Check out our full calendar of events for the entire month!
Thursday, April 21, 2022
12:30pm CDT Solar Geoengineering Versus Carbon Removal
EPIC
Open to – Students, Faculty, OAAs, Staff
In person at Saieh Hall – Registration required
Join EPIC as we host Harvard’s David Keith.
Reducing temperatures in the next few centuries requires use of either carbon removal (CDR) or solar geoengineering (SRM) or both. Emissions cuts should be the overwhelming focus of current efforts but zeroing emissions just stops making the problem worse—it cannot reduce temperatures on policy-relevant timescales. CDR and SRM differ in many dimensions. Yet it can be helpful to consider them as alternative methods of achieving the same fixed amount of additional cooling at some future time to enable comparison of their physical and social impacts. A CDR facility—industrial or biological—achieves nothing the day it starts, but only cumulatively, year upon year. So, the earlier one demands the cooling, the faster one must build the removal industry, and the higher the social costs and environmental impacts per degree of cooling. I present preliminary results comparing air pollution mortality and land use disturbance from SRM and CDR. These quantitative comparisons suggest that—contrary to widespread assumptions—SRM may be a substantially less risky way to achieve a given amount of additional cooling than is CDR.
4:30pm CDT CEGU: Environment, Democracy, and Social Movements
Chicago Studies and the Program on the Global Environment
Open to – Students, Faculty, OAAs, Staff
Virtual: Registration required
The Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU) is a proposal currently under development by a faculty working group at the University of Chicago. Join us for Environment, Democracy, and Social Movements with Alyssa Battistoni (Barnard College) and Megan Black (MIT), moderated by Dipesh Chakrabarty and Lisa Wedeen (UChicago).
5:00pm CDT Divestment poster-making
PSI and EJTF
Open to – Students
Join us in McCormick Lounge from 5 to 7 pm to create posters for the upcoming student demonstration urging the University to make a commitment to divesting its endowment from fossil fuels.
7:30pm CDT Just Earth: Films for A Sustainable Future
Smart Museum of Art
Open to – Students, Faculty, OAAs, Staff, Public
Free at 5550 S Greenwood Ave
This outdoor film screening presents work by established and emerging filmmakers that interweave the pressing concerns of climate change with racial, economic, ecological, and social justice.
The program—a reprise of a screening held last fall—includes films by University of Chicago student filmmakers Atman Mehta, Jode Sparks, and Andrei Thüler as well as UChicago alumni Cameron Hu, Amy Tian, and Ellen Askey. It is presented in conjunction with the UChicago Earth Week 2022 celebrations as well as the exhibition “Unsettled Ground: Art and Environment from the Smart Museum Collection.”
Featuring
— Desynchronized (Olivia Leyva and George Denison, 2021)
— This Extraordinary Rock (LiCo: Cameron Hu, David Habets, & Stefan Schafer, 2020)
— I Can Only See Shadows (Marissa Lee Benedict and David Rueter, 2016)
— Zhashagi, Echo Maker (Steve Zieverink, 2015)
— Loss (Atman Mehta, 2021)
— Alaskans in Chicago (Jode Sparks, 2021)
— Globalized Consequences (Amy Tian, 2021)
— Downstream (Ellen Askey, 2021
— P.E.T.s (Andrei Thüler, 2020)
The films will be projected onto the façade of the Smart Museum. Please bring your own blanket or chair and set up on the grassy area between the Smart Museum and Henry Crown Field House.
This film program is co-presented by the Smart Museum of Art and Center for Leadership and Involvement at the University of Chicago.
Want more Earth Week content? Check out these events taking place nationally and globally:
April 18-24
Earth Week Film Fest
One Earth Film Festival
Virtual – view screenings and get tickets here
April 21-23
48 Hour Earth Day
Democracy Lab
Virtual – details here
Countdown to Earth day
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
https://www.epa.gov/earthday
April 22
Earth Day Live: Debating Planet Earth’s Urgent Issues
EARTHDAY.ORG
Virtual – details here
To find more events around the world: https://www.earthday.org/earth-day-2022/