University of California San Diego (UCSD) students and staff rallied in solidarity with the global climate strike in front of Geisel Library on Sept. 24. This protest was lead by Green New Deal at UCSD, an organization that advocates for an end to the university’s carbon neutrality initiative and demands the university to commit to a fossil-fuel free campus.
Protestors also demanded that UCSD divest from financial institutions which perpetuate the fossil-fuel industry, support student workers and student life, and establish a general education requirement to teach students about the climate crisis and climate justice.
This protest comes after a petition which Green New Deal at UCSD circulated in 2020 was signed 3,500 times and supported by UC Unions representing 50,000 students and workers. Green New Deal at UCSD also marched for climate action in 2019 in support of a global climate strike.
The protestors assembled in front of Audrey Geisel Library at 12 p.m. as a group of UCSD dance students performed a piece called Coggs in the Wheel, “replicating industrial capitalism and depicting the problem of our lack of water,” according to Alison Smith, Faculty at the UCSD Dance Department. Smith also performed a piece called Death of the Mother.
After the dance performances, fourth year atmospheric chemistry PhD student and organizer with Green New Deal at UCSD, Adam Cooper, took the mic. “The fossil fuel industry … has ignored and fought against climate science for the past fifty years. And their customers are right here on this campus,” said Cooper. “UC San Diego burns around 10 million dollars worth of fracked methane gas every year right on campus. UC San Diego emits around 300 thousand tons of carbon dioxide every year, contributing to a climate collapse.”
UCSD completed the Jacobs Medical Center Central Plant in 2015. The building was the first power plant to receive Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification. “UC San Diego is very responsible,” said Dee Davis, a consultant and project manager for the university. “We realize we are in a drought. We want to build better and greener. Achieving LEED Gold validates these efforts and we are thrilled.”
Green New Deal at UCSD believes the university does not live up to the image of sustainability they project. “UCSD prides itself as a climate leader. They brag about our award-winning power plant,” Cooper continued. “They greenwash fracked methane gas as natural gas. They call it natural. They call it clean. There is nothing natural, there is nothing clean about extracting gas from the earth’s crust by blasting high pressure acidic water laced with toxic chemicals deep in the ground to release trapped methane.”
“This methane gas, which is 80 times as potent as carbon dioxide at heating our atmosphere, leaks during extraction and leaks during transport. It’s brought here where we burn it for fuel. So maybe UCSD needs our administration to sit in on some of our chemistry lectures,” Cooper said.
“Carbon neutrality is a lie, we won’t let our planet die,” protestors chanted as the crowd marched from Geisel to the Triton Steps outside of Price Center.
UC’s goal of Carbon Neutrality by 2025 relies on purchasing offsets for their emissions; that is, they pay other groups to reduce greenhouse gas emissions proportionally to the amount they emit. The UC does this principally by buying cooking stoves for people in Darfur and Uganda, causing them to switch from burning wood to burning wood pellets, which reduces carbon dioxide output. Offsets have been widely criticized by experts for not actually countering emissions, sometimes even increasing emissions and proliferating climate colonialism.
At the 15th session of United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues on May 18, 2016, Juan Antonio Correa Calfin Lafkenche, a leader of the Mapuche nation in Chile, told the United Nations, “carbon offsets … constitute a new form of colonialism and have caused conflicts, forced relocation, threats to the cultural survival and violations of the rights of Indigenous peoples, especially the rights to life, to lands and territories, and to free, prior and informed consent.”
Kevin Anderson, deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the university of Manchester, wrote for academic journal Nature: “Offsetting is worse than doing nothing. It is without scientific legitimacy, is dangerously misleading and almost certainly contributes to a net increase in the absolute rate of global emissions growth.”
In 2020, the Academic Senate at UCSD (ASUCSD) endorsed a report by the Task Force on the Climate Crisis which supported decarbonization at UCSD. The report reads: “‘carbon neutrality by 2025’ is not an accountable, realistic or moral solution for UCSD.”
UCSD also relies on directed biogas to meet its carbon neutrality goals. This means they pay other domestic sites to switch to biogas, a lower emissions gas made up of methane, carbon dioxide, and other trace gases. UC has referred to biogas as a “renewable natural gas” because it is sourced from landfills, animal waste, and wastewater.
Cooper does not see directed biogas as a legitimate pathway to reducing emissions. “They burn methane gas and make carbon dioxide here, and they justify this by burning methane gas and making carbon dioxide elsewhere” he explained.
Green New Deal at UCSD also advocates the university divest from the fossil fuel industry. “The UC system still supports the fossil fuel industry directly through staff, faculty, and grad student retirement accounts, and indirectly through the use of big banks such as Bank of America, who are in bed with the rest of our capitalist, extractivist system,” Cooper said.
The demonstration also criticized the lack of sufficient transparency around research that is funded by fossil fuel companies. Green New Deal at UCSD called on the administration to establish a rule requiring researchers, institutes, and departments to “declare it as a potential conflict of interest in any public presentation or publication.”
The faculty senate has unanimously supported the organizer’s other proposed academic reform: to establish a new general education requirement teaching about the climate crisis and climate justice.
The Green New Deal’s approach combines climate action with worker’s rights and progressive economic action. In this vein, Green New Deal at UCSD is demanding the university to “publicly support and commit to improving student wellbeing, especially around affordable housing and the right to organize,” according to Cooper. Particularly, they are interested in removing barriers for union membership some researchers face based on the sources of their funding.
This protest was co-sponsored by the University Professional Technical Employees Union (UPTE) CWA 9119. Susan Orlofsky, recording secretary UPTE Local 9 at UCSD, and member of the steering committee for Green New Deal at UCSD, was among the UPTE members who came to show their support.
“We are one of the first unions that has taken a resolution supporting the Green New Deal with strong labor provisions, and we think it is so important for UC to be a leader in showing the rest of the world how we can get off fossil fuels and that we can do it with an equitable transition so no workers are harmed in the process,” said Orlofsky.
As protestors marched down library walk, Eric Halgren, Professor of Neuroscience and Radiology, implored students flyering on library walk to join the march, saying, “It’s your future!”
“We’re on a bus, we’re headed for a cliff. That’s the science, and we’re not doing what needs to be done,” Halgren said.
Kate Zegans is the Managing Editor for The Triton.