We are in a five-alarm fire.
When it comes to climate action, the Trump administration is proposing measures so spectacularly damaging that we are now in an existential crisis, in addition to being perhaps in a constitutional crisis.
This makes me wonder what my French grandfather who lived through WWII felt like. He was nominally Catholic and probably saved my part-Jewish grandmother’s life. He drove her and the children to unoccupied Vichy as the Nazis rolled into Paris, doctored the eldest daughter’s papers and managed to send her via Spain and Portugal to the U.S. for the duration of the war. Then, Grandpapa did some work for the Résistance. He was by no means a bigtime leader like de Gaulle or Jean Moulin. He played only a small, episodic role. But he did his bit. Now I’m going to do mine.
My hope is that Yale will also do its bit.
This is not the time for doomscrolling and despair. There is no room for looking away, hiding our heads in the sand, or retracting like turtles into a shell. Climate change is upon us and it waits for no man. It will make large swaths of our planet uninhabitable, likely displacing 1.2 billion people globally by 2050. More people will die and suffer every year from scorching heat waves, fires, droughts, superstorms, floods, crop failures and starvation, turbocharged by global warming. If you don’t believe we are at war with our planet, consider this: we are already living in a mass extinction. In the last 20 years — the time many Yale students reading this article have been alive — the U.S. lost 22 percent of its butterflies. In just 50 years scientists have seen a cataclysmic 73 percent decline in the average size of monitored wildlife populations. Without great climate science guiding powerful climate action, our children will struggle on an unrecognizable, hostile planet. Our generation is called upon to step up right now and do all we can to cut emissions and minimize sufferings that global warming will bring — with major risks now amplified by Trump.
Yale can step into the breach in a way that will reverberate through history. Yale is the second wealthiest educational institution in the world. Our endowment surpasses $30 billion. With great wealth and power comes great responsibility.
Yale could make an offer to every key climate scientist who was sacked from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Environmental Protection Agency or National Science Foundation, the latter being the agency that funds and supports all American field research in Antarctica. Yale could also make an offer to all U.S. government scientists who Trump has forbidden from working on the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC, which is the crucial lynchpin of worldwide climate science. Yale’s offer could be modest: you’ve been sacked. Your vital work is being destroyed. Please come to us as fellows, virtually or in person. We cannot pay you much, if anything, unfortunately, as our budgets are also on the chopping block. But we have an illustrious university affiliation for you, an email, a superb library system, brilliant scholars, wonderful students, dining halls with free food and a warm welcome. We can squeeze, share, make do, fold you in somehow and help you keep your climate science going to the best of our ability.
I know this is a scary time. Would Yale be punished for this? Will Yale lose money? Would the Trump administration cut federal funding for Yale, to the tune of hundreds of millions per year, just as it recently targeted Columbia? Is that the right question we should be asking ourselves?
Or should we ask: what will our grandchildren say to us about this pivotal moment in history, when Yale had the chance to help save global climate science in the middle of a climate crisis that threatened humanity? Will future generations look at Yale and say: never have so many owed so much to so few?
People often ask themselves, what would I do if I lived through WWII? Well, we can stop asking ourselves and do our duty to future generations, right now.
ETELLE HIGONNET graduated from Yale College in 2000 and from Yale Law School in 2005. She is the founder and director of Coffee Watch, an NGO fighting to end deforestation and slavery in coffee. Previously she worked at the National Wildlife Federation, Mighty Earth and Greenpeace, fighting to end deforestation with an emphasis on the cocoa, palm oil, rubber, cattle, and soy industries. Before that she worked at Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. She has been knighted for her human rights and environmental work. She can be reached at etelle.higonnet@coffeewatch.