Dear UW Faculty,

UW is a major polluter, and needs local climate action.

As Institutional Climate Action (ICA), we have been fighting to make this happen. We are a grassroots group of students dedicated to leading climate action on campus and pushing for decarbonization of the UW campus. Now, we need your help.

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Students and professors at the UW do not need to be convinced or reminded of the urgency of the climate crisis. As the fourth best school in the world to study climate change, UW's academic departments have written Washington's Climate Commitment Act, worked on the United Nations Climate Change panel, and developed some of the leading science around climate impacts.

Yet, the University of Washington is one of the state's worst polluters. The University is the state’s second most polluting agency, in terms of greenhouse gasses (GHG). The power plant on campus is the 30th largest source of emissions in the state of Washington -- and the 16th highest GHG emitting power plant. UW currently plans to move this plant off fossil fuels by 2050 – but as the UN Secretary-General and many prominent scientists have shared, that is not nearly enough. We are already likely to hit 1.5C of warming in one of the next five years. Every set of emissions beyond that is another step towards climate destruction – another step towards broken promises.

The UW could move its plant 95% off fossil fuels by 2035, a timeline more aligned with climate justice, and one that hundreds of students and dozens of community organizations such as UAW 4121 and Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility have demanded. The demand is similar to those of Universities like the University of British Columbia (100% by 2035), and the University of California (net zero by 2025). Heat pumps, lake energy, on-site solar, and more make this transition more than technically possible. Given UW’s access to Inflation Reduction Act / Climate Commitment Act funds, the UW also has finances available to move this through – available government funding that it can’t use for other projects. And, transitioning the campus off fossil fuels will save enough money in operational costs that it will be a “net positive” financially in just a couple decades, though even if that wasn’t true, the state of the climate crisis demands action.

In our first few months of campaigning, and talking to administration, we saw no inclination from the UW to change its direction from 2050 to 2035. We delivered a letter to UW on May 12th declaring our intention to protest – on May 19th, more than a hundred students marched down to the UW’s methane plant, and began a five day overnight protest at the plant. This got admin attention – during our overnight protest, we had several conversations with President Ana Mari Cauce about our demands. Despite our near-unanimous support in the ASUW and GPSS student senates, endorsements from dozens of community groups, and signatures from hundreds of students, we were informed that admin didn’t consider this a high enough priority, and that we had to prove that the UW community truly cared about this issue.

Our campaign also discussed one other crucial issue – accessibility. UW is a very physically difficult campus to get around for folks with disabilities, a problem which is even more present during wildfire season, when the smoke can make it dangerous for folks with disabilities to spend the twenty minutes or more it can sometimes take to get from class to class. The big problem here – UW has many locations where entrances or exits are stair-dominated, or ramps are not well-maintained and are unsafe.

Decarbonization provides an opportunity to address this. In order to install the hot-water piping which will let UW efficiently switch from methane gas to heat pumps, UW has to “tear up” major portions of its campus. This is essentially unavoidable, unless UW wants to continue burning fossil fuels forever. In doing so, though, it can put in ramps or other land changes that would allow UW to be much more easily accessible to the disability community – it can replace barriers with welcoming, universally accessible infrastructure.

We are calling on UW faculty, important members of the UW community, and experts in their respective fields, to show their support for our demands by signing this petition. UW faculty represent a powerful voice on campus and many of you have contributed a great deal to climate science. With your voices, and scientific support, we can make real, local, change.

We’re asking you to sign below. By doing so, you endorse these demands:

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As faculty of the University of Washington, given our responsibility to educate and stand up for future and current generations, and our specific responsibilities as faculty at a University leading in climate education, during undeniable crisis –

We demand that the Board of Regents sign a written commitment to fully fund and approve a 95% by 2035 GHG reduction, or a plan with greater and more rapid GHG reductions.

We demand that the Board of Regents commits – in writing – to use the decarbonization of campus to address physical inaccessibility and other campus access barriers.