CUNY represents the best of New York. It deserves a clean energy future

The City University of New York is among the most essential institutions in New York City. The school’s 25 campuses and quarter-million students reflect the diversity, resilience, strength and striving of all New Yorkers. 

The university system does more to elevate students out of poverty than almost any other institution in the country. Our CUNY grads contribute enormously to the well-being of our city, state and nation. In so many ways, CUNY represents the very best of New York. 

But the present state of CUNY also reveals serious infrastructural challenges that the administration, the governor and the mayor must work to overcome. Our public colleges, especially community colleges, have been starved over the last 50 years. We are constantly fighting to expand our too-low budget lines, and many of the 300 buildings across New York that make up CUNY are crumbling: inefficient, polluting and outdated. 

CUNY hosts three of the state’s 15 highest-emission public facilities, and only about 8 percent of its buildings are in a state of good repair. Despite the fact that CUNY draws its power from a public utility, the New York Power Authority (NYPA), every campus remains overwhelmingly reliant on fossil fuels.

I have been a member of the CUNY community since I was hired as a professor of psychology at Brooklyn College in 1973. I have witnessed enormous changes in those years, as climate change has gone from being a problem of the future to an urgent crisis we confront every day. The 10 years since I retired in 2014 have been the 10 warmest years in the 174-year record, with increasing extreme weather and wildfire smoke across New York. 

Due to decades of budget starvation, most CUNY buildings have not been improved through all that change. A majority are over 50 years old, built for a different world. And the energy they rely on comes from the same old sources, fossil fuels that pollute our communities, clog our atmosphere, harm our teaching and learning conditions and poison our future. 

Thanks to the Build Public Renewables Act, New York State leaders have a mandate to rapidly expand the production of public, renewable energy across the state and clean up public buildings such as those of CUNY. Right now, the federal Inflation Reduction Act is funneling badly needed dollars into climate adaptation and resiliency projects. In fact, the federal government stands ready to foot half the bill for the infrastructure improvements that CUNY campuses need and for the NYPA public renewables that will transform the power grid for millions of New Yorkers statewide. The IRA will also provide a 50 percent tax deduction for decarbonization projects in homes and businesses.

Now, CUNY faculty, students, and staff are urging Governor Kathy Hochul and NYPA leaders to seize this opportunity and capitalize on billions in federal matching funds by building large-scale renewable energy projects and bringing CUNY up-to-date. In response to this great opportunity and supported by Public Power NY, union activists on 10 of our campuses across all five boroughs have organized campus-based “Decarbonize CUNY Town Halls” this fall, bringing hundreds of members of our union together with students, other CUNY workers, community activists and city and state officials in the fight for environmental justice. 

We have found that decarbonization is not an abstract prospect for the CUNY community: every day, our faculty and staff confront leaky roofs and moldy ceilings in their classrooms, offices and labs; our students study under broken lights in rooms too hot or too cold to tolerate. But attendees at our town halls have not stopped after decrying the ways CUNY’s degradation affects their learning and working conditions. They have made daring and powerful connections between what happens in our buildings, what happens in our communities and what happens to our planet. 

Town hall participants have analyzed the persistence of deadly “peaker plants” that pollute our poorest students’ neighborhoods with toxic fumes while pumping carbon into the atmosphere. They have questioned the power that private, polluting energy companies continue to wield in our city and state. And they have offered a powerful alternative vision: one in which our schools are fully funded, our facilities are modern and excellent, union labor is fully engaged in construction and instruction, and the power on which we all rely is owned by all of us, public, safe and renewable.

This future is achievable, but we must act now. The law demands that NYPA build enough renewables for the state grid to be entirely sustainable by 2040. Instead of empowering them to make that happen, the governor is conceding that we will miss this mandatory benchmark. Half-measures and private incentives are not enough. 

CUNY is evidence that a large, public institution can be an engine of transformation for millions of lives. NYPA can do the same, delivering a popularly-controlled, renewable energy future and offering a model for the whole world. Neither institution can meet their mandates, however, without funding, support and forward-looking leadership from the governor, the mayor, CUNY Trustees and the NY State legislature.

The CUNY community’s vision for a sustainable future is achievable; with New York’s pioneering legislation, it’s closer than ever. Now it’s up to Hochul to empower NYPA, fund CUNY and make it a reality. 

Nancy Romer, Ph.D., is professor emerita at Brooklyn College and is the co-chair of the Environmental Justice Working Group of the Professional Staff Congress of CUNY. She is also on the union's executive council.