Do the light thing

Editorial: Party foul

For some students, this week’s federal government shutdown may not mean much more than a cancelled weekend trip to Acadia National Park. But not all Mainers are as insulated, and the spending freeze will be felt most acutely by those who are already vulnerable.
According to the Portland Press Herald, funding for Section 8 housing subsidies for low-income residents is only guaranteed through the end of the month; if federal funds aren’t restored, landlords will have grounds to evict tenants. Similarly, money for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children is likely to dry up if the shutdown is not resolved before the end of the month, leaving the more than 26,000 Mainers who receive assistance through those programs unable to cover their basic expenses. The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program that subsidizes utility costs—which will only increase as the weather gets colder—needs federal confirmation before November to be able to help underwrite heating bills.
The previous shutdown, which lasted for 26 days between November 1995 and January 1996, cost the federal government $1.4 billion. Bloomberg projects the current shutdown will cost the federal government about $300 million a day. The results of an extended shutdown will be enormous, and a swift agreement seems like a tenuous hope. We will hit the debt ceiling on October 17, and if the government surpasses it, the Treasury will not have the authority to borrow funds to close the gap between spending and revenues. Though Speaker of the House John Boehner has publicly stated that he wants to avoid defaulting on our loans, the shutdown is an unnecessary crisis and his egregious mishandling leads us to question his ability to navigate another critical fiscal vote.

Editorial: To be at home

On Wednesday, President Mills sent out a campus-wide email highlighting an incident on October 10 when an intoxicated Brunswick resident made homophobic and sexist remarks before punching a student outside of Joshua’s Restaurant and Tavern. This violent altercation sticks out as an anomaly in the otherwise peaceful relationship between the College and the greater Brunswick community.
The dispute outside Joshua’s is not indicative of deep-rooted us-and-them tension. Most of the faculty and staff live in town, send their children to Brunswick schools, pay Brunswick taxes and shop at Brunswick stores. Many restaurants on Maine Street now accept students’ OneCards, and town auditors are a familiar sight in class. The relationship between Bowdoin Security and Brunswick Police Department is a symbiotic one that encourages cooperation between the forces. Incidents like those we covered this week are perhaps an inevitable consequence of living in a place where people are not all the same. It is important to address and try to make sense of these individual acts of violence and bigotry, but it is also important to remember that they do not characterize our town-gown relationship as a whole.
In March of 2011, someone vandalized a white board in Coles Tower. Dean of Student Affairs Tim Foster sent a campus-wide email soon after the incident was reported, explaining what had transpired, and condemning the act as “targeted hate speech.” Several days later, a community-wide forum was convened to discuss not only the event but also other instances of bias. The following fall, our editorial board applauded Bowdoin’s active response to the incident, contrasting it with the hands-off approach the Williams administration took immediately following a hate crime on their campus. We saw a similiarly supportive reaction from Bowdoin this week: yesterday, a closed meeting at 30 College Street brought multicultural campus leaders together to discuss moving forward in the aftermath of the week’s reports. A follow-up forum on Sunday will further the discussion.

Editorial

This piece represents the opinion of The Bowdoin Orient editorial board.

October 18, 2013

Last Friday, President Mills announced the College’s proposal to install a solar power complex spanning the roofs of Farley Field House and Watson Arena as well as three acres of the recently-acquired former Naval Air Station property. If the project obtains the necessary local, state and federal approvals, it will be the largest solar power installation in the state, with the potential to generate 1.6 million kilowatt-hours of power and offset Bowdoin’s annual electricity consumption by 8 percent.

The announcement made headlines in the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle and on the Huffington Post, highlighting Bowdoin’s efforts to remain at the forefront of renewable energy use. We applaud the plan’s movement toward institutional sustainability, taking steps beyond encouraging individuals to recycle or turn off the lights. But we should note that the project is still no more than a promising prospect—a preliminary step toward our ultimate carbon neutrality goals. The College must still jump through a number of regulatory hoops before ground will be broken at the Naval Air Station, and electricity prices have yet to be established. It will be a few years before the panels will become fully operational.

As Bowdoin seeks to benefit from the construction of Maine’s largest solar-panel facility, the state as a whole has missed an opportunity in another field of renewable energy. On Tuesday, the Norwegian company Statoil announced that it will not proceed with plans to build a $120 million wind farm on the coast. A spokesperson for the company attributed the decision partially to legislation signed by Governor LePage in June that reopened the bidding war for offshore wind power. LePage stated his opposition to the deal when it was announced last winter. According to the Portland Press Herald, the governor criticized the agreement because it offered Statoil an above-market rate for the electricity it would provide to the state. As a result, Maine loses a multi-million dollar investment in green energy and jobs as well as an opportunity to be a national leader in harvesting offshore wind power.

Like much of what is innovative, this wind power proposal was not a sure thing; there was no guarantee that it would have resulted in cheaper electricity rates, and it did carry some degree of risk. This does not justify LePage’s opposition. Bowdoin’s plan, too, is not without risk. While it is estimated that these solar panels will decrease our energy costs after 12 to 15 years, these predictions are not concrete. But because we are only seven years away from the College’s goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2020, these efforts are necessary and welcome. Bowdoin is paying it forward, not opting to safely maintain the status quo for the sake of short-term economic security, but making an investment that will pay out over the long term. Actions like the installation of the solar power farm will not eliminate our reliance on nonrenewable energy needs, but they are steps in the right direction. These are risks we should be taking.

The editorial represents the majority view of the Bowdoin Orient’s editorial board, which is comprised of Claire Aasen, Erica Berry, Nora Biette-Timmons, Marisa McGarry, Eliza Novick-Smith, Sam Miller and Sam Weyrauch.

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