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Interested in campaign volunteering opportunities? Email Harry Alper at harry@greencorps.org.
Join UNC Beyond Coal on Facebook to connect with other members.
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The Sierra Student Coalition (SSC) is a broad network of high school and college-aged youth from across the country working to protect the environment. The SSC is the youth-led chapter of the Sierra Club, the nation’s oldest and largest grassroots environmental organization. Our mission is simple: “to train, empower, and organize youth to run effective campaigns that result in tangible environmental victories and that develop leaders for the environmental movement.” To keep up with what UNC’s SSC group is doing here in Chapel Hill, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.
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Carolina has a “Dirty Little Secret”: Our university endowment, one of the top 30 college endowments and valued at nearly $2 billion, is funding the coal industry.
Mining coal and burning coal to generate power is the single most destructive industrial process currently employed on a daily basis in our country. In addition, coal plants emit more than 30% of our nation’s annual carbon dioxide emissions, making them a major contributor to global warming. From taking coal out of the ground, to burning it to generate electricity, to disposing of the waste – coal destroys the environment, pollutes our air and water and jeopardizes public health.
Coal is also a bad financial investment. With increasing EPA regulation, the abundance of natural gas, and the plummeting cost of renewables, coal is “a dead man walkin’,” as The Washington Post put it last year. While there hasn’t been construction on a new coal plant in over two years, the decade 2000-2010 saw the solar PV market grow an average of 40% each year and the wind industry grow an average of 30% each year.
It’s time to do something about this. UNC has been a leader in sustainability and we want to keep it that way. That’s why the campaign goal of UNC Beyond Coal and the Sierra Student Coalition is to urge UNC and the UNC Management Company, which invests the endowment, to disclose its energy and natural resources holdings and pass a divestment resolution to remove its holdings in the “Filthy 15” – the worst coal mining and coal burning companies in the country. Divestment movements have been extraordinarily powerful in the past – from South Africa (apartheid) to Sudan (genocide) – and coal is next.
By getting UNC’s money out of the pockets of coal companies and reinvested in clean, green businesses and renewable energy companies, we will be actively building the clean energy future we deserve and creating the green jobs that will employ young people – including many future UNC graduates.
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