Last week, I wrote about the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education’s Carbon Neutrality resolution. And on Friday, members of Kyoto Now! put a copy of it on President Skorton’s desk. The resolution binds Cornell to eliminate its dependence on fossil fuels by 2050 — step by step, we’ll make the switch and eventually use only renewable energy.

The day after that column was published, Cornell utilities engineer Lanny Joyce told me that the University’s new “combined-heating” plant would cut our emissions more quickly than his last CO2 forecast indicated. Most power plants burn something to boil water, then use the steam to power turbines. But Cornell’s new plant will use the heat produced for making electricity to heat the campus. This combined approach will cut emissions to 9 percent below 1990 levels by 2009.

Unfortunately, fossil fuels will remain the primary source for Cornell’s heat and energy. This project is a $50 million investment in a stone-age technology. Less than 1 percent of our energy comes from clean sources — exactly what the Carbon Neutrality resolution demands we change. Today, the results of the meeting with Skorton will be released in a joint statement from Kyoto Now! and Cornell. Someone close to the meeting says that Skorton didn’t sign, but instead appointed a committee to think about signing. Penn’s President, Amy Gutmann, signed AASHE’s Presidents Climate Commitment on Tuesday — all new Penn buildings will be LEED Silver (a construction industry standard for green facilities), new appliances will be energy efficient, public transportation will be provided for faculty, students and staff, and renewables will comprise at least 15 percent of Penn’s energy. She commits to all this by 2009, in addition to extending Penn’s huge wind energy purchase for another decade.

So what did Skorton do? Chances are the press release is featured prominently today on Cornell’s website. Here’s how to evaluate the two possible outcomes:

No, he didn’t sign it. Shame on Skorton for any kind of delay. He should take President Guttman’s advice: “At Penn, we must recognize the impact of a research institution of our size and acknowledge that our management of utilities, our construction, transit services and our recycling extends beyond our campus and has global consequences.” If our leaders respond to Climate Change with committees to study the issue, they’re not reading what better-informed committees and serious scientists tell us daily. With the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Report earlier this month, only fanatics and Exxon-Mobil’s junk scientists can still deny that humans are causing Climate Change.

The scientific community’s consensus is unambiguous: increases in emissions are melting Greenland and glaciers more quickly than anticipated, extreme weather patterns are on the rise and business as usual and stabilization policies will cement these effects.

Don’t buy anything on a coastline.

Skorton should read a recent study by Professors Sterman and Sweeney at MIT’s Sloan School of Management (not known for hippie eco-socialism) and Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, respectively, who ask why educated adults are so complacent about Climate Change. They interviewed graduate students at MIT and found that “widespread misunderstanding” of basic science leads policymakers and educated adults to advocate “wait and see” responses.

Like appointing a committee to consider whether Carbon Neutrality is worthwhile, denying the basics of science is symptomatic of our inability to tackle Climate Change. What committee-makers and the graduate students don’t understand is basic conservation of matter — greenhouse gases, once emitted, don’t go away. Currently, the planet emits about twice the amount of gases it can naturally digest. Oceans and trees are sometimes called “carbon sinks” because of their ability to “sequester” carbon — but we’ve overwhelmed capacity and are thus living with increasing Climate Change.

What Sterman and Sweeney find are graduate students who want to “wait and see” if the effects of Climate Change are really worth preventing. Appointing a committee to study the “what ifs” or “best way forward” isn’t just waiting longer to act — it’s denying that our current emissions are chiefly responsible for Climate Change, and praying that later on we can change the past.

The other possibility —

He signed it. Congratulations, President Skorton. You’ve taken greater steps than any of your predecessors. But, in the weeks ahead, we must be certain that the policies we enact to achieve Carbon Neutrality don’t indulge offsets or pseudo-remedies.

Offsets are a new business you’ve seen on travel websites. They offer you the option of “going carbon neutral” by purchasing green “offsets” for your carbon footprint. For example, Terrapass calculates that your flight to London produces 2,700 lbs of CO2, and for just $9.95 they’ll “offset” it. They say this will “counterbalance the global warming impact of your flying.” Terrapass is one of just dozens of firms trying to make a buck off your guilt. Companies invest in projects that ostensibly “offset” your carbon by planting trees somewhere, or investing in green energy somewhere else. Many companies lack transparency. They hope you don’t ask questions about where these projects are or who is impacted. A project at Mount Elgon, Uganda, involved a monoculture tree plantation (lots of one crop means no diversity and bad ecology). It encroached on land that Ugandans used for farming. The same has happened in Brazil, and in South Africa a clean development project meant that a cancer-causing landfill would stay open for an extra 30 years — all in the name of saving the environment.

Fundamentally, offsets fail to reduce emissions, though CEOs are increasingly buying them to “reduce” emissions. We don’t know for sure how much trees can really offset, and secondly, (here’s the killer), they don’t entail any reduction in our emissions. Think back to basic science, conservation of matter — if the issue is how much we’re polluting by burning fossil fuels, there are no solutions that don’t reduce the amount we’re emitting. Once Cornell burns millions of tons of oil, coal and gas to heat Olin Library, the emissions don’t disappear no matter how many acres of Brazil we steal to offset our energy use. Likewise, the new green industry teems with feel-good quick fixes like ethanol (Barack Obama’s favorite) and “clean coal” (an oxymoron) that must be avoided. If we invest in less terrible fossil fuels (like natural gas: half as bad as coal but still neither clean nor renewable), we’re not planning for the future, only hoping to postpone it. Skorton can partner with AASHE to design better growth and more efficient research. His term has just begun, yet these choices will determine how Skorton is remembered — as a trailblazer or just another laggard.

Jeff Purcell is a graduate student in Africana Studies. He can be contactd at jlp56@cornell.edu. Brutal Honesty appears Mondays.