Alumni often ask me what the University is doing to address the climate crisis. Here is what I tell them. —C.L.E.
Climate change poses a daunting and unprecedented challenge to humanity. The scale, complexity, and tangled nature of the environmental problems can only be addressed through an interdisciplinary approach that harnesses knowledge across the disciplinary spectrum.
Princeton will have the most significant impact on the crisis through the scholarship we generate and the people we educate. Indeed, one of the most powerful things that we can do is create the conditions that allow the world’s most promising students and most accomplished faculty to do their best work.
That is the heart of our climate strategy.
It’s a strategy that is flourishing at the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment and the High Meadows Environmental Institute, where Princeton faculty collaborate not only to push the frontiers of environmental science and engineering, but also to develop the policy solutions and cultural insights essential to meaningful change.
It’s bearing fruit through projects like the groundbreaking Net-Zero America study that has become a go-to roadmap for policymakers across the country.
It was on display in March at the White House, when President Biden’s top climate official acknowledged the global scientific leadership of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, which is working to make clean fusion energy a reality.
And it has allowed students to immerse themselves in environmental studies and research projects—formative college experiences that have, for example, prepared Pyne Prize winner Claire Wayner ’22 to pursue what she calls her “life’s work” of addressing climate change.
While the University’s greatest impact will be through our teaching and research, we have also committed to bold targets in our campus operations, including a goal to achieve net-zero campus-based carbon emissions on or before the University’s 300th anniversary in 2046. This is the second component of our climate strategy.
Some of this work will be on full display to those of you returning for Reunions. We have expanded solar arrays to provide 19 percent of campus energy needs, and are using sustainable materials and techniques to construct our new art museum, residential colleges, graduate student housing, and research facilities.
Much of the environmental magic won’t be quite so visible—as we retrofit underground campus infrastructure to liberate us from nonrenewable energy sources like natural gas. Among these improvements is the drilling of more than 1,000 geo-exchange bores that will allow us to store free and clean summer heat to warm our buildings in winter.
Finally, a year ago this month, the Trustees of Princeton University authorized the creation of a process to divest and dissociate from certain fossil fuel companies. The Board also committed to reducing the aggregate harmful climate impact of the entirety of the University’s endowment holdings and setting a target date by which to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in the University’s portfolio. This is the third aspect of the University’s climate strategy.
Princeton has a strong general presumption against divestment. Our truth-seeking mission requires us to provide an open and unbiased forum for key issues of the day. We make exceptions only in rare circumstances defined by sustained campus consensus around a central University value. When we do make these exceptions, we don’t just divest—we also dissociate by severing other ties.
The climate crisis has created one of those rare exceptions. I am grateful to the experts, advocates, and activists who helped us reach this point, and to all who have engaged in thoughtful and exacting deliberations over the course of this academic year to determine how to implement the Board’s dissociation decision. I can confidently make two predictions about the results of their work.
The first is that Princeton’s approach to fossil fuel divestment and dissociation will stand up over the years as principled, intellectually honest, and firmly grounded in the values of the University.
But divestment, no matter how carefully designed, will not take a single molecule of carbon out of the atmosphere. When Princeton sells shares in a company, somebody else is buying those shares. The Board’s divestment and dissociation decisions enable us to adhere to our shared values. When it comes to true impact on the climate crisis, however, we must look to our research, our teaching, and our campus’s direct effect on the environment.
This leads to my second prediction, which is that when Princeton’s impact on the global climate crisis is measured years from now, the transformative impact of our faculty’s research and the intellectual and leadership contributions that our students and alumni make to the world will far outweigh the effects of any dissociation choices we might make.
And so let me end with a special thank you to all of you who are contributing your time and energy to address the climate change emergency. In doing so, you embody Princeton’s mission of service to country and humanity.
3 Responses
Hamilton Osborne Jr. ’65
2 Years AgoBefore you publish another letter criticizing the pace at which Princeton University is seeking to reduce its carbon emissions, please require the writer of the letter to describe what he or she has done to reduce his or her personal carbon emissions.
Hana Heineken ’03
2 Years AgoI was disappointed to read President Eisgruber’s message regarding Princeton’s response to the climate crisis (President’s Page, May issue). Having been active in the climate justice movement since graduating, the president’s reluctant support for partial fossil-fuel divestment and his touting of the “Net Zero America” study as “groundbreaking” are simply embarrassing. That study was funded by Exxon and BP, which have given millions of dollars to Princeton’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment and High Meadows Environmental Institute, and is being used to justify continued extraction of fossil fuels through a massive build-out of carbon capture and storage infrastructure that will do nothing to prevent a 1.5º C overshoot and will undoubtedly increase the negative cumulative impacts on low-income and BIPOC communities. At a time when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has essentially urged an end to the use of fossil fuels, neither Exxon nor BP have plans to stop their fossil-fuel expansion, nor take responsibility for their climate-destructive activities.
Princeton’s continued investments in and association with some of the most irresponsible fossil-fuel companies on the planet is sending the wrong message to its students and to society at large. Princeton has a responsibility to ensure its endowment is invested prudently, with a long-term time horizon and in consideration of the institution’s charitable purposes. If Princeton is genuinely committed to its students’ futures and being “In the Nation’s Service and the Service of Humanity,” fossil-fuel divestment should not even be a question. Princeton should be a true climate leader and stop greenwashing the fossil-fuel industry. I encourage alumni to learn more at divestprinceton.com.
Lynne Archibald ’87
2 Years AgoIt is disheartening that after more than two years of sustained and thoughtful work by Divest Princeton, supported by over 3,000 students, alumni, faculty and staff, our president refuses to consider the scientific, economic and financial reasons for divestment, choosing instead to repeat disinformation. In his recent President’s Page in the May 2022 edition of the Princeton Alumni Weekly, President Eisgruber falls back on two examples of parsing or using almost-truths to convey the wrong idea:
“But divestment, no matter how carefully designed, will not take a single molecule of carbon out of the atmosphere. When Princeton sells shares in a company, somebody else is buying those shares.”
Apart from natural carbon sinks like trees, the only thing that might actually remove carbon molecules from the atmosphere is carbon capture and sequestration — the love child of the fossil fuel industry — which has not yet managed to bring any successful large scale CCS projects to fruition. President Eisgruber’s statement intentionally elides the actual objective of divestment, which is to stop carbon molecules being emitted into the atmosphere. A number of other things also do not take carbon molecules out of the atmosphere but do lower emissions — including solar arrays, geo-exchange bores, sustainable materials and techniques — but our president has no quarrel with them. Divestment works to lower carbon emissions in two ways: by removing the social capital of the fossil-fuel companies and by increasing their cost of financial capital such that they cannot afford to continue expanding fossil-fuel operations.
When shares are sold, it is true someone else does buy them. But as the perceived value of the fossil fuel companies declines (stranded assets, increasingly cheap renewables, litigation liability, a changing regulatory framework, lost government subsidies, divestment, etc.) those shares are worth less and less. Many formerly great American companies that refused to face the future know well the sounds of the supply and demand death rattle including Blockbuster, Sears, and Kodak.
We believe the president is right about one thing — the faculty is producing transformative research. Recently over 160 members of Princeton’s faculty and staff, including a number of climate scholars and experts, published an open letter urging Princeton to divest fully from fossil fuels this year. We hope someone is reading their work.