I’ve heard from a lot of people offering to compromise on the Brandeis Sustainability Fund by saying that they’d support it as long as they could opt out of paying. That still seems a little unfair to me, so let me offer a compromise of my own:
Anyone can opt out of paying the BSF. However, anyone who opts out is no longer allowed to use campus resources that produce carbon emissions. That’s fair, right?
No?
Then join me in voting YES on the Brandeis Sustainability Fund: https://sys.brandeis.edu/voting/menu/9655.
So, while I think that this initiative is problematic, I do believe that it’s necessary that we vote in favor if we want to see greater change on the part of the administration. Self-taxation isn’t necessarily the best way to get the administration to change their environmental practices as they can just point to the fund and claim that the fund will take care of it… But, having a failing vote on this initiate particularly when the fee is nominal would seem to indicate more about the spirit of Brandeis towards environmental issues rather than interest in a particular policy. At least, that’s how I see that it would be used in leverage by the administration against change…
tl;dr
shitty if you do vote for it, wore if you don’t.
Hah Adam, I love it. Right on.
Adam, this logic would work if the fee went to directly off-setting carbon emissions. It doesn’t. It goes to generic “green” initiatives which may or may not have anything whatsoever to do with those emissions. I would be happy to pay a fee which was precisely calculated to cover the damage individuals do on average during a year at our university. But that isn’t what this is.
Gideon, maybe SEA messed up by not pushing harder for the opt out option, but I think at this point if the initiative is defeated, it would be extremely difficult to get back to this point with an opt out initiative, due to the loss of momentum, the perceived opposition’s influence on administrators and senators, and the fact that the sponsors would have to go through the whole process and reinvest all that time all over again. The likely result of a no vote is that the whole idea is dealt a death blow. Why not vote yes, and then push for an amendment to change it to an opt in/opt out system as soon as sage can handle it? If that’s as quick a transition as everyone says it is, then we may not even ever end up being stuck with mandatory fees, if its slower, its still a maximum of four semesters. That seems like a better compromise to me.
Art,
I’m kidding on the square; obviously, this would never actually happen. But my point is that it doesn’t matter if you don’t care about it. Whether or not you care, you still have the same environmental impact. If we’re trying to solve the problem of too much carbon emission, we have two options: stop participating in carbon-emitting activities, or help fund infrastructure improvements to lessen carbon emission. My proposed solution is the only one that solves the problem and gives everyone that choice.
….is this serious? we can’t use anything that emits carbon because we don’t want to opt in for something that we may not care about?
again, my solution was opt-in=preferential deisbike rental
idk i don’t have any good reasons to vote against it, but i do have more and more ad hominem reasons to.
works for me. But remember, it can’t be done, since this is so urgent that it can’t wait until they figure out how to do optional fees in sage.
How about if the measure is defeated you still make the people who voted yes pay seeing as they so clearly believe in this cause.