The pitfalls of climate activism

Milo Vetter Staff Writer

There’s a stereotype that climate activists are idealists with little to no understanding of what they’re trying to change. That stereotype may be an exaggeration, but it is sometimes accurate. When I first learned about Case Western Reserve University’s undergraduate climate advocacy group, Sunrise CWRU, I became curious about whether this stereotype applies to the student activists at CWRU. Sunrise makes strong demands from the university administration, and I, as much as anyone, would like to see these demands met, but to what extent are they possible?

The organization wants to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, but what does that current dependence look like?

To find out, I interviewed Stephanie Corbett, the director of CWRU’s Office of Energy and Sustainability along with the University Farm. She told me that a large portion of CWRU’s greenhouse emissions come from the Medical Center Company’s natural gas plant on the south side of University Hospitals—those creepy smokestacks that you can see from the Agnar Pytte Center for Science Education and Research. This plant burns natural gas to make steam for heating, while a separate plant produces chilled water. While this system does cause unavoidable emissions, it is comparatively much more efficient than other options for heating and cooling around campus. “Because [the Medical Center Company] creates the chilled water for those buildings, that means we don’t have to have other small chillers from building to building. So there is some efficiency to be gained,” Corbett said.

So, if we hypothetically wanted to stop CWRU’s reliance on the Medi - cal Center Company’s natural gas combustion, how would CWRU do it? Well, somebody would have to add water heaters and chillers to any building that needs to be heated or any lab that needs to be cooled. Of course, the steam and chilled water plants would still be necessary for other buildings that are not affiliated with CWRU, making them far less efficient in their operations as they would continue spewing emissions but for the service of less buildings. Not to mention that all of the infrastructure that distributes steam and chilled water around campus would be abandoned as well, and new infrastructure would have to replace it. This is, obviously, an extremely expensive solution—especially considering that these new electric heaters and chillers would be less efficient (due to smaller scale) and more expensive to operate. And for what benefit? After all, an electric water heater is only as green as the electricity that powers it. The demand to reduce reliance on natural gas seemed so simple—so, where did we go wrong?

The problem presented by this kind of climate advocacy is illustrated in a 2022 book “How the World Really Works” by Vaclav Smil, an interdisciplinary scientist and author with a focus in energy studies. There are a couple of chapters about globalization and the mechanics of supply chains, but the book is mainly a criticism of climate activism. To a climate activist, the idea of a net-zero world by 2050 may seem overly optimistic but possible. However, to Smil, it is completely laughable.

The conversation about greenhouse gases focuses mainly on electricity and sometimes transportation, but these make up only a fraction