Activists Attempting to Raise Our Tuition for Corporate Gains
November 11th, 2009 by 
Mitchell Blatt
The cost of college is out of control, rising three times faster than inflation, even during a recession, and yet despite the recession activist groups on campus are pushing for policies that are leading to huge profits for architects of the financial collapse like Morgan Stanley and Citigroup.
The Sierra Club, a recipient of wind-energy giant General Electric’s corporate donations, is pushing for universities to switch off coal, and they have a lot of backing on campus. INPIRG has also been involved in the anti-coal push.
Tuition is high enough as it is without expensive, inefficient energy production, and this is a bad time to try to raise tuition further.
Obama Energy Secretary and 1997 Nobel Prize winner Steven Chu says that solar power is far too expensive to compete. Coal is the most cost-effective energy source. America is falling behind though, in effective cleaner sources. China is taking the lead in clean energy, building one clean energy plant a month. Clean coal, including technologies like carbon sequestration, could help the economy rebound while decreasing our reliance on foreign energy, as the United States has the world’s most coal reserves. Now, however, China will surpass us in an area with which we have natural advantages.
Oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens has been pushing wind power, but he canceld his plans for a wind farm in Texas after the state didn’t give build power transmission lines for him. Government subsidies are the only thing supporting wind power. Subsidies and tax breaks are given to corporations that profit from wind power, including Morgan Stanley and Citigroup, both with $100 million riding on wind power.
Other alternative sources like nuclear power face similar problems. Nuclear power is actually the cheapest energy source to operate once it is operating, but the cost to build a plant can be up to $12 billion. Of course, it also is the cleanest energy source emission-wise, but there are still unsolved problems about depositing used fuel.
November 11th, 2009 at 6:58 pm
The logic behind this is seriously flawed and way overly sensationalized.
Let me paraphrase:
1. The Sierra Club, which has successfully sued General Electric as recently as this October, is (supposedly – I couldn’t find any proof of this anywhere) receiving donations from GE.
2. The Sierra Club, an environmental organization, as it has numerous times in the past, supports tearing down a pollutant-releasing coal power plant on IU’s campus.
3. Anyone that supports IU switching from coal to clean energy is naïvely doing so at the behest of GE.
Is that about right? Needless to say I find that argument very weak.
If you don’t support switching to clean energy, just be honest and say you don’t care about the environment or that you care more about how much you pay for tuition than the environment. Don’t hide behind a façade of concern over corporate lobbying.
While rhetorically nifty, trying to connect an environmentalist organization to a corporation that they just sued isn’t very helpful in the debate on climate change.