By: Miriam Brown ’21
The United States may intend to pull out of the Paris Agreement in 2020, but Colorado College is saying, “We Are Still In.”
In 2015, 195 countries, including the U.S., came together in Paris and agreed to make strides to limit the effects of global warming, such as by reducing carbon emissions to 26-28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. In June 2017, President Donald Trump announced his intent to withdraw from the climate deal in 2020, so American political and business leaders formed the “We Are Still In” coalition that same month to show that they would still stand by the agreement.
As part of the Economics of International Climate Policy course in Block 4, Lily Weissgold ’20, vice president of outreach for the CC Student Government Association, attended the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Katowice, Poland. When she returned to campus, she wrote a resolution asking CC to sign onto We Are Still In. The faculty approved the resolution unanimously during the Block 5 faculty meeting, and now CC is one of 348 colleges and universities to sign on.
“Signing onto We Are Still In is sort of taking a stand and saying that as an institution, we believe climate change is real; we believe it’s going to affect our future students and our current students in their futures; we care, and we’re going to do everything in our institutional power to make the world a better place,” Weissgold says.
As an institution, CC has already beat the timeline of the Paris Agreement. CC made a commitment in 2008 to become carbon-neutral by 2020, so since then, CC has reduced direct emissions on campus by over 50 percent, and overall emissions — including air travel and commuting — by 33 percent.
According to Director of the Office of Sustainability Ian Johnson, the school community can support these efforts by continuing to reduce their emissions, particularly in the areas of electrical use, heating/cooling and domestic hot water, business travel, solid waste and wastewater, and commuting.
“We know that this is a monumental challenge, which means every thing we do as individuals and everything we do as a college that reduces emissions helps move the world closer to that goal,” Johnson says.
