Thursday, March 28, 2024

Time for MSU to stop being hardheaded and go 'green'

During the past year, I’ve become very frustrated with the “Man” and how we’re destroying ourselves through convenience. I won’t get into every facet now, but I will discuss one thing.

A few weeks ago, something came to my attention that is much more close to home than I imagined. MSU is not as “green” as we have been led to believe. In fact, we could be one of the least green campuses in the Big Ten — ironic, right?

What’s holding us back isn’t what we’re doing or not doing. It’s something most of us aren’t even aware of: a coal plant. This coal plant is the largest on-campus coal plant in the nation, providing 99 percent of MSU’s energy and lacing the air with arsenic, which can be found in rat poison.

There are better ways to provide energy to the campus, but MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon has been hardheaded in switching to anything else, choosing convenience (as if to say, “Well, we have the coal plant already, why not keep using it?”) instead of health.

How do we know there are more eco- and budget-friendly alternatives? The University of Illinois, which we will play during Homecoming, has about 6,000 less students than we do, but according to The News-Gazette it only burned 94,171 tons of coal in 2009. Compare that to our 250,000 tons of coal per year. We should be ashamed to call ourselves greener than them.

What do we do to advance ourselves in this anti-coal race? It’s simple, actually — the administration needs to hear students voice their concern, whether through petitioning, discussions or even calling its offices.

Until then, it will stick with the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” policy, By the time “it’s broke,” rather our community is wasted, there won’t be an opportunity to fix it. So Spartans, I urge you to fix this problem before it breaks — go (truly) Green!

Carrie Frazier, Residential College in the Arts and Humanities senior

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