Science-Based Climate Change Denial: Manufacturing Doubt in the Age of Collapse

Despite overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity—especially the burning of fossil fuels—is the primary driver of climate change, a sophisticated form of climate change denial persists, often cloaked in the language and authority of science itself. This “science-based” climate change denial does not simply reject climate science outright but instead cherry-picks data, emphasizes uncertainties, and amplifies marginal scientific viewpoints to cast doubt on established facts. At the center of this strategy are credentialed scientists, industry-funded think tanks, and academic institutions that provide intellectual cover for the continued exploitation of fossil fuels.

This form of denialism has proved highly effective in delaying climate action, muddying public understanding, and influencing policy—especially in the United States, where partisan politics, neoliberal economic ideology, and extractive capitalism intersect.

The Evolution of Denialism

In the 1990s, outright climate change denial was more common, with prominent voices denying that the Earth was warming or that human activity played any role. But as evidence mounted—through rising global temperatures, melting ice caps, and increasingly destructive weather events—climate denial evolved. Rather than deny global warming altogether, many so-called skeptics now argue that climate models are unreliable, that warming is not necessarily dangerous, or that adaptation is more cost-effective than mitigation.

This shift gave rise to a subtler, more insidious strategy: science-based denial. Unlike conspiracy theories or fringe pseudoscience, this form of denial often involves credentialed experts, peer-reviewed articles (sometimes in low-quality or ideologically driven journals), and selective interpretation of data to mislead the public and stall regulatory action.

Scientists for Hire

Think tanks like the Heartland Institute, Cato Institute, and George C. Marshall Institute have employed scientists with impressive resumes to lend credibility to denialist arguments. Figures like Willie Soon, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, have received funding from fossil fuel interests like ExxonMobil and Southern Company while publishing papers that downplay human contributions to climate change. These financial ties are often undisclosed or downplayed, even though they present a clear conflict of interest.

In some cases, these scientists present themselves as heroic dissenters—mavericks standing up against a corrupt, alarmist scientific establishment. Their arguments are rarely about disproving the reality of climate change, but instead about inflating uncertainties, misrepresenting data, or offering misleading counter-examples that are unrepresentative of broader trends.

The Role of Higher Education

Elite universities and academic journals have sometimes unwittingly enabled science-based denial by embracing a culture of both-sides-ism and neutrality in the face of coordinated disinformation campaigns. In the name of academic freedom, universities have tolerated or even elevated voices that promote denialist rhetoric under the guise of “healthy skepticism.”

Institutions like George Mason University’s Mercatus Center and Stanford University’s Hoover Institution have provided intellectual homes for scholars funded by fossil fuel interests. These institutions maintain the veneer of academic legitimacy while promoting deregulatory, pro-fossil fuel policy agendas.

Furthermore, federal and state funding for climate research has become increasingly politicized, especially under Republican administrations. Under the Trump administration (2017–2021), federal agencies were directed to scrub climate change from reports and suppress scientific findings. Even now, with the potential return of Trump-style governance, science-based denialists are preparing for a resurgence.

Strategic Misinformation

Climate denial campaigns use sophisticated media strategies to manipulate public opinion. Through platforms like Fox News, right-wing podcasts, and social media channels, science-based denial is disseminated to millions. The denialists often invoke “Climategate”—a 2009 scandal involving hacked emails from climate scientists—as proof of corruption in climate science, despite multiple investigations clearing the scientists of wrongdoing.

The playbook is familiar: exaggerate uncertainty, cherry-pick cold weather events, blame solar activity, and discredit prominent climate scientists like Michael Mann or James Hansen. The public, already overwhelmed with crises, becomes confused, disoriented, or apathetic.

Consequences and Countermeasures

The consequences of science-based climate denial are devastating. Delayed action has led to rising sea levels, record heatwaves, agricultural disruption, and biodiversity collapse. Vulnerable communities, particularly in the Global South and marginalized communities in the U.S., bear the brunt of the damage.

To counter this, scholars and educators must move beyond “debating” denialists and instead expose the ideological and financial underpinnings of their arguments. As Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway showed in Merchants of Doubt, denialism is not a scientific disagreement—it is a political and economic strategy designed to protect powerful interests.

The Higher Education Inquirer supports open scientific inquiry, but not at the expense of truth or the planet. Universities, journalists, and the public must hold denialists accountable and challenge the structures that enable them—especially those in academic robes who lend their credentials to oil-funded propaganda.

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Reliable Sources and Further Reading:

• Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. Merchants of Doubt. Bloomsbury Press, 2010.

• Brulle, Robert J. “Institutionalizing delay: foundation funding and the creation of U.S. climate change counter-movement organizations.” Climatic Change, vol. 122, no. 4, 2014, pp. 681–694.

• Dunlap, Riley E., and Aaron M. McCright. “Organized climate change denial.” The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society, Oxford University Press, 2011.

• Mann, Michael E. The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet. PublicAffairs, 2021.

• Union of Concerned Scientists. "The Climate Deception Dossiers." 2015. https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/climate-deception-dossiers

• Inside Climate News. “Exxon: The Road Not Taken.” https://insideclimatenews.org/news/15092015/exxon-the-road-not-taken/

• Climate Investigations Center. “Tracking the Climate Denial Machine.” https://climateinvestigations.org

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For inquiries, reprint permissions, or to contribute your own investigations, contact The Higher Education Inquirer at gmcghee@aya.yale.edu.

How might we do climate action in academia under a second Trump administration? (Bryan Alexander)

With the reelection of Donald Trump, a candidate who has flaunted his desire for autocracy—aided and abetted by a Republican-controlled Congress that will not constrain him with guardrails—the United States is now poised to become an authoritarian state ruled by plutocrats and fossil fuel interests. It is now, in short, a petrostate.

–professor Michael Mann, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

How can we do climate crisis work within the higher education ecosystem under a second Trump administration?

With today’s post I’d like to explore strategic options in the present and near future. This is for everyone, but I’ll conclude with some self-reflection. My focus here will be on the United States, yet not exclusively so.

(I’ve been tracking possibilities for a Trump return for a while. Here’s the most recent post.)
Climate change under Trump: pressures on higher education

To begin with, the threat is that president Trump will undo federal support for climate action across the board (for evidence of this, see statements in Agenda 47, Project 2025, and elsewhere). Beyond the federal government, Trump can cause spillover effects at state and local levels. This should strengthen red states, counties, and cities in anti-climate policies and stances.

That governmental change will likely have direct impacts on higher education. About two thirds of American colleges and universities are public, meaning state-owned and -directed and therefore quite exposed to political pressures. Academics working in those institutions will be vulnerable to those forces, depending on their situation (institutional type, what a government actually does, the structural supports for units and individuals). How many academics – faculty, staff, students – will be less likely to undertake or support climate action? Will senior administrators be similarly disinclined to take strategic direction for climate purposes?

Beyond governments, how would the return of Trump to national power, complete with Republican control of Congress and the Supreme Court, shape private entities in their academic work? I’m thinking here of non-governmental funders, such as foundations, along with the many businesses which work with post-secondary education (publishers, ed tech companies, food service, etc.). Researchers studying global warming might have a harder time getting grants. Some funders might back off of academics doing climate work of all kinds. This can impact private as well as public academic institutions.

On the international side, Trump’s promised withdrawal from the Paris agreement and his repeated dismissal of climate change might make it harder for American academics to connect with global partners. Without simplifying too much, non-American academics might find Trump 2.0 an extra barrier to partnering with peers in the United States, especially if their national or local governments also took up anti-climate positions. International businesses developing decarbonization goods and services might step back from a newly Trumpified America (here’s one recent example).

Beyond those entities we should expect various forms of cultural resistance to climate work. Leaders from Trump and Vance on down can stir up popular attitudes and actions; the anti-immigrant focus on Springfield, Ohio gives one example. Politically-engaged individuals can challenge, threaten, or attack academics whom they see as doing harmful actions along climate lines.

On the other hand, academics might draw support from governments, businesses, nonprofits, and individuals who resist MAGA and seek to pursue climate goals. We could see governmental climate energies devolve below the federal level to states and below. Hypothetically, a professor in, say, California or Vermont might fare better than peers in Texas or South Carolina.

To be fair, political boundaries might not be cut and dried. Climate disasters might change minds. Republicans who benefit from the surviving pieces of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act might decide not to oppose academics doing climate work. The low costs of solar can trump (as it were) ideology. And insurance companies seem likely to continue their forceful actions of denying coverage and increasing fees in especially endangered areas.

I’ve been speaking of the academic population as a whole, but we should bear in mind the district experience of campus leaders (presidents, chancellors, system administrators, provosts, vice presidents, deans) in this situation. They play a decisive role in supporting climate action through setting strategic directions, developing programs, and, of course, providing funding. In my experience of researching academic climate action and thinking I’ve found this population to be, all too often, resistant to the idea for a variety of reasons: perceived lack of faculty interest; concerns about board/state government politics; anxieties about community response; fears of financial challenges. Then the Gaza protests happened and campus leaders seem to me even more nervous about taking public stances. How will they act under a new Trump administration?

Recall that politicians can bypass those leaders. The recent Texas A&M story is illustrative in this regard. A state politician decided that the university should no longer offer a LGBTQ studies minor. Campus faculty and its president refused to end the program, but the institution’s board unilaterally terminated it. It’s easy to imagine parallel cases for climate activity, from offering a sustainability degree to overhauling buildings to reduce their carbon footprint, only to be met by a politician’s enmity.
Academic options and possibilities

So what can we do now?

One option is for those doing climate work to just keep on doing it, damning the torpedoes. After all, climate action has historically elicited blowback and hostility, so Trump 2.0 is nothing new. Perhaps it’s a difference in kind, not degree. Academics who see themselves having institutional or other backing (tenure, private funding, benefactors) may just continue. Some might relish the prospect of a public fight.

The public/private divide might be a powerful one. Being employed by, or taking classes at, a state university makes climate politics potentially powerful, even dispositive. Blue states might double down on climate action, which could take the form of new regulations forcing campuses to decarbonize more rapidly or to include global warming in general education. Red states, in contrast, can disincentivize faculty, staff, and students from the full range of climate action, making teaching, research, campus operational changes more difficult, even dangerous.

In contrast, academics affiliated with private colleges and universities might enjoy greater political latitude, at least in terms of direct governmental authority. Some might find themselves constrained by their non-governmental institutional affiliations – i.e., by their churches, if they’re a religious school. Economic and cultural pressures can also hit academics in private institutions. That said, we could see private campuses take a leading role compared with their public colleagues.

What new forms might academic climate action take?

We could well see new informal support networks appear, perhaps quietly, perhaps openly. This could take place via a variety of technological frameworks, from Discord to email. People involved will need others working on the same lines. There are already some formal networks, like AASHE and Second Nature. They might serve as bulwarks against hostility. We could also see new nonprofits form to support academic climate action.

Another tactic might be to establish a for-profit company to do climate work. This might sound strange, but businesses often appeal to the famously business-friendly GOP. An LLC or S-corp doing climate work in higher education could look less Green New Deal-y.

Will we see academics become more public in their climate research, perhaps participating in government lobbying, civic demonstrations, or more? After all, four more years of Trump means we will see increased American greenhouse gas emissions. The crisis is worsening, and that fact might engage more faculty, staff, and students to resist. Perhaps campuses will become centers or hubs of all kinds of climate action.

Furthermore, we might see more direct action. American colleges and universities have seen little of this so far, as opposed to European institutions. There have been some initial, tentative signs of this outside of the academy, like Just Stop Oil spray painting an American embassy in the United Kingdom.



Might we see American students, staff, faculty letting the air out of SUVs, damaging oil infrastructure, pie-ing fossil fuel company executives, or more?

A very different tactic for academics to consider is to be stealthy in order to avoid hostile attention. Not talking about one’s new climate class on social media, not sharing global warming research on TikTok, not doing a public talk in the community might be appealing tactics. Similarly, scholars might avoid publishing in open access journals in favor of those behind high paywalls. We could organize using private messaging apps, like Signal.

We could also stop. We might judge the moment too dangerous to proceed. Think about the largest population of faculty, adjuncts, who have so little workplace protections. They might deem it safer to go dark for a few years until things are less dangerous. Consider academics in various forms of marginalization – by race, religion, gender, professional position – as well as those with non-academic pressures (financial, familial). How many of us will pause this work for the time being?

Those academics who are committed to climate work are thinking about such choices now. And some may be participating in conversations about these options.

Let me close on a moment of self-reflection.

I’ve been doing climate research for years as part of my overall work on higher education’s future. This has taken many forms, including a scholarly book, blog writing, teaching, and a lot of presentations, both in-person and virtual. I have been participating in several networks of like-minded folks. I’ve hosted and interviewed climate experts in various venues. Overall, I work climate change into nearly everything I do professionally.

Yet I am an independent, as some of you know. I do not have a tenured or full time academic position. I don’t have independent wealth backing me up. Doing climate work is increasingly risky. To the extent that people know my commitment, I might quietly lose work, allies, colleagues, supporters. I have seen some signs of this already. Similarly, the public nature of what I do opens me up to the possibility of public attacks. I have not yet experienced this.

My philosophy of work – heck, of life – is that it’s better when shared with other people, hence my longtime preference for sharing so much of what I do online. This makes my work better, I think. Yet now, with a new and energetic conservative administration in the country where I live and do most of my work, perhaps this is too risky. I’ve already received advice to run dark, to do climate and other work underground.

Or maybe this is me overthinking things, starting at shadows. These are possibilities, each contingent on many factors and developments in a sprawling and complex academic ecosystem. We could see versions of all of the above playing out at the same time. Some presidents may boldly lead their institutions into accelerated climate action, while others forbid faculty and staff from any such activity. Some professors may launch new climate-focused classes while others delay teaching theirs for years. Staff members in a blue state might set up organic farms and push for fossil fuel vehicle parking fees, while others focus on other topics and keep their heads down. Some of us will make content for public view while others head underground.

Everything I know about climate change tells me this is a vast, civilization-wide crisis which humanity is struggling to apprehend, and that academia can play a significant role in addressing it if we choose to do so. Today I do not feel comfortable advising individuals on what each person should best do in this new political era. But I want to place the options before the public for discussion, to the extent people feel they should participate.

I hope I can keep doing this work. It needs to be done.

(thanks to the Hechinger Report and many friends including Karen Costa and Joe Murphy)

 

 

Bryan Alexander is an award–winning, internationally known futurist, researcher, writer, speaker, consultant, and teacher, working in the field of higher education’s future. He is currently a senior scholar at Georgetown University.  This article was originally published at BryanAlexander.org.

Spying on Climate: What the Intelligence Community Knew and When They Knew It

 On June 30, 2025, the National Security Archive published a revealing new briefing book titled “Spying on Climate: Inside Intelligence.” The release includes more than two dozen once-secret documents showing that the U.S. Intelligence Community has been closely tracking climate change as a national security threat for decades. Far from being a niche environmental concern, climate disruption has been consistently framed in these internal assessments as a driver of conflict, instability, resource scarcity, and mass migration—issues of direct importance to U.S. national security.

The collection includes detailed analyses from agencies including the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. These assessments underscore how environmental shifts—from flooding and sea level rise to desertification and extreme heat—are already affecting geopolitical dynamics. In regions from Sub-Saharan Africa to Southeast Asia, climate stress has been shown to amplify risks of war, terrorism, authoritarianism, and mass displacement. The Arctic thaw has raised the stakes for U.S.-Russia competition. Drought and crop failure are destabilizing fragile governments. And millions of people are being forced to move, often toward borders that are increasingly militarized.

One especially significant report, produced by the National Intelligence Council in 2021, warned that climate change would “exacerbate cross-border flashpoints, particularly over water and migration.” The 2024 Annual Threat Assessment from the Director of National Intelligence also emphasized that climate-related hazards are expected to intensify, directly affecting U.S. military infrastructure and increasing demands for humanitarian and disaster relief operations.

Although many of these findings have appeared in unclassified summary form in recent years, this newly released archive reveals the long-standing nature of the intelligence community’s attention to the issue. One report, commissioned in the early 2000s, was kept classified for over 17 years and only made public in February 2025. It detailed early efforts to model climate instability and its implications for military readiness and international order. Other documents show how climate security assessments informed Pentagon and diplomatic planning as early as the late 1990s.

These disclosures are not part of a political campaign or advocacy push. They come from some of the most secretive and security-focused institutions in the U.S. government—agencies that prioritize global surveillance, satellite data, and geopolitical modeling over ideology. Their purpose is to identify and mitigate threats, not to build consensus or win elections.

The implications are clear. Climate change is not a distant or debatable threat; it is a persistent, multi-decade risk documented in some of the most secure channels of government communication. For those who still dismiss or downplay climate science, these documents challenge that complacency. If the CIA and Pentagon have treated climate change as a strategic risk for years, it raises the question: why would any rational civilian ignore it?

At a time when disinformation about climate change is rampant, and when powerful interests continue to sow doubt for financial or political gain, the release of these documents is a stark reminder that the highest levels of U.S. intelligence have already moved far past debate. They have been planning for climate disruption not as possibility but as certainty.

To pretend otherwise is to ignore a body of evidence that has now been dragged into the light. The intelligence community isn’t in the business of making policy recommendations, but it does flag risks. It is now up to civil society, higher education, and the public to respond with the urgency that the moment demands.

Sources:
National Security Archive, “Spying on Climate: Inside Intelligence,” June 30, 2025. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/climate-change-transparency-project/2025-06-30/spying-climate-inside-intelligence
National Security Archive, “The Climate Intelligence Consensus,” February 28, 2025. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/climate-change-transparency-project-intelligence/2025-02-28/climate-intelligence
Office of the Director of National Intelligence, “Annual Threat Assessment,” February 2024. https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ATA-2024-Unclassified-Report.pdf

Climate Denial and Conservative Amnesia: A Letter to Charlie Kirk and TPUSA

Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA have built an empire of outrage—rallying young conservatives on college campuses, feeding them culture war talking points, and mocking science in the name of “free thinking.” At the top of their hit list? Climate change. According to TPUSA, man-made global warming is a hoax, a leftist ploy to expand government, or simply not worth worrying about. But this isn’t rebellion—it’s willful ignorance. And worse, it’s a betrayal of the conservative legacy of environmental stewardship.

Let’s be clear: man-made climate change is real. It is measurable, observable, and already having devastating consequences across the planet. The science is not debatable. According to NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Earth’s average surface temperature has risen more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the late 19th century—largely driven by carbon emissions from human activities. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which aggregates peer-reviewed science from around the world, states unequivocally that “human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land.”

If Charlie Kirk and TPUSA were interested in truth, they wouldn’t be spreading climate denial. They’d be listening to the 97 percent of actively publishing climate scientists who confirm that this warming is caused by humans. They’d look to the Department of Defense, which recognizes climate change as a national security threat. They’d pay attention to farmers losing crops to drought, families displaced by floods and wildfires, and millions of people suffering through record-breaking heat.

In 2023, Phoenix experienced 31 straight days above 110°F. In 2024, ocean temperatures reached the highest levels ever recorded, accelerating coral bleaching and threatening global fisheries. Canadian wildfires covered U.S. cities in toxic smoke. Coastal towns face rising seas. These are not “natural cycles.” They are the direct result of burning coal, oil, and gas at unsustainable levels—driven by short-term greed and fossil fuel lobbyists.

And that brings us to a painful irony. TPUSA claims to speak for the working class, for rural Americans, and for future generations. But these are exactly the people being hit first and hardest by climate change. Farmers in Texas and Kansas are watching their yields collapse. Gulf Coast communities are being battered by stronger hurricanes. Urban neighborhoods with little tree cover and poor infrastructure are turning into deadly heat islands. Denying climate change doesn’t protect these people—it abandons them.

But perhaps the worst betrayal is ideological. TPUSA calls itself conservative. Yet real conservatism means conserving what matters—our land, our water, our air, and our future. And in this regard, the Republican Party once led the way.

It was Republican President Theodore Roosevelt who pioneered American conservation. He created national parks, forests, and wildlife refuges. He didn’t call environmental protection socialism—he called it patriotism.

It was Republican Richard Nixon who signed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act. He founded the Environmental Protection Agency, understanding that pollution was not just bad for nature—it was bad for people and for capitalism itself.

Even Ronald Reagan, whose presidency is often associated with deregulation, signed the 1987 Montreal Protocol, an international agreement to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals. The result? The ozone layer began to heal—one of the greatest environmental successes in human history.

More recently, conservative leaders like Bob Inglis, Carlos Curbelo, Larry Hogan, and Susan Collins have advocated for carbon pricing, clean energy investments, and bipartisan climate action. Groups like RepublicEn, Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, and the American Conservation Coalition are working to reintroduce common-sense environmentalism to the Republican movement. These are not radicals. They are conservatives who understand that freedom means nothing without a livable planet.

Young Republicans increasingly agree. Polls show that Gen Z conservatives are far more likely than older Republicans to support climate action. They’ve grown up in a world of extreme weather, mass extinction, and economic uncertainty. They know the cost of inaction. They see through the oil-funded lies.

So what exactly is TPUSA conserving? Not the environment. Not scientific integrity. Not the truth. They are conserving ignorance—and protecting the profits of ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, and the very fossil fuel billionaires who knew the risks of climate change in the 1970s and chose to deceive the public anyway. (See: Harvard University’s 2023 study on Exxon’s internal climate models.)

If TPUSA is serious about freedom, they must realize that freedom cannot exist without responsibility. There is no free market on a burning planet. There is no liberty when wildfires choke your air, when hurricanes destroy your home, or when heatwaves kill your grandparents.

We challenge Charlie Kirk and TPUSA not to “own the libs,” but to own the truth. Talk to climate scientists. Visit frontline communities. Debate conservatives like Bob Inglis who actually care about the world they’re leaving behind. Break the echo chamber. Lead with courage instead of trolling for clicks.

The earth does not care about your ideology. It cares about physics. And physics is winning.

Sources:

NASA – Climate Change Evidence and Causes: https://climate.nasa.gov
NOAA – Global Climate Reports: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov
IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, 2023: https://www.ipcc.ch
Harvard – Exxon’s Early Climate Models, Science, Jan 2023
U.S. Department of Defense – Climate Risk Analysis, 2022: https://www.defense.gov
Pew Research – Gen Z Republicans and Climate Change, 2023
RepublicEn – https://www.republicEn.org
American Conservation Coalition – https://www.acc.eco
Montreal Protocol overview – United Nations Environment Programme

The truth is not left or right. It is grounded in science, history, and conscience. Conservatives once led on environmental protection. They still can—if they’re brave enough to face the facts.

The Real Sin Behind the Texas Floods

Last week a catastrophic flood swept through Central Texas, killing at least 50 people, including at least two dozen girls at a Christian summer camp located near the Guadalupe River.  The water reportedly rose 25 feet in 40 minutes, something of almost Biblical proportions.    

In similar horrifying events, 9-11 and Hurricane Katrina for example, conservative religious voices framed disasters as divine punishment for the sins of modern society. These interpretations, often shared in churches, social media posts, and talk radio segments, portray tragedies like these as acts of God triggered by moral decay: homosexuality, abortion, secularism, or a failure to adhere to traditional values.

This time politicians blamed these deaths on the National Weather Service and NOAA and its antiquated warning system. Part of that is true. And it's mind-boggling that conservative politicians like Homeland Security Chief Christy Noem, who make these assertions, are those who have worked so hard to shortchange federal agencies like this.    

The biggest sin in this case, though, is the refusal by those in power, to confront the mounting crisis of human-caused climate change. What we are witnessing in Texas, and in countless other climate disasters around the globe. It is the direct and measurable result of a planet warming due to greenhouse gas emissions and the systems that sustain them.

Scientific evidence has been clear for decades. As the Earth’s atmosphere warms, it holds more moisture, leading to heavier and more intense rainfall events. A warmer climate also disrupts traditional weather patterns, increasing the likelihood of sudden and extreme downpours. The National Climate Assessment and peer-reviewed studies in journals like Nature Climate Change and Geophysical Research Letters confirm the link between climate change and flash flooding, especially in the U.S. South and Midwest. In Texas specifically, the frequency and intensity of extreme precipitation events have risen markedly over the past few decades, driven in large part by human activity.

In the case of this month’s flood, nearly a foot of rain fell in just a few hours over the Guadalupe River basin. The river surged more than 26 feet in 45 minutes, submerging campsites, RV parks, and a Christian girls’ summer camp. This level of devastation is not random. It is part of a trend—a predictable, deadly trend that scientists have warned us about repeatedly.

And yet, the political response to climate change, especially among many conservative lawmakers and right-wing institutions, has been one of denial, deflection, and delay. Texas remains heavily dependent on fossil fuels, both economically and politically. Industry-backed campaigns have spread climate misinformation for years, weakening public understanding and blocking meaningful policy reforms. Some Texas leaders continue to cast doubt on climate science even as their constituents drown in record-breaking floods and fry in record-breaking heat.

But if we are to talk about sin, we should do so honestly. The sin is in the silence and inaction. The sin is in ignoring the suffering of the vulnerable—children at summer camps, workers without flood insurance, renters with no way to evacuate—while protecting the profits of polluters. The sin is in cutting funding for emergency management and scientific research while quoting scripture to justify the status quo.

True moral clarity lies in demanding justice from systems that degrade the planet and sacrifice human life for political gain. Repentance, in this sense, means changing course: ending fossil fuel subsidies, embracing climate adaptation, strengthening infrastructure, and respecting the knowledge of scientists and Indigenous communities.

Texas is drowning not because of God's wrath but because of human arrogance. To call it anything else is not only dishonest—it is a grave disservice to the dead, the missing, and the millions still at risk.

Sources

• US Global Change Research Program. Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume II (2018). https://nca2018.globalchange.gov

• Prein, A. F., Rasmussen, R. M., Ikeda, K., et al. "Increased rainfall volume from future convective storms in the US." Nature Climate Change, 7, 880–884 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-017-0007-7

• Trenberth, K. E. "Changes in precipitation with climate change." Climate Research, 47(1–2), 123–138 (2011). https://doi.org/10.3354/cr00953

• Hoerling, M., Eischeid, J., Perlwitz, J., et al. "Explaining Extreme Events of 2013 from a Climate Perspective." Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (2014). https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-14-00021.1

• Zhang, W., Villarini, G., Scoccimarro, E., & Vecchi, G. A. "Impacts of the Pacific Meridional Mode on U.S. Springtime Tornado Activity." Geophysical Research Letters, 43(3), 1096–1104 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1002/2015GL067193

Thinking about climate change and international study (Bryan Alexander)

[Editor's Note: This article first appeared at BryanAlexander.org.]

Greetings from London, where I’m attending a CIEE event on international study. It’s good to be back in this city, if only for a few overscheduled days.

I’d like to share notes for my talk here. Since I gave it without slides, the only images I’ll share are screen grabs and photos I took, like this one of the unsuspecting audience:

 

To frame my quick talk, recall my old question: how can higher education best respond to the climate crisis?

I began with a big picture overview: the specter of global warming as a grand civilization crisis. I noted the sheer size and complexity of the problem. It impacts everything, including climate change. I mentioned the many ways colleges and universities can react and be influenced by the crisis, then focused down to the question of international study. How can we reduce the carbon footprint of study abroad? What are the available options? 

I didn’t get to show this Climate Reanalyzer image, but described it.

One option is to consider alternatives to flying. Students can take trains to destinations. This can work well in Europe, coastal China, America’s east coast, and… not many other places, given the limited availability of train infrastructure. We can also turn to ships and boats, but similarly that also only works in a limited sphere. Using these options a study abroad program would have to re-localize or regionalize its scope.

A second option is to go virtual. We already know how to do virtual trips through combinations of web content, live video, and asynchronous video. There have been examples of immersive experiences in virtual reality for a long time. Now extended reality (examples: Hololens, Magic Leap, Vision Pro) offer even greater immersive possibilities. So student can have *some* experience of another part of the world. Yet this runs into all kinds of problems, such as yielding a much narrower and shallower experience, not to mention cost and digital divide challenges.

(I told the crowd a little about my own experience with decarbonizing professional travel)

A third option is for study abroad to embrace climate change at a programmatic level. First, students can study global warming through themed internships, exchanges, formal classes, and just cultural immersion. Host groups can identify climate-relevant opportunities, from civil engineering projects to solar installations, agricultural experiments, and more. Imagine an economics major working with a company attempting to decarbonize operations, or a political science student interning with a government wrangling climate policies. As I keep saying, climate change is deeply transdisciplinary.

Second, students could travel abroad for non-climate topics, but explore global warming in that content. Imagine, for example, a student spending months in Madrid to work on their Spanish language and culture understanding. They can keep an eye out for how climate appears there: consumer behavior, popular attitudes, new regulations, emerging products and services, even the language used. This will take some preparation on the “sending” institution’s part, perhaps through a climate change literacy program.

As with anything involving climate, or higher education, there are quality questions. How can we assure that such experiences are good and germane? How do supporting faculty and staff learning climate issues and their applications in these contexts? Institutions of all kinds – colleges, nonprofits, companies, governments – will have to do this carefully. Realistically, some might not.

I wrapped up this quick sketch with advice to the audience, recommending that everyone in the study abroad world not only get up to speed on climate change, but look ahead to changes in this topic. We might expect (for example) rising governmental or cultural pressure against flying. We should also anticipate developments in air travel technologies, such as the emergence of new jet fuels and the return of airships. Study abroad might take to the skies once more.

…and that was a lot to do in 15 minutes, but I managed in 14. “Like drinking from a firehose” observed the program’s moderator.

Afterwards, there was a good deal of interest from conference participants in conversation. I raised climate during question and answer periods for some other sessions, and presenters took the topic seriously. I got the impression that this was a topic either new to them, or one they hadn’t hashed through out loud. I hope my quick presentation was a useful contribution.

At a meta-level, I’ve been traveling a lot this summer, reaching locations on two continents via car, train, and aircraft. I’ve also done a series of virtual events. I am by no means satisfied with my own professional carbon footprint, and am working on it. 

From yesterday afternoon’s walk.

Climate Change 101: This college campus may be literally underwater sooner than you think

Stockton University’s Atlantic City campus may be treading water—literally and figuratively. Built in 2018 on a stretch of reclaimed land in the South Inlet neighborhood, the coastal satellite of Stockton University sits just a few hundred feet from the Atlantic Ocean. With scenic views and beachfront access, it was marketed as a fresh vision for higher education: experiential learning by the sea.

But according to Rutgers University’s Climate Impact Lab and corroborated by NOAA sea level rise projections, that vision may be short-lived. In less than 50 years, large portions of the campus could be underwater—possibly permanently. In fact, with high tide flooding already happening more frequently in Atlantic City and sea levels expected to rise 2 to 5 feet by 2100 depending on emissions, climate change poses an existential threat not just to Stockton’s Atlantic City facilities, but to the broader idea of oceanfront higher education.

The Science: Rutgers’ Stark Warning

Rutgers’ 2021 “New Jersey Science and Technical Advisory Panel Report” projected sea level rise in the state could exceed 2.1 feet by 2050 and 5.1 feet by 2100 under high emissions scenarios. Even under moderate mitigation efforts, the sea is projected to rise 1.4 to 3.1 feet by 2070, placing critical infrastructure—including roads, utility networks, and public buildings—at risk. Stockton’s coastal campus is among them.

A Teachable Crisis

For students and faculty in environmental science, public policy, and urban planning, Stockton's Atlantic City campus is both classroom and case study. Professors can point to flooding events just blocks away as real-time lessons in sea level rise, coastal erosion, and infrastructure vulnerability. Students witness firsthand the tension between development and environmental limits.

Yet these lived experiences also raise ethical questions. Is the university preparing students for the reality of climate displacement—or is it merely weathering the storm until the next round of state funding? Are public institutions being honest about the long-term risks students will face, not just as residents but as debt-burdened alumni?

In many ways, Stockton’s presence in Atlantic City epitomizes the “climate denial by development” that characterizes so much U.S. urban planning: Build now, mitigate later, and leave tomorrow’s collapse for someone else to manage.

No Easy Retreat

Climate adaptation strategies in Atlantic City have been slow-moving, expensive, and often controversial. Proposed solutions—such as sea walls, elevating roads, and managed retreat—require enormous financial and political capital. There’s also no consensus on how to preserve equity in a shrinking, sinking city.

For Stockton University, retreating from the Atlantic City campus would be politically and financially damaging. The expansion was celebrated with ribbon-cuttings and bipartisan support. Pulling back now would mean acknowledging a costly miscalculation. Yet failing to plan for relocation or phased withdrawal could leave students and taxpayers on the hook for an underwater investment.

According to the New Jersey Coastal Resilience Plan, Atlantic County—home to Stockton’s main and satellite campuses—is one of the most climate-exposed counties in the state. And Stockton isn’t just sitting in the floodplain; it’s training the very people who will be tasked with managing these emergencies. It has both a responsibility and an opportunity to lead, not just in mitigation but in public reckoning.

Lessons for Higher Ed

Stockton is hardly the only university caught between mission and market. Across the U.S., colleges and universities are pouring resources into branding campaigns and capital projects that ignore—or actively obscure—the long-term environmental risks. Climate change is often treated as a course offering, not an existential threat.

In Universities on Fire, Bryan Alexander outlines how climate change will fundamentally reshape the higher education landscape—from facilities planning to enrollment, from energy consumption to curriculum design. He warns that campuses, particularly those located near coasts or in extreme heat zones, face not just infrastructural threats but institutional crises. Rising waters, wildfires, hurricanes, and population shifts will force universities to rethink their physical footprints, economic models, and public obligations.

Yet few accreditors or bond-rating agencies have accounted for climate risk in their evaluations. Endowments continue to fund construction in flood-prone areas. Boards of trustees prioritize expansion over retreat. And students, many of whom are first-generation or low-income, are seldom told what climate vulnerability could mean for the real value of their degrees—or the safety of their dormitories.

As sea levels rise and climate models grow more precise, Stockton’s Atlantic City campus may become a symbol—not just of poor urban planning, but of an education system unprepared for the world it claims to be shaping.

What Comes Next?

For now, Stockton continues to expand its Atlantic City footprint, even as new reports suggest that this part of the Jersey Shore may be uninhabitable or cost-prohibitive to protect in a few decades. The university has proposed additional student housing and even a new coastal research center. But each new building reinforces the same flawed logic: that short-term gains outweigh long-term collapse.

At some point, Stockton University—and many other coastal institutions—will have to decide whether to keep investing in property that’s literally slipping into the sea, or to model the kind of resilience and foresight they claim to teach.

Because this is not just a sustainability issue. It’s a justice issue. It’s a debt issue. It’s a survival issue.

And it’s happening now.

Sources

Bryan Alexander. Universities on Fire: Higher Education in the Climate Crisis. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023.

NJ Department of Environmental Protection. Resilient NJ: Statewide Coastal Resilience Plan. 2020.

Rutgers University. New Jersey Climate Change Resource Center.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Back Bay Study – New Jersey.

New Jersey Future. “Climate Risks and Infrastructure in Atlantic County.”

Stockton University. Strategic Plan 2025: Choosing Our Path.

NOAA. State of High Tide Flooding and Sea Level Rise 2023 Technical Report.

When climate change dries out cloud computing (Bryan Alexander)

[Editor's note: This article first appeared at BryanAlexander.org.]

Greetings from a northeastern Virginia where the heat has been brutal.  For several weeks we lived under temperatures reaching 100 ° F, while humidity sopped everything badly enough that the “feels like” reading hit 110.   (And the Trump administration decided to federalize and militarize DC – that’s for another post.)

North of us, epic wildfires burned swathes of Canada.  “‘It’s the size of New Brunswick, to put it into context,’ Mike Flannigan, a professor of wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University, told CBC News.” This is apparently the second worst fire year on record.  Climate change has not only increased temperatures in that nation but dried out regions, making them tinder.

Parts of Europe are also suffering under horrendous heat waves.  As a result the region is experiencing upticks in fires, heat exhaustion, and deaths.  Temperatures are hitting the 30s and even 40s (centigrade; for Americans, this means upper 90s and over 100 F).

I’d like to explain about how these are predictable outcomes of the worsening climate crisis, how global warming is doing precisely what we thought it would do, but I’d also like to get in the habit of issuing shorter blog posts. Besides, I suspect my readers either get the point or have turned away by now.

What I wanted to focus on today was a recent connection made between Europe’s fierce summar, the climate crisis… and digital technology.  Britain is suffering under drought conditions exacerbated by global warming, a drought so harsh that the government has assembled a National Drought Group to organize responses.  (One of my shorthand expressions for thinking of climate change is that regions with too much water will receive more, while those with less, less.  A kind of climate Matthew Effect. The UK drought is an exception for now.)

Yesterday the drought team issued a report on the crisis, summing up steps various local authorities are taking along with series of recommendations for Britons wanting to take actions against the drought.  I’d like to draw your attention to one of them:

Fiery red box not in the original.

“Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.”

There’s much we can say or ask about that single line.  Just how much of an impact does cloud computing hosting have on British water use? If this is aimed at residents, are businesses or the government taking similar measures? Should one use cloud services not colocated in drought-stricken areas?

At a broader level I wonder about the possibility that the growing anti-digital movement, which some call the techlash, might finally become focused on climate implications.  Do we decide that advanced computing (think generative AI or bitcoin mining) has too large a footprint and must be curtailed? Or do we instead assess its climate benefits – crunching vast arrays of data, running simulations, generating new research – as outweighing these costs?

For years I’ve been asking audiences about the climate-digital connection. I’ve asked people to imagine individual and group choices they might have to make in the future as the crisis worsens and electricity becomes more fragile, more restricted. These are provocative, clarifying questions. Think of choosing between WiFi and air conditioning, or cloud computing versus refrigeration. And now we have a first glimpse of that future with the British government requesting Britons to cut back their digital memories.  We can imagine new questions in that light. How would you choose between streaming video and potable water, or Zoom versus crop irrigation?

The Higher Education Inquirer reminds us of the higher education implications.

For colleges and universities, the connection between digital behavior and resource conservation is an opportunity to model sustainability. Digital housekeeping campaigns could encourage staff and students to purge outdated files, trim redundant email chains, and archive with intent. Institutions can audit cloud storage use, revisit data retention policies, and prioritize providers that invest in energy- and water-efficient infrastructure. These choices can be paired with curriculum initiatives that make students aware of the climate–digital nexus, grounding sustainability not just in labs and gardens, but in inboxes and servers.

Indeed.  These actions are available to us, should we choose to take them.

Yet this is a difficult conversation to have now, at least in the United States, as the Trump administration attacks climate science even to the point of hurling a satellite out of Earth orbit.  Businesses are walking back climate commitments. Journalists don’t mention the crisis very often. Democrats are falling silent.  Yet, strangely enough, climate change continues, ratcheting up steadily.  We must think and act in response.  That means, among other things, rethinking our digital infrastructure and practices.

Lee Zeldin as EPA Administrator: A Deregulatory Revolution and Its Risks

Lee Michael Zeldin’s January 2025 confirmation as Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has triggered the most sweeping rollback of environmental protections in the agency’s history. Installed during President Trump’s second term, Zeldin’s tenure is marked by a radical deregulatory agenda that favors economic growth and fossil fuel interests over climate science, public health, and environmental justice.

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Deregulation as Doctrine

Within weeks of taking office, Zeldin unveiled the “Powering the Great American Comeback Initiative,” a deregulatory blitz that erased 31 major environmental rules in a single day. This initiative aims to dismantle longstanding safeguards in pursuit of what Zeldin terms “energy realism” — a euphemism for expanding fossil fuel production and reducing regulatory hurdles.

Key actions include:

• Repealing vehicle emissions standards that had helped reduce greenhouse gases and urban pollution

• Weakening pollution controls on coal and natural gas power plants

• Narrowing the scope of the Clean Water Act, reducing protections for rivers, wetlands, and drinking water sources

• Fast-tracking permits for oil, gas, and mining projects, often at the expense of environmental review

Environmental advocates warn these rollbacks jeopardize public health and the environment by prioritizing short-term corporate profits over scientific evidence.

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Climate Denial by Policy: The Endangerment Finding Under Siege

Perhaps the most consequential move is Zeldin’s effort to repeal the 2009 “Endangerment Finding,” which legally classified greenhouse gases as harmful to public health under the Clean Air Act. This ruling underpinned decades of federal climate regulation.

Zeldin claims repealing it will save $54 billion annually in compliance costs, calling it a “correction of regulatory overreach.” Legal experts and scientists counter that overturning the finding would strip the federal government of its ability to enforce climate protections and likely violate established legal precedents. Lawsuits challenging the repeal are already in preparation.

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Budget Cuts and the Gutting of EPA Science

Zeldin’s deregulatory campaign is matched by a dramatic downsizing of the EPA itself. The Trump administration’s 2025 budget slashed the agency’s funding by 55%, gutting its scientific capacity.

Among the casualties:

• Cancellation of $3 billion in climate justice block grants aimed at addressing environmental disparities in low-income communities

• Elimination of clean energy funding for rooftop solar programs

• Cuts to Superfund site cleanups and environmental justice research

The Office of Research and Development, the EPA’s scientific core, has been dismantled, with thousands of staff reassigned or laid off. The agency now emphasizes “state collaboration” and “industry efficiency,” shifting regulatory power to often under-resourced states and industry self-policing.

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Conspiracies, Culture Wars, and Science Under Siege

Zeldin’s EPA has also ventured into controversial territory, endorsing investigations into weather modification and “geoengineering transparency,” areas often linked to conspiracy theories. Internally, climate education materials are under review, and there are reports of pressure on universities to defund or redirect climate research away from contentious topics.

This ideological shift threatens to politicize science and erode the integrity of federal partnerships with academic institutions.

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Implications for Higher Education

Though the EPA does not directly govern education policy, its policies and budget cuts send shockwaves through higher education, especially at public and land-grant universities focused on environmental science and agriculture.

• EPA grant funding for climate and environmental research faces severe cuts, jeopardizing ongoing projects and future STEM initiatives.

• Scientific partnerships between universities and the EPA are imperiled, risking a loss of federal research infrastructure.

• Climate policy education is increasingly vulnerable to ideological scrutiny and defunding pressures.

• Programs designed to encourage STEM participation among underserved communities are at risk of collapse without federal support.

These trends threaten to dismantle vital components of the STEM pipeline and undermine America’s ability to educate the next generation of environmental scientists and policymakers.

Lee Zeldin’s EPA represents a historic pivot away from climate action and environmental protection toward deregulation, austerity, and ideological control. The long-term consequences for public health, environmental justice, and higher education remain deeply uncertain — but the alarm bells are ringing loud.

Sources

• Environmental Protection Agency. “Administrator Zeldin Announces Powering the Great American Comeback Initiative.” epa.gov. March–July 2025.

• Winston & Strawn LLP. “EPA Launches Historic Deregulatory Plan.” March 2025.

• The Washington Post. “EPA Moves to Overturn Endangerment Finding.” July 29, 2025.

• Associated Press. “Democrats Say EPA Budget Cuts May Kill People.” July 2025.

• The Guardian. “EPA Halts $3 Billion Climate Justice Program; Lawsuit Looms.” August 5, 2025.

• The Week. “How the EPA Plans to Nullify Climate Science.” July 2025.

• New York Post. “Zeldin Aims to Cut ‘Woke’ Climate Spending, Slash Energy Costs.” July 2025.

• Times Union (Albany). “Editorial: EPA’s Dangerous Ignorance.” July 2025.

• CNN Interview. “Zeldin Defends Record, Faces Tough Questions.” July 2025.

"Why Should I Bring a Child Into This?": Gen Z’s Reproductive Strike and What It Says About Higher Education and the Climate Crisis

A recent report covered by MSN reveals a growing phenomenon: millions of teenagers in the United States say they never plan to have children—and one of the leading reasons is climate change. This sobering shift in personal and generational priorities is not just a cultural footnote. It is a profound indictment of the systems that failed to offer hope for the future. And among those systems, higher education plays an overlooked but complicit role.

The article, originally reported by USA Today, quotes students across the country who describe the prospect of parenting as irresponsible, even cruel, given the current climate trajectory. Some reference collapsing ecosystems, rising sea levels, extreme weather, and political inaction. Others cite the emotional toll of living in a world where they believe things will only get worse.

For those of us at the Higher Education Inquirer, these testimonies hit with more than just empathy. They reflect the culmination of decades of institutional neglect—where universities have profited off fossil fuel investments, watered down sustainability programs, partnered with carbon-intensive corporations, and taught apolitical STEM curricula as if climate denial wasn’t a social phenomenon to be understood and confronted.

Beyond “Climate Anxiety”: A Rational Response

The term climate anxiety is often used to pathologize young people’s fears. But what if their decision not to reproduce isn’t just emotional—it’s rational? These teens are seeing the long view. They’re watching coral reefs bleach, forests burn, heat records break monthly, and global elites gather for climate summits with little but platitudes to show.

Their refusal to have children is not apathy. It’s resistance. A form of protest. What used to be a personal decision has become a political one.

The Higher Ed Connection

Higher education has long claimed to be a leader in sustainability, climate science, and public discourse. And yet, when it comes to confronting the deeper roots of ecological destruction—capitalism, colonialism, the military-industrial complex, and yes, the higher education system itself—most institutions have either gone silent or opted for greenwashing.

Universities continue to:

• Accept massive donations from fossil fuel billionaires.

• House think tanks and business schools that promote endless economic growth.

• Invest endowments in carbon-heavy portfolios.

• Sell students the myth that a degree will solve their personal future, even as the collective future deteriorates.

Meanwhile, young people in middle school and high school are already making life-altering decisions based on what they see—and what they don’t see: real accountability or meaningful change from their elders’ institutions.

A Warning Higher Ed Can’t Ignore

If colleges and universities are serious about their claims to be incubators of the future, they can’t ignore the fact that a significant portion of that future now feels it has no reason to exist. Young people are not only opting out of parenthood—they are increasingly questioning the value of traditional life scripts: college, career, mortgage, family. The entire package is unraveling.

This is not just a demographic trend. It’s a moral judgment.

The institutions that educated yesterday’s leaders now face a credibility crisis. Students are watching closely. And they are making decisions—about reproduction, education, consumption, and activism—based on what they see and what they refuse to inherit.

Higher education must reckon with the reality that its credibility, like the climate, is heating toward a breaking point.

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Source:
"Millions of teens report they won't ever have kids due to climate change — here's why." MSN / USA Today, August 2023.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/millions-of-teens-report-they-won-t-ever-have-kids-due-to-climate-change-here-s-why/ss-AA1JT4Pg

How campuses engage with the climate crisis: a taxonomy (Bryan Alexander*)

[This article is part of the Transparency-Accountability-Value series.]

How might colleges and universities grapple with the climate crisis?

This question is the subject of much of my work now, as you can see from these posts. Researching answers can lead in a wide range of directions, not to mention down some twisty rabbit holes. Today I’d like to avoid those depths and instead look at a very macro, very ten-thousand-foot level. Let’s explore a schematic analysis looking at campuses as institutions and communities, facing perhaps the greatest crisis of the century.

(I draw the following from my forthcoming book on the topic, Universities on Fire.)

To start, let’s break down the different ways by which the climate emergency can hit academic institutions. There’s the direct, environmental way, as storms strike, desertification and aridification expand, fire rage, heat rises, and waters surge through a campus. We can call this the primary impact vector.

Other campus impacts result from the ones crashing through the primary vector. Think of how temperature rises, the intrusion of salt into fresh water, and the arrival of new diseases can sabotage agriculture, which then leads to human misery and economic dislocation. This can reshape the area around some campuses, not to mention challenging a university’s ag programs. It can also injure campuses which enjoy appealing physical grounds in terms of mental health and outreach. Additionally, these ecological shocks can also strike academics directly, through newly arrived diseases. Increased storms can injure a local economy by damaging infrastructure, products, and workers, which can in turn blow back on a local college or university. Let’s place all of these knock-on effects under the header of a secondary impact vector.

Humanity responds to pressures exerted through the primary and secondary vectors, and these responses engage the academy. For example, natural disasters can prompt migration; the tendency of some regions to become uninhabitable will drive even more people to seek new abodes. Economic dislocation (a secondary impact vector) can breed social problems as well as feed extremist politics. Further, as humanity revises its energy production basis to get away from carbon dioxide, all kinds of ripples can work through society, from changes to economics, human spaces, and gender roles. If we extend our response to the crisis to include rethinking society and politics (viz anticapitalism, donut economics, decolonization, etc.), campuses feel the results as they are embedded within society and politics. I think of all of these organized together as the third climate crisis impact vector.

Given this triple threat, how can campuses react? As institutions, as individual people affiliated with schools, as groups within a college or university, academics have a broad range of strategies and responses available. Following the tripartite model above, we can similarly break down the scope or domain of academic action. Seen through our macro lens, academia can act on three levels, starting with the smallest events and actions taking place on campus: The physical campus. From renovating buildings to hosting renewable power generation, turning lawns to forests or gardens, banning carbon-burning vehicles, changing food service, and embracing green computing, academics have institutional grounds and materials as a major ground of action.

The campus in its community. Colleges and universities partner with local businesses, nonprofits, government agencies, and civil society for a range of purposes. The local community can also pressure a campus in many ways, from subjecting it to policies to protests. “Local” can scale up to municipal or other subnational governance, too. In short, there’s potential for productive work as well as friction. In America we call this “town-gown relations.”

Academia on the world stage. Already higher education contributes powerfully to humanity’s climate crisis actions by producing vital research. Individual academics can act as public intellectuals, translating their research for general consumption and influence. The reverse is also true as nation-states and transnational entities implement policies or generate other influences on the academic world. Further, some within the academy – faculty, staff, students – will seek to organize for climate mitigation and adaptation efforts. Indeed, some call on us now to imagine a new, post-carbon civilization; colleges and universities are fertile grounds for such creative work.

(I’ve also been thinking about the various arguments I’ve heard about why campus populations should not seek to change their institution during the climate crisis. Let me set those aside for now, perhaps for a future post just on the topic. That’s a different response category.)

To be fair, we can easily think of responses which cross between these boundaries, such as working with a religious group with a powerful local presence as well as a significant global one. Further, there’s not a hard and fast line between town-gown and academic in the world. I tend these artificial categories to be heuristics, a very rough sketch of possibilities.

How do these two sets of three interact? Let’s play them against each other to produce that beloved tool of futurists, a grid (click on grid for a clearer image):





To explicate this scheme further, I can offer some real world and hypothetical examples for each cell on this grid.

Primary or direct impact: on campus, elevating buildings to allow flood water to pass underneath. In community: students and faculty partnering to construct and maintain a large seawall. In the world: professors publishing research modeling the impact of an Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) slowdown.

Secondary impact: on campus, revising sociology curricula to focus on climate-driven social changes. In community: increasing partnerships with local medical care providers and public health authorities to address climate-caused health problems. In the world: students, faculty, and staff lobby national governments to adopt a no-growth economy.

Tertiary or socio-political impact: on campus, setting up an institute for Post-Carbon Society. In community: offering housing and teaching for climate refugees. In the world: scholars advocating in public to block geoengineering.

Let’s stick these into the grid:

Click on grid for a clearer image.

I think that shows the breadth of ways colleges and universities could engage with the climate emergency, both proactively and reactively. It might be useful to give academics a sense of the options they have, and a pointer towards the multi-pronged nature of the threat.

I hope it’s useful to some of you. What do you think of this template as a heuristic?

*Bryan Alexander is an award–winning, internationally known futurist, researcher, writer, speaker, consultant, and teacher, working in the field of higher education’s future. He is currently a senior scholar at Georgetown University. Bryan's next book is Universities on Fire, to be published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This article was originally published at BryanAlexander.org.

Alaska’s Colleges at the Meltdown’s Edge—Just as the Arctic Heats Up

Alaska’s higher-ed story is a preview of the national “College Meltdown,” only starker. The University of Alaska (UA) system—Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Southeast—has endured a decade of enrollment erosion and austerity politics, punctuated by a 2019 budget crisis that forced regents to declare financial exigency and consider consolidations. The immediate trigger was a proposed $130+ million state cut, later converted into a three-year reduction compact; the long tail is a weakened public research engine in the very state where climate change is moving fastest.

In 2025 the vise tightened again from Washington. UA’s president told regents that more than $50 million in grants had been frozen or canceled under the Trump administration, warning of staff cuts and program impacts if funds failed to materialize. Those freezes were part of a broader chill: federal agencies stepping back from research that even references climate change, just as the Arctic’s transformation accelerates.

This is not an abstract loss. Alaska is the frontline laboratory of global warming: thawing permafrost, vanishing sea ice, collapsing coastal bluffs. UA’s scientists have documented these trends in successive “Alaska’s Changing Environment” assessments; the 2024 update underscores rapid, measurable shifts across temperature, sea ice, wildfire, hydrology, and ecosystems. When the main public research institution loses people and projects, the United States loses the data and know-how it needs to respond.

Climate denial collides with national security

The contradiction at the heart of federal policy is glaring. On one hand, the Trump administration has proposed opening vast swaths of Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve to drilling and reversing environmental protections—signaling a bet on fossil expansion in a region already warming at double the global rate. On the other hand, the same administration is curtailing climate and Arctic science, even as military planners warn that the Arctic is becoming a contested theater. You can’t secure what you refuse to measure.

The security stakes are real. Russia has spent the past decade refurbishing Soviet-era bases, deploying ice-capable vessels, and leveraging energy projects along the Northern Sea Route (NSR). China has declared itself a “near-Arctic” power and partnered with Moscow on patrols and infrastructure. Meanwhile, the U.S. remains short on icebreakers and Arctic domain awareness—even as traffic through high-latitude passages grows more plausible in low-ice summers. Analysts project that a meaningful share of global shipping could shift north by mid-century, and recent reporting shows the region is already a strategic flashpoint.

That makes UA’s expertise more than a local asset; it’s a pillar of U.S. national security. The University of Alaska Fairbanks hosts the Center for Arctic Security and Resilience (CASR) and degree pathways that fuse climate, emergency management, and security studies—exactly the interdisciplinary skill set defense, Coast Guard, and civil authorities will need as sea lanes open and storms, fires, and thaw-related failures multiply. Undercut these programs, and you undercut America’s ability to see, interpret, and act in the Arctic.

The costs of disinvestment

The 2019 state-level cuts did immediate damage—hiring freezes, program reviews, and fears of accreditation changes—but their larger effect was to signal instability to students, faculty, and funders. Austerity invites a spiral: as programs and personnel disappear, grant competitiveness slips; as labs lose continuity, agencies look elsewhere; as uncertainty grows, students choose out-of-state options. UA leadership has tried to reverse course—prioritizing enrollment, retention, and workforce alignment in recent budgets—but it’s difficult to rebuild a research reputation once the pipeline of projects and people is disrupted.

The 2025 federal freezes amplify that spiral by hitting precisely the projects that matter most: those with “climate” in the title. Researchers report program cancellations and re-scoped solicitations across agencies. That kind of ideological filter doesn’t just reduce funding—it distorts the evidence base that communities, tribal governments, and emergency planners depend on for everything from permafrost-safe housing to coastal relocation plans. It also weakens U.S. credibility in Arctic diplomacy at a time when the Arctic Council is strained and cooperation with Russia is largely stalled.

Why this matters beyond Alaska

Think of UA as America’s northern early-warning system. Its glaciologists, sea-ice modelers, fire scientists, and social scientists collect the longitudinal datasets that turn anecdotes into policy-relevant knowledge. Lose continuity, and you lose the ability to detect regime shifts—abrupt ecosystem changes, cascading infrastructure failures from thaw, new navigation windows that alter shipping economics and risk. Those changes feed directly into maritime safety, domain awareness, and the rules-of-the-road that will govern the NSR and other passages.

Meanwhile, federal moves to expand Arctic drilling create additional operational burdens for emergency response and environmental monitoring—burdens that fall on the same universities being told to do more with less. Opening the door to long-lived oil projects while throttling climate and environmental research is a recipe for higher spill risk, poorer oversight, and costlier disasters.

A pragmatic way forward

Three steps could stabilize UA and, by extension, America’s Arctic posture:

1. Firewall climate science from political interference. Agencies should fund Arctic research on merit, not language policing. Reinstating paused grants and re-issuing climate-related solicitations would immediately restore capacity in labs and field stations.

2. Treat UA as critical national infrastructure. Just as the U.S. is racing to modernize radar and add icebreakers, it should invest in Arctic science and workforce pipelines at UA—scholarships tied to Coast Guard and NOAA service, ship time for sea-ice and fisheries research, and support for Indigenous knowledge partnerships that improve on-the-ground resilience.

3. Align energy decisions with security reality. Every new Arctic extraction project increases environmental and emergency-response exposure in a region where capacity is thin. If policymakers proceed, they owe UA and Alaska communities the monitoring, baseline studies, and response investments that only a healthy public research university can sustain.

The paradox of the College Meltdown is that it hits hardest where public knowledge is most needed. In the Lower 48, that might mean fewer nurses or teachers. In Alaska, it means flying blind in a rapidly changing theater where Russia and China are already maneuvering and where coastlines, sea ice, and permafrost are literally moving under our feet. The University of Alaska is not a nice-to-have. It is how the United States knows what is happening in the Arctic—and how it prepares for what’s next. Weakening it in the name of budget discipline or culture-war messaging is not just shortsighted. It’s a security risk.

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Sources

• University of Alaska Office of the President, FY2020 budget overview (state veto and reductions).

• University of Alaska Public Affairs timeline (2019 exigency and consolidation actions).

• Alaska Department of Administration, Dunleavy–UA three-year compact (2019).

• Anchorage Daily News, “$50M in grants frozen under Trump administration” (May 28, 2025).

• The Guardian, “Outcry as Trump withdraws support for research that mentions ‘climate’” (Feb. 21, 2025).

• UA/ACCAP, Alaska’s Changing Environment 2.0 (2024 update).

• UAF Center for Arctic Security and Resilience (programs and mission).

• Empower Alaska: UA Arctic expertise overview.

• Wall Street Journal, Russia/China Arctic power projection and U.S. capability gaps (Feb. 2025).

• The Arctic Institute, shipping projections for the Northern Sea Route.

• Arctic Review on Law and Politics, vulnerabilities and governance challenges on the NSR.

• The Guardian, rollback of protections in the National Petroleum Reserve–Alaska (Aug. 2025).

• Alaska Public Media, uneven cuts to Arctic research under Trump (Apr. 2025).