cornell’s climate action plan. The resolution documented evidence for and called for remediation of the university’s misleading emissions reporting, attempts to exempt itself from Ithaca’s energy code, continued overconsumption and high-carbon activities, and lack of climate leadership. In response, the Sustainability Director rolled out a series of PR talking points while pointedly ignoring the resolution’s factual statements about the university’s outsized carbon footprint, misleading emissions reporting, and inadequate climate action. For instance, she disingenuously boasted that “Cornell faculty played a key role in the New York State Climate Impacts Assessment.” Yet she herself co-authored the dissenting opinion to oppose the methane emissions reporting standards advocated by those very same Cornell faculty and now written into NY law. Well aware of this fact, the authors of the Resolution stated that “a comprehensive emissions baseline inventory should include all significant emission sources, such as methane.” This was painfully ignored. The Sustainability Director concluded by deflecting from the institution to individuals, volunteering to help students “identify barriers” to their own “low-carbon lifestyles.” Sustaining fossil turf: “Tall Grass, Small Gas,” meet “All Gas, No Grass.” Cornell used to launch their “Tall Grass, Small Gas” initiative in “No Mow May,” but it’s now “No Mow April” due to warming temperatures. Accordingly, this month Cornell refrained from mowing select campus lawns to reduce equipment gas use (yes, Cornell’s equipment still runs on fossil fuels). Cornell reports that, “Just based on reduced fuel use, the tall grass initiative reduces Cornell’s CO2 emissions by a total of 9,700 pounds [or 4.85 tons] per year.” Yet all month long, Cornell has also continued working to expand fake grass fields across campus. These carbon-intensive plastic fields are made from petrochemicals, helping to sustain demand for fossil fuels. Hence, we dub Cornell’s artificial turf program “All Gas, No Grass.” Cornell’s three newest artificial turf fields alone (excluding existing fields) will increase Cornell’s CO2 emissions by 159-450 tons of CO2 per year.* That means Cornell is annually emitting up to 93 times more CO2 from three new fake grass fields than they’re reducing from all their no-mow lawns combined.* Cornell makes much of the trivial emissions reductions from “tall grass,” while remaining silent about the large emissions increases from “all gas” turf.* Looking back on “Sustainability Month” at Cornell, we can safely conclude that it was a raging success in sustaining the status quo. If we rely upon institutional actors for climate action, we are doomed. The only way forward is for ordinary folks to begin cordially disrupting fossil fuel business-as-usual. Join us at 11:15am this Friday, May 2 to begin studying our options. This unusual public lecture with Bill McKibben and Kevin Young is not to be missed! Your partner in business-unusual, Cornell on Fire *Asterisks indicate where supplemental notes can be found in our corresponding blog post. Explore this post and others on Instagram.
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