Campus climate change schema: one example

Yesterday I shared a simple framework for understanding how campuses may approach climate change. That post offered a few hypothetical examples. Today I’d like to add a real world example.

Let’s start with the University of Texas-Austin. A Bloomberg report describes the institution as making a lot of money by (among other things) owning a big chunk of oil-rich land.

Land operated by the University of Texas System is on track to post its best-ever annual revenue in fiscal 2022 because of soaring oil prices and production on its property in the Permian Basin. Oil reached a high of $120 a barrel earlier this year as a result of a war-induced energy crunch. The revenue is expected to help narrow the gap between the Texas system’s $42.9 billion endowment and Harvard’s $53.2 billion as of June 2021.

There is some helpful mapping:

This isn’t a passive source of income, either. UT did its best to ramp up production:

Over the last six years, University Lands brought on teams of engineers, geologists, geophysicists and other experts to make extraction as efficient as possible, leaving very little oil in the ground.

What stance towards global warming does this operation indicate? According to the schema I posted yesterday, there are four positions a campus…