Carbon Dioxide: Too Many New Records

We humans are pushing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere five times faster than we were in the 1960s. We’ve reached not only a new record of 427 parts per million but also a new record in the amount of increase in one year.

Scripps Institute of Oceanography

The current concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is twice what it was prior to industrialization in the 19th century, and higher than it’s been in several million years — when sea levels were 78 feet higher than today. 

Also: a quarter of the carbon dioxide we’ve emitted in the past 175 years has been absorbed by the oceans, which are becoming more and more acidic as a result. Bye-bye, coral reefs. 

The amount of CO2 the oceans can absorb has slowed since the start of industrialization — so more of our excess CO2 is going into the atmosphere.

Meanwhile, we’ve pushed atmospheric methane to a level approaching three times what it was before the Industrial Revolution, mostly because the amount of livestock we’re farming. Rice paddies, landfills, and fossil fuel extraction also contribute.

Methane heats the air a lot faster than carbon dioxide does. It degrades in about a decade into water and — yikes! carbon dioxide. 

CO2, unfortunately, is niiiiice and stable. It hangs around for hundreds of years. If we could somehow end all emissions by 2100, it would take thousands of years for CO2 to drop to its pre-industrial level.

Y’all, I’m nervous. Every day, I choose hope that we can manage as a human family to reduce consumption, transition to renewable fuels, and make peace. But despair over the world we are leaving the coming generations is never far from my mind. 

What if NJ Transit Actually Served New Jersey?

New Jersey Transit mostly exists to get people from the hinterlands to and from Newark and New York; you can also go to Trenton, Philadelphia, and Atlantic City.

The European Union, population density 109 per km2, supports a rail network that goes even to the tiniest towns, via high-speed rail and a gazillion local lines.

New Jersey, with 488 people per km2,  has more than four times the population density of Europe, but only the tiniest fraction of the rail network. It turns out I’m not the only person who imagines a more robust rail system.

Reddit: creolefish

Here’s the thing, though: this is still a commuter system with NYC/Newark and Philadelphia as the hubs. 

New Jersey is already among the states with the lowest number of cars per capita, at 674 cars per thousand residents. The European Union, despite all those trains, averages 567 cars per person — not so different from New Jersey. But we drive almost twice as far every year than they do — 14,263 miles per year, on average, compared to Europeans’ 12,000 km, or 7440 miles, per year.

(Montana, on the other hand, has almost two cars for every person in the state. Including children. How do they find the time to drive them all?) 

Connecting all of New Jersey without having to transfer in Newark or Secaucus would take only two more rail lines, each starting at the Hudson River in the north, and running west, south, and finally east to the Atlantic Ocean.

The inner ring would go from Stevens to Stockton, with stops at Montclair State, Seton Hall, Monmouth, Georgian Court, and the community colleges in Essex, Union, Middlesex, Monmouth, and Ocean counties. 

The outer ring would run from Fairleigh Dickinson to Atlantic City, by way of the community colleges in the north, east, and south of the state, with a stop at Cape May.

It would transform the state.

• The availability of public transit would increase access to college. Low-income students can study at community colleges around the state for free, but the effective tax is that they need cars to get to class. Driving cheaper, older cars means less reliable transport on top of more repair bills, plus car insurance and gas.
• Reducing by even a quarter the average amount New Jersey residents drive every year would cut tailpipe emissions by more than 3 million metric tons: New Jersey has 2.5 million cars whose owners drive them, on average, 12,263 miles every year, emitting, on average 5 metric tons of carbon dioxide each, or collectively 12.5 million metric tons of CO2.
• Lower-income residents rely on an outrageously slow bus network to get to work and run errands; replacing these bus lines with trains would speed their trips dramatically (and get yet more vehicles off the roads).
• If half the people who went to the shore on a summer weekend could easily ride the train, they’d get to spend more time swimming, flirting, and eating ice cream, and less time stuck in traffic and hunting for parking. With only half the traffic on the roads, the drivers would get there faster, too.
• If teenagers could take a quick train ride to meet up with friends in the next town, we could worry a whole lot less about them driving under the influence.
• Roads with fewer cars are safer for pedestrians and cyclists. And making biking safer would reduce driving even more: almost 40 percent of the time someone gets in the car, they drive three miles or less. A leisurely three-mile bike ride to go to work or run an errand takes fifteen minutes — barely enough to break a sweat. And spending 30 minutes a day on a bike instead of driving and parking makes people healthier and happier.

Less road rage. More time for exercise. Lower emissions. More leisure time. Can we afford NOT to upgrade the system?

What Professors Do: Too Many Things

Social media right now is full of faculty plaints about the difficulties of making it through the final weeks of the semester. In past years, I’ve commented myself about the frenetically intense workload of this time of year.

A lot of it is about reading, grading, and providing feedback on ALL THE THINGS. One year, I calculated during the last week of the semester that I had approximately 1100 pages of student writing left to grade for students in three courses. I swore I would never make that mistake again. Counting the pages, that is.

The end of the academic year is also filled with symposia, thesis presentations, awards, and other rites of passage. I love to attend these, congratulate students, and meet their families, yet they add to an already intensely busy time.

Being on disability with Long Covid means I have time to think about how we got here. Shifts in how we think about teaching, the increasing roles of technology, the politicization and defunding of higher education, and the attendant move from tenured to contingent faculty all play major roles.

In my own undergraduate courses in literature and philosophy forty years ago, I took a midterm and a final exam, and wrote a paper near the end of the term. I could retrieve the final exam and the paper by going to the prof’s office and shuffling through a box left outside the door. Each item would have a grade at the top of the first page, maybe some marked typos, and possibly an enigmatic check or two in the margin. Teaching students writing as a process of drafting, revising, and rethinking — that you could “write to learn,” as Donald Murray put it — had not yet reached my faculty.

I became a literature professor after years of teaching composition. I took for granted that students should write a lot, with opportunities for informal, creative, and open-ended writing as well as more directed assignments. My students analyze, compare, and synthezise ideas, and they engage in meta-cognition about their reading, writing, and learning.

I assign a sequence of related writing assignments in all of my courses. I give a lot of oral and written feedback to help students see what they are good and and what they can get better at. I encourage and require drafting, revisions, expanding work, writing about the same topic for different audiences. So the way I teach takes a lot of time and energy in engaging with students and their work.

Add pandemic learning losses and the fragmenting mental health of young adults in a polarized nation facing down climate change. Professors are mandated to report if we notice students struggling. We refer students to appropriate resources on and off campus. We make phone calls to student life staff to ask them to reach out. We extend flexibility and grace to try to help students make it through courses, semesters, degrees.

These changes have happened in the context of broader social shifts. New technologies affect teaching more than you might think. Decades ago, I typed a two-page syllabus, made copies, and handed it out on the first day of class. We spent a few minutes reviewing major due dates, I’d explain the rationale for how the course was organized, and we would jump right into discussions of ideas.

Today, the syllabus is a contract between students and faculty, and contains pages and pages of information about policies and expectations, rubrics and grading criteria, uploaded to course management systems before classes start. Students buy books online rather than in a campus bookstore; usually, they have them by the third week of classes. Medieval texts exist in numerous editions and translations, and I’m lucky if students all end up with the versions I’ve planned on, and can be on the same page and even reading the same words.

The politicization of higher education has direct consequences on college faculty and their relationships with students. I’m not going to romanticize the past — there have always been plenty of students majoring in beer and bonhomie, doing the minimum they can to get through.

But current disdain among many segments of the US population for education and educators, alongside consistent defunding of higher education by state and federal governments and widespread hiring of hostile administrators with little respect for faculty, have wrought sea changes.

College and university faculty design courses and programs, they evaluate and re-evaluate the role of distribution requirements and the shape and extent of the major, and they create and revise policies on various aspects of student life. The emergence of AI-mediated writing is a current challenge for individual faculty and university policy: students need to understand appropriate uses and limitations of tools such as ChatGPT in fostering and not substituting for their own critical and original thinking. 

Across the nation, administrators, boards of trustees, and state legislatures are axing tenured professors, or simply not replacing them whey they retire. Classes are covered by hiring faculty to terms of just a few years, supplemented by numerous part-time instructors who teach at three or four different institutions to try to get by. 

Ever-fewer tenured professors shoulder the work of faculty governance and service to the profession, while coping with more stressors than ever before. So many are retiring or leaving the profession. Harvard and Stanford are never going to have trouble keeping faculty, but I wonder how much longer community colleges and regional universities can hire the faculty to keep offering courses and programs.