Vincent Boudreau
Dear Members of the City College Community,
Starting in the spring of last year, a working group of faculty and staff have been planning a year of activity around how environmental pressure and climate change are threatening our populations, and questions of what we can do about it. Faculty from across the college are planning speaking events-I attended a truly interesting presentation in the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Department last week concerning how the industrial palm oil plantations and rampant forest burning are destroying Kalimantan. We will soon have a roster of events covering the spring semester, but until then, keep an eye out for lectures and presentations branded with our year of climate justice tag.
The idea, in this year of programming, is to put CCNY’s cross-disciplinary expertise on display, and to position the college to contribute its environmental, sustainability and climate change expertise to efforts to resolve these problems. We’re hoping, underneath this year of public events programming, to begin developing a set of programs and connections that can help us more effectively mobilize campus expertise into the struggle for the more sustainable future. I’ll periodically send out notices of events in this series that merit attention, and look for the longer roster of events to be published later in the semester.
At the moment, I’d like to draw your attention to something taking place this semester, starting tomorrow. The Colin Powell School is launching its Climate Fellows Program, under the direction of CCNY and Colin Powell School alum, Trevor Hauser. The project is designed to bring to CCNY something that Trevor has been working on as partner at The Rhodium group, and the head of its energy and climate group: the integration of climate change data with the tools of economic analysis. Students drawn from a diversity of CCNY disciplines will, via a series of workshops, learn to integrate approaches from these two disciplines. The first session takes place tomorrow and is entitled: The State of the Climate: Science, Economics and Policy, taking place at Shepard Hall, room 350 at 4:30 PM.
Sincerely,
Vince Boudreau
President