Yet at a time when so many Americans are demanding clean energy, why are so many of our institutions of higher education still relying on and supporting such a dirty and outdated energy source as coal?

From the mine, to the plant, to the ash pond, coal is our dirtiest energy source. It causes asthma and other health problems, destroys our mountains and releases toxic mercury into our communities.

We cannot continue to rely on this dirty and dangerous source of power. That’s why I’m excited to debate Fred Palmer, senior vice president of government relations at Peabody Energy, on Tuesday, April 27, at Graham Chapel here on the Washington University campus.

We’ve seen our nation’s college campuses become great activism centers around our greatest environmental threat: global warming. Young people are laying the groundwork for our clean energy future, and they’ve got the coal—which is responsible for more than 30 percent of our global warming pollution—in their sights.

Coal provides about half of our nation’s electricity, but here in Missouri, it’s responsible for 84 percent of the state’s power. We all know the Show Me State can do better.

Coal plants are dangerously outdated. Nearly half of our existing coal fleet began operating more than 50 years ago, and many of these plants lack modern pollution controls, making them major sources of mercury, soot, smog and global warming pollution.

Pollution from coal creates significant health impacts, including asthma, lung cancer and other respiratory issues. According to Physicians for Social Responsibility, pollution from coal plants has been linked to four of the top five leading causes of death in the U.S.: heart disease, cancer, stroke and respiratory disease. These impacts are suffered right here on the Wash. U. campus, which is located in a county that violates federal air-quality standards for smog (also known as “ozone”), a dangerous pollutant that is largely caused by pollution from coal plants in the metro area.

Coal plants are also one of the largest sources of man-made mercury pollution in the U.S. Mercury pollution causes brain damage and other developmental problems in unborn children and infants and has been linked to a greater risk of coronary heart disease in men.

Pollution from coal plants adds $62 billion a year to health care costs, according to the National Academy of Sciences, and research from the American Lung Association shows that coal pollution causes 12,000 hospitalizations, 38,000 heart attacks and 24,000 deaths each year.

And that’s just what burning it does. Mountaintop removal coal mining devastates Appalachian communities and watersheds, as coal companies blow the tops off mountains to get at a seam of coal, and then dump the waste into nearby streams and valleys.

Once coal is burned, its ash is very toxic, containing harmful metals and chemicals like arsenic, lead and selenium. This coal ash is dumped into unlined piles and waste ponds, where it seeps into the ground and water tables. Or, even worse, the waste ponds can rupture, just as one did near Harriman, Tenn., in December 2008, destroying homes and permanently damaging the landscape.

This all shows what a bad investment coal is. It’s unhealthy and it destroys communities. Instead of spending millions to artificially extend the life of the outdated fleet of coal-fired power plants, it is time to phase out this old way of generating power and transition to clean energy technologies, like wind, solar and efficiency, that will power the future and create good paying jobs for Americans.

Clean energy technologies are available and already creating thousands of jobs around the country. An October 2009 study by researchers at the University of Illinois, Yale University and the University of California, Berkeley, shows that clean energy investments will create as many as 1.9 million jobs nationally by 2020. Those are jobs that Wash. U. and other college grads will be seeking out over time.

And no matter what our opponents say, capturing the carbon pollution from coal plants does not make coal clean. As I’ve noted, there is a host of other dirty problems associated with coal.

Continuing our dependence on coal chains us to dirty energy and prevents us from making the changes we need to bring about a clean, secure energy future. I hope you’ll join me at the debate against Peabody Energy’s Fred Palmer on Tuesday, April 27. Let’s stand up for clean energy together.

Bruce Nilles is the director of the Sierra Club’s nationwide Beyond Coal campaign. To reach him, see
http://www.sierraclub.org/contact/

(Erin Mitchell | Student Life)

I returned to school eager to fulfill this resolution. At first, going out more frequently was easy enough: my responsibilities were limited, and my workload was minimal. Yet, after a month or so of classes, I slowly regressed to my old ways. I stayed in to study, to finesse an essay, or to catch up on sleep. This wasn’t to say that I stopped going out altogether, but merely that I often couldn’t bring myself to put down the textbook and slip on some high heels.

After some reflection, I realized that not only was I not fulfilling my resolution, I was also merely brushing one finger gently against the surface of a more comprehensive dichotomy. Balancing academics with a thriving social life is really just a subcategory to a broader issue, striking a balance between achievement and experience. An achievement, or rather, the desire to achieve, is a way to gain some sort of hold on the ambiguous future. A future that is emphasized by numerous external forces as being “necessary to secure”—as if it is tangible, an animal we must wrestle with and physically restrain. Experience, or rather, the desire to just experience life, is a focus on the present, with the implication of a lack of concern for the future.

My realization that my resolution was just a subcategory to a bigger life issue came about this past month when I began frantically putting together a résumé to apply for summer internships. The process of creating this one simple document illustrated to me the unfortunate reality of our culture: A person’s self-worth is contingent upon measurable achievement, not the less calculable life experience. My résumé is no more than a neatly compiled list of grade point average, honors and awards—all without any reference to life experiences. Even the résumé section demarcated “experiences” is not intended to include real experiences, such as a recent skydiving endeavor. Instead, it is another area to highlight the more tangible past jobs and internships.

With both internal and external pressure to accumulate achievements, it’s hard to leave time and energy for experiences. Just as emphasizing academics can stunt a person’s social life, emphasizing achievement can deter a person from living. Achievement is important, but this does not mean that experience should be left by the wayside. It’s important to strike a balance, and even though it may seem that the two are antithetical, I do think that they have the potential to work in tandem.

Up to this point in my life, I can honestly say there hasn’t been a fair balance between the two. If the “experiences” section on my résumé were to truly reference my real life experiences, I’d be hard-pressed to formulate a considerable list. As I grow older—moving closer to the “real world”—the pressure to achieve is more pronounced. I now realize that my impulsive resolution reflects my wish to evade these pressures, and to place greater value on experience. With social endeavors acting as only one aspect of life experiences, I wish to broaden the framework of my resolution. This coming year I intend to find a balance: to both achieve and experience, or at least to make a conscious effort to do so.

Amanda is a sophomore in Arts & Sciences. She can be reached via e-mail at arjacobo@wustl.edu.

(Erin Mitchell | Student Life)

On Oct. 28, Student Life published an article discussing the recently formed student group called Washington University Students for Endowment Transparency (WUSET), a “New student group pushing transparency in endowment.” WUSET, acting in support of a group known as the Responsible Endowments Coalition, has begun to gain recognition on campus, claiming it promotes “responsible” investments. While the purported pros of this organization make it seem as though this group of students is presenting the administration with a delicious candy apple, they fail to take into account that—caramel coating aside—their idea is filled with worms. WUSET is bad. Let’s talk about why.

The most important question to ask is, what exactly constitutes a “responsible” endowment? According to www.endowmentethics.org, such an endowment is one that “screen[s] out or divest[s] from particular investments, such as in tobacco…” Additionally, these endowments make “proactive investments in companies or projects that align with the institution’s mission, such as green energy or low-income housing…” Now I won’t say that green energy is a particularly bad investment or that tobacco is an especially good place to park endowment funds. But I will say that opening up the endowment to student opinion could have potentially serious consequences for the student body.

The endowment, according to the University’s Web site, is a collection of funds designated for such purposes as supporting “professorships, scholarships and fellowships, research, the libraries, teaching, curricular development, buildings and grounds, technology, and new or evolving academic programs.” In short, it provides money to support just about everything a university does. Endowments operate as giant pools of money that are invested; the returns from said investments are then used for the aforementioned purposes. If the University’s money is invested well, then it ought to reap a higher return. This translates into more spending on the part of the University to improve itself. Note that it also yields more financial aid for needy students.

I truly wonder why WUSET would push an agenda that severely limits the types of investments that the school can make. It seems strange that the betterment of the University could be put in jeopardy because the school may soon have to weed out putting its money in anything that could be construed as controversial. The University is very vocal about its politics, and if WUSET accomplishes its mission of endowment transparency, the University as a whole could be very much worse off.

I will not go as far to say that this notion of “responsible” investing is entirely bad and that the school should pour its money into blood-soaked African conflict diamonds. I only say that opening the endowment’s components up to scrutiny by a student body more concerned with myopic politics and less informed about investing is not the best idea. Take the following two investments as hypothetical examples: The Vanguard Consumer Staples ETF (NYSE: VDC) and Market Vectors Global Alternative Energy Trust (NYSE: GEX). In the past six months, one of these ETFs has risen 18.73 percent. The other has dropped 3.14 percent.

I’ll cut to the chase and say that the alternative energy investment is the one that dropped. But out of the two, it’s the only viable investment according to the Responsible Endowments Coalition. The consumer staples ETF, which puts its money in a well-rounded mix of companies whose products have relatively stable demand, invests 7.07 percent of its assets in Philip Morris International. Cigarettes, as noted above, are a no-no under the “responsible” endowment scheme.

I’ll respond to the supposed evidence in favor of a responsible endowment. The $150,000 Wesleyan Student Endowment, a “responsible” endowment, has outperformed the market. It now stands at $150,065.46, according to an article on the Responsible Endowments Coalition Web site. That’s annually a 0.04364 percent return. In the past year, Altria (another cigarette manufacturer) is up roughly 3 percent.

Call it irresponsible, but making money is what the endowment is supposed to do. Before the student body throws its support behind WUSET, I urge everyone to consider whether it’s worth potentially hindering our endowment’s future growth just to help a few misinformed and quixotic students sleep better.

Aviya Lanis | Student Life

I stayed up far too late a few nights ago, talking with my friends, venting some frustrations and laughing about Napoleon (ambiguous jokes are always the best kind). There I sat, crunched against the wall, knees pulled into my chest, when a group of loud and obviously drunk freshmen stumbled past my withdrawn feet, shouting about finding a friend of theirs.

They ran off with quite a bit of noise and left my friends and me to think about what we had seen. The others returned to bantering about the Corsican, but I still couldn’t shed the image of those people stumbling down the hallway.

I don’t understand it.

In my mind, the concept of getting drunk has always evaded even a hint of logic.

Think about it. You pay a ridiculous amount of money for every drink, chugging can after can or bottle after bottle, knowing full well that the next morning you could (and most likely will) wake with a pounding headache and maybe even a bed buddy who looks a lot like Quasimodo. On top of that, everyone knows that enough partying can lead to a Freshman (or Sophomore or Junior or Senior) 15 and, later on in life, that wonderful condition that doctors call cirrhosis of the liver. Am I using a slippery slope argument? Maybe, but everyone knows that drunk people have slower reflexes and impaired balance, so the argument still stands.

I write this not, though, as a nutritionist or MADD lobbyist or even as someone who is tired of people stomping on the floor above him every morning at 3 o’clock. I write this because I am genuinely curious as to what drives someone to drink until they don’t know where they are.

When does life become so bad that the only possible escape is from a cup you scored from some Greek letters or your roommate? Why is it that almost every non-CS40 event we have on this campus is so awkward that we have to lubricate our social gears with a disgusting-smelling drink that looks like pee? What triggers us to drink and drink until we find humor in the vomit dripping down our shirt and saturating those shoes that we hoped so badly would match our outfit for the party? I asked myself those questions that night as I took a walk through the rain.

It still doesn’t make sense to me. We all attend this amazing school with these amazing people and opportunities, yet we feel so compelled to get wasted every weekend. Is there solace in it? Because all I have seen is someone in tears, retching up their dinner. Is there happiness in it? Because all I have seen is someone staggering around with a dejected look on their face. Is there pride in it? Because all I have seen is someone babbling incoherently about how drunk they were.

That same night as I had just come in from my walk, a girl bolted down the stairs behind me, looking around frantically with confusion in her eyes. She finally looked at me and said with an urgency in her voice, “How do I get out of here? I can’t find my way out of here.” I showed her that the door was merely a few feet behind her, and before I even had a chance to ask her if she was all right, she was gone.

That really resonated with me because it made me wonder if that was the reason: Maybe we just want to get out of here. Maybe we’re all so miserable, and we think there’s no escape until someone points to that easy-access door right behind us, and then we have it, our answer. Or, at least we think it’s our answer, but what does it tell us, really? I’m still trying to figure that one out.

I probably will not make any friends with this column, but I think someone needed to say it. As much as that girl was trying to find her way out of the building, we are all trying to find our way to someplace a little better. I have seen people try to find their way through a drunken stupor, but it never quite works out. No, I’ve found in my experience that the best way is maybe just sitting up until 2:30 in the morning with a group of people that understands your ambiguous jokes and listens to every qualm you have, however small it may be.