Move us forward

Robert Kasdin, Senior Executive Vice President and head of Environmental Stewardship at Columbia, announced in the Summer 2011 Update on the University’s Environmental Stewardship that the Morningside campus is in the process of switching from outdated and dirty heating oil to natural gas. The University markets this switch as positively green. But where will this natural gas come from? Because of a sharp decline in conventional natural gas extraction in the U.S. since the 1970s, an increasing proportion of domestically produced gas comes from an alarming new technology known as “hydrofracking.”

High-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” produces fossil fuel energy for commercial and residential use by blasting water and a “proprietary” slew of carcinogenic and otherwise toxic chemicals thousands of feet down into the ground to break up rock formations and release trapped pockets of natural gas. Columbia, Cornell, and other research institutions have conducted studies showing that fracking pollutes water, causes earthquakes, and emits more greenhouse gas than oil over a 20-year horizon. It destroys farmland, contributes to air pollution, and contaminates water supplies. Still, energy providers and the institutions that employ them advertise natural gas extracted through fracking as a sustainable alternative to foreign oil.

Having installed hundreds of thousands of wells in Western states like Texas and Colorado, natural gas companies are turning now to the Marcellus Shale, an underground rock formation that stretches through New York and Pennsylvania to Virginia, and beneath the Delaware River Basin, which provides some of the cleanest unfiltered tap water to 15 million people in New York City and the surrounding area. The gas industry estimates that it would use and pollute over 10 billion gallons of water from this source over 10 years.

Even as Columbia scientists expose its ecological and health hazards, hydrofracking is entirely left out of the University’s conversation about the transition to a natural gas-fueled campus. This exemption is ignorant at best and evasive at worst, considering Columbia’s scientific and financial power to seriously contemplate more progressive alternatives.

Meanwhile, a student group called Infracktion has formed, seeking to pressure the administration to consider the implications of hydrofracking in the University’s switch to natural gas, and to implement a more genuinely sustainable energy policy. Considering that we are mostly undergraduates studying a variety of subjects, we are not equipped to provide all the answers to Columbia’s energy issues. That isn’t our job. Rather, we ask that Columbia turn to its own valuable resources: its professors and scientists. Columbia should allocate funding to create a group of energy and finance professionals dedicated to finding energy alternatives for the University. We could, for example, tap into the expertise of professors at the Earth Institute such as Klaus Lackner and Peter Eisenberger, who are developing innovative renewable energy and carbon capture technologies.

To fund such endeavors, Columbia could consider creating a green revolving fund, as many other universities have successfully done. Through this model, an initial investment in clean energy saves the University a certain amount of money, which is then reinvested in further clean energy development. Stanford, for example, has invested $24.45 million in its green revolving fund.
Columbia’s switch to natural gas is more than unfortunate—it’s regressive. Converting to natural gas is an expensive infrastructural commitment, which implies long-term dependency on a cheap supply of gas. No doubt this investment will “create jobs,” a phrase exploited as much by the oil and gas industry as by mainstream politicians, but the question is what kind of infrastructure we want these jobs to build. Updated research has shown that the projected gas reserves in the Marcellus Shale were exaggerated by at least 60 percent, and industry analysts like Deborah Rogers have suggested that the hydrofracking boom is poised to bust long before delivering on its promises. To stake this many jobs on such an unstable base is as dangerous for the economy as fracking is for our health.

Columbia is a locus of power and influence, supported by brilliant scientific minds working towards real energy alternatives. This is not a matter of what’s possible, but of priorities. As the powers-that-be put $6.3 billion into a 17-acre expansion into Harlem that will likely run on natural gas, we ask: Why not go further? Rather than slowing the implementation of cleaner solutions, why not move forward, starting right here on our campus?

The author is a List College senior majoring in anthropology. She is a member of Infracktion, a project of Students for Economic and Environmental Justice and a Green Umbrella group. This op-ed is written on behalf of Infracktion.