Jordan River Forum: You’re right. No one cares about Sierra Club or the environment.

Lauren Kastner
President of Coal Free IU.

I had a surreal dream last night that our beautiful campus exploded in flames and, to my alarm, the earth was burning. I woke up to find that my nightmare actually exists in reality but has taken the form of coal. Coal, the contributor to 40 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions, the single most destructive industrial process employed daily and the No. 1 cause of global warming.

I suppose Nick Jacobs is right. No one cares about Sierra Club. The 80 people that packed into our call-out meeting last semester didn’t care; the 2,000 students (that’s 1 in 20 students of total population) that signed our petition didn’t care; the 15 student groups and 25 faculty members who endorsed our campaign didn’t care; the Kelley School of Business students who dropped their syllabus material to study our campaign strategy didn’t care; and the 19 times the IDS covered our campaign were for nothing.

The White House didn’t care about Sierra Club either when they invited dozens of other youth leaders in environmentalism from across the country, including myself, to the White House Clean Energy Economy Forum to meet with Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Ken Salazar, Hilda Solis and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to discuss and encourage our pursuits in our local communities and campuses.

And finally I guess your University does not, in fact, care about Sierra Club. Vice President Morrison agreed to hold a conference with us to discuss IU’s energy future because apparently he didn’t care. The Office of Sustainability is overseeing the draft of an Energy Master Plan where a transition away from coal could potentially be outlined because they clearly don’t care either.

All of this was accomplished in a mere 13 weeks by people that obviously didn’t care.
You’re right about those “Coal Free IU” stickers graffiti-ing our beautiful campus. Just to be clear, an over-enthusiastic individual who was in no way instructed by Coal Free IU to do so placed those around campus and has since been instructed to remove them.

You’re also right about the fact that Indiana is suffering major budget cuts, and IU will have to tighten its purse strings. However, there also wasn’t a lot of money out there two years ago when an unsettling $67 million dollars was allocated to IU for carbon sequestration research – a highly ineffective, invasive and widely disproven technology.

We also no longer have the money or the tolerance to pay for the externalities associated with burning coal on our campus including horrific air, water and soil degradation, and public health costs including the devastating and expensive results of lead and mercury being released from our Central Heating Plant. However, Coal Free IU is not ignorant to the issues of alternative energy like geothermal, wind, solar and natural gas and understands the need for a realistic timeline for energy sources that fit our needs.

So yes, you should be concerned and attention should be brought to the issue from all angles to create positive support for our University’s energy transition. But to say that no one cares is a huge misnomer.