Dartmouth’s big green plan

On Earth Day, President Sian Beilock announced the Dartmouth Climate Collaborative — an approach to addressing climate change that integrates “academic enterprise, campus operations, and community engagement.” Over the next five years, Dartmouth will invest more than $500 million in improvements to its physical plant to reduce emissions on campus — 60% by 2030, and 100% by 2050. In addition, the college plans to capitalize on areas where it is positioned to lead on climate scholarship and solutions.

On behalf of Sustainable Hanover, we congratulate President Beilock for moving Dartmouth forward with a bold and comprehensive vision. We also thank her for inviting Sustainable Hanover to participate in the Dartmouth Climate Collaborative through representation on its Advisory Council. Dartmouth is a vital member of the Hanover community. As such, its climate and sustainability actions are critically important for Hanover to achieve its own 100% renewable energy goals adopted at Town Meeting in 2017 and re-affirmed in Hanover’s 2024 Sustainability Master Plan.

Many Hanover residents and businesses and the town government are on the path to reducing their carbon footprints. One impressive business example: Hypertherm has achieved net zero waste. In addition, 10% of Hanover households are using locally generated solar electricity. Virtually all other households and small businesses are enrolled in Hanover Community Power, which supplies electricity through the grid with a higher renewable content than that supplied by the utilities. Town government covers nearly all its electricity needs from solar installations on its properties.

That’s good progress, but much work remains. For that, we welcome Beilock’s invigorating action plan. As Dartmouth pushes “for the campus to achieve real carbon zero and to become a world leader in developing innovative, sustainable, and human-centered cold-weather climate solutions,” we anticipate their work will inform households and businesses striving to reduce their own carbon footprints.

We urge everyone who lives, works and plays in Hanover to tune in to the college’s plans, contribute feedback in a timely way and, despite inevitable and annoying disruptions from infrastructure improvements, find ways to support these inspirational efforts to create a better future.

Yolanda Baumgartner
and Judith Colla

Hanover

The writers are co-chairs of Sustainable Hanover.

No, it’s not genocide

The case currently before the International Court of Justice re: whether Israel is guilty of committing genocide in Gaza, does not require tortuous debating. It can be resolved by simply following the pornography example: “You know it when you see it.” Accordingly, Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom is unequivocally not genocide.

During World War II, realizing deportations and roving killing squads were inefficiently resolving the Reich’s fabricated Jewish problem, Germany’s senior Nazi leaders hatched a new plan, the Final Solution. It called for systematic annihilation. What followed was a coordinated, collaborative effort between the government, private industry, the military, like-minded German citizens and enablers in occupied lands to murder all the Jews. Before the war ended the Nazis succeeded in murdering 6 million. Until Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish jurist coined the term “genocide,” there wasn’t even a word that could adequately describe this most heinous crime of all time.

Despite unparalleled steps the Israel Defense Forces have taken to minimize harm since Oct. 7, its campaign to destroy Hamas has unfortunately created great suffering for Gaza. This dilemma is due to Hamas’ fighters’ cowardly strategy of embedding within Palestinian civilian society. There is no need to debate whether Israel’s response to the Hamas attack constitutes equivalence to Nazi Germany’s coordinated, collaborative genocidal Final Solution plan. It does not. The case should be dismissed.

David Greenfield

Grantham

Listen to our youth

I just finished listening to the news on television this morning, and I ask myself: since when is a peaceful demonstration against genocide and our country’s involvement in supporting it considered antisemitic? Why are we continuing to be held in thrall by the threat of antisemitism when the nation of Israel, not the Jewish people, is going way beyond the claim of self-defense and committing atrocities on the Palestinian (which includes people of all religions) people? War crimes supported by the U.S., by my tax dollars?

The issues are dividing our nation, and our young people are calling out to us. Rather than arrest them, we should listen to them and try to understand that the way to any peace will come only when all voices can be heard (and listened to) and when addressing the terrible humanitarian crisis (50% of the Palestinians killed have been women and children, and many people are starving in Gaza) becomes the priority over revenge and mass destruction.

Richard Morse

Plainfield