On March 2, SU and ESF students joined more than a thousand others from around the country at the White House to urge President Barack Obama to reject the Keystone pipeline and halt further fossil fuel development. Three hundred and ninety-eight people were arrested; 398 is also the number of carbon dioxide parts per million in our atmosphere. A photo of their 398 hands tied through the wrought iron White House fence went viral on the internet.

David Blackmon of Forbes Magazine called the protest “an exercise in hypocrisy and ignorance.” He argues that they acted hypocritically, creating pollution in travelling to D.C.

Travel is indeed a major cause of climate change. In our Global Community course we ask students to take a quiz measuring how many Earths would be necessary if everyone lived their lifestyle. Those students who fly frequently find that their lifestyle would require as many as twenty planets!

Much of the travel that we do for pleasure and for work would not pass the test of whether the benefits outweigh the harms (to everyone, not just to ourselves). We can often conduct business over the internet and can have just as much fun at destinations closer to home.

A protest, on the other hand, is one of the few tools activists have, and hopefully if there are more protests, the amount of pollution we prevent — through hindering the mining of the tar sands, enacting a carbon tax, supporting renewable energy, etc.— will be greater than the harm already done. That’s the goal. Few travelers have one as noble.

Environmentalists should not and cannot try to be perfect before they try to change the fossil fuel-based system. When dealing with multinational, multi-billion dollar corporations and corrupt politics, the verse about the “speck of dust in your neighbor’s eye” does not apply. In this case, we are not talking about a “speck of dust” or a neighbor, but a system that is delivering billions in short-term profits for the few and deadly or dislocating climate disasters for the other six billion.

Blackmon calls the students “ignorant” for not appreciating the importance of fossil fuels, but the UN estimates that rich countries must reduce fossil fuel pollution by 80 percent to avert the most horrendous climate disasters (like all of Florida underwater).

Amongst young activists and engineers, hope abounds. Is this optimism merely ignorance? Perhaps they’d rather be naïve and progressive than realistic and underwater.

Diane Williamson
SU Professor

Published on March 31, 2014 at 1:00 am