Statement on the President’s Commission on Carbon Neutrality Final Report

Climate Action Movement at the University of Michigan

3/18/21

The climate crisis is an existential threat that requires a bold, integrated approach. This means addressing fundamental needs such as housing, transportation, food justice, resiliency, and addressing these needs quickly. The PCCN’s final recommendations hint at some small steps toward this, but will require much greater ambition, accountability, investment, and community representation moving forward.

As a result of the advocacy of CAM, the GEO Housing Caucus, and allied groups, the final report makes some improvements upon the preliminary recommendations. For example, it calls for the expansion of affordable, sustainable housing on campus and discusses the importance of robust, community-driven accountability mechanisms to ensure that implementation occurs quickly—two measures we called for directly. There is also more attention to environmental justice in this version of the report, which CAM centered in our advocacy. Finally, the recommended transition of U-M’s central power plant to geothermal is imperative, and we must hold the administration accountable to this recommendation.

However, there are still a number of critical flaws. These include continued reliance on carbon offsets, the far-too-late neutrality target date of 2040, and astonishing lack of detail on energy procurement. There is an assumption of continued and new partnerships with DTE, a utility that still relies extremely heavily on fossil fuels and actively throttles equitable access to clean energy. And while the call for affordable, sustainable housing is an important step, UM must recognize its role in driving rampant gentrification in Washtenaw county, and pledge to donate funding to Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti’s affordable housing trust funds. This is critical for both climate mitigation and resilience: if community members can afford to live in Ann Arbor, commuting emissions will drop; when our housing-insecure neighbors have a stable place to live, they are far less vulnerable to acute climate impacts. Finally, this late-game commitment to EJ is woefully inadequate; the fact remains that it was systematically deprioritized throughout the writing of the recommendations.

Thus, while the report takes some steps in the right direction, it falls far short of what the science tells us is necessary: a radical, swift transition to a resilient, carbon free economy, centering the basic needs of our most marginalized community members. The University of Michigan needs a climate justice plan, not just a carbon neutrality plan.