Inequality and Climate Change

To the Editors:

Oberlin College, like any other school, exists to prepare young people for the future. If the College itself fails to educate students about climate change and lead us by example, then our future has been jeopardized. I’m not talking about the scientific basis of climate change, although I encourage everyone to read the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2001 Synthesis Report, which can be found online at www.ipcc.ch/pub/reports.htm. I’m talking about the more important reasons to reduce our negative impacts on the global atmosphere — the moral, ethical and common-sense reasons.

If you are offended by racial, gender and class inequalities in our classrooms, then you should be offended by the prospect of global climate change outside of the classroom. Every student and faculty and staff member at this school should take on the responsibility of mitigating these inequalities as they relate to climate change just as we have in other parts of our lives. The ways in which we use energy and abuse the privileges of having heat, electric lighting and our own cars say something about how much – or rather, how little – we value the lives of people on the small Pacific islands that are already disappearing under the rising ocean and in other equatorial regions that have seen the irregular and dramatic weather patterns associated with climate change destroy food crops and homes and bring social and political unrest.

Because climate change is a very global and very real problem, what we do every day affects the ability of others to deal with this problem. And Oberlin College, by failing to acknowledge the problem in official policies and planning, has not provided a framework in which students, faculty and staff members can make changes in their daily lives that would reduce their individual impacts on the climate. Oberlin gives individuals no incentive to conserve energy, and things like the antiquated, two-thermostats-per-building heating system give students no other option but to waste heat – and the money it costs to produce it. The Environmental Policy Advisory Committee has already given the President’s Office a number of policy recommendations, and the critical next step is for the College to actually adopt these and other policies that would reduce energy use and the associated emissions of greenhouse gases.

Individuals are members of institutions throughout their lives, and current Oberlin students, faculty and staff members, as well as alums, are now a part of the institution known as Oberlin College. Are you proud of this institution’s record on climate change? Are you proud of your own actions relating to global climate change? The only difference between inequality on our campus and inequality in the world is the scale, and global inequalities demand that every institution and every person on earth work towards their eradication. If Oberlin, a school that attracts students because of its progressivism and social morality, cannot come to grips with what climate change will mean for people all over the world, then what hope is there for any other institution, and what hope is there for the world?

–Claire Jahns
College senior