FREIGHT RAIL, OFF TRACK

On February 3, 50 cars of a Norfolk Southern freight train carrying hazardous materials derailed near East Palestine, Ohio. The trains burned for more than 48 hours, during which residents within a two-mile radius of the accident site were evacuated by first responders. On February 6, an hours-long controlled burn of five cars—typically a hazard reduction measure—released 115,580 gallons of vinyl chloride gas, one of several known carcinogens released in the crash, into the atmosphere. Though water and air samples taken by the EPA on February 7 were deemed safe enough for residents to return, residents continue to experience health effects, including rashes, coughing, vomiting, dizziness, and headaches, and scientists from Texas A&M and Carnegie Mellon have found chemical compounds at a higher concentration than the government had reported.

The conditions that produced this disaster are far from unique. Excluding subway systems, the U.S. rail industry comprises passenger rail and overwhelmingly freight rail. Freight rail carries around 4.5 million tons of toxic chemicals each year. Government agencies have reported that an estimated 12,000 rail cars like these pass through U.S. cities and towns each day and that 54,539 train derailments have occurred between 1990 and 2021, averaging 1,704 per year. The College Hill Independent counts at least 14 other reports of freight rail derailments across the country since East Palestine. Three have included the spill of hazardous materials. In the words of Glenn Olcerst, the founder of Rail Pollution Protection Pittsburgh, to the Indy, “This is a Norfolk nightmare coming soon to a neighborhood near you.”

U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has since called upon carriers across the freight industry to cooperate with initiatives from Congress and the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) to improve safety and accountability. What these calls for increased regulation overlook is that the volume of rail accidents we see today is also the result of a far longer history of negligence. These practices include running longer and less weight-balanced trains; reducing personnel on board and in rail yards, including for freight trains with only a single crew member on board; and implementing precision scheduled railroading, which leaves car men only 90 seconds to complete each rail car’s safety inspection. All of these industry standards have allowed freight rail companies to chip away at labor rights and implement aggressive cost cuts.

Downsizing in particular has increased the risk of derailment. Rail companies laid off more than 20,000 workers in 2018-2019 alone— the largest layoffs since the Great Recession. Post-pandemic hiring has far from kept pace, and training processes that used to take years have now been shortened to six months.

In this system where labor rights, effective maintenance, and regulatory efforts can be tossed aside in the name of profit, derailments have transformed from events that should be minimized to inevitabilities. Rather than trying to decrease their numbers, companies like Norfolk Southern now ‘plan’ for derailments and the resultant payouts to local communities. East Palestine has already been promised a $5.6 million financial commitment, a $300,000 “donation” to the school district, an $875,000 “reimbursement” to local firefighters, and a $1,000 “inconvenience check” to all residents.

Many future-oriented policy projects, including President Biden’s policy agendas, have emphasized the need for sustainable rail infrastructures to chart a course toward climate and economic resilience. Transitioning from fossil fuel-powered rail to electric rail would significantly reduce carbon emissions, for example, and would be critical to transporting the infrastructure materials necessary for climate-resilient construction. But our current freight rail systems are far from equipped to handle this. If freight rail demand doubles by 2045, as projected by the DOT, our current systems instead chart a course toward continuous disaster.

Despite an expressed commitment to rail from the federal government last November, Congress forced a contract between major freight carriers and unionized employees that gave most freight rail workers what amounts to a pay cut during a time of record profits and discussions of mergers between some of the largest freight companies in North America. This move will only exacerbate pressure on an industry under immense strain and reinforce profit incentives that allow for such chaos to continue. +++

Threading through the expanses of the United States, railroads are this country’s vascular network. Through wide-open and urban spaces alike, freight cars transport the raw materials, industrial products, and merchandise that allow business to continue as usual. The railroads affect everyone, most tangibly those working in and living alongside them. But those at the industry’s extremities—the railway company leaders, their shareholders, and their lobbyists—make the critical decisions about how freight courses through its terrain.

This concentration of decision-making power at the hands of those who are the least materially impacted has created an industry where the safety of rail companies’ workers, the physical landscape, and the people surrounding railways are constantly at risk. This is possible because the danger posed to human and environmental health is already absorbed into rail companies’ profit structures. Through corporate consolidation, stock market cunning, technological negligence, government entrenchment, and union intimidation, Class I rail companies, or companies with revenue over $900 million in 2021, have evaded any real accountability. Based on this overarching strategy and its tangible effects on the people impacted, it becomes clear that the people involved in this industry who are deemed ‘essential’ are treated as disposable.

PART I: STATE OF THE INDUSTRY ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT

The East Palestine derailment revealed the profound environmental fallout that can follow catastrophic rail accidents. But just as harmful is the quiet barrage of health risks endured by those who live near train tracks all around the country.

Rail lines release particulate matter, diesel exhaust, and other harmful pollutants, increasing communities’ risk of cancers and heart disease. A 2005 California Air Resources Board assessment found that the 18 major rail yards in California emit 210 tons of diesel pollution each year, putting millions of people at an elevated risk of cancer.

This pollution often disproportionately affects low-income communities and communities of color. Consider the case of North Richmond, CA, whose Black residents were pushed toward unincorporated areas close to nearby refineries and railroad tracks by Jim Crow-era housing policies. Richmond residents have higher rates of asthma and generally shorter lifespans than the rest of Contra Costa County. Richmond’s case is far from unique: Location siting for industrial facilities and rail lines is closely correlated with marginalized communities.

Similar battles over the placement of freight rail tracks continue to this day. In 2018, Norfolk Southern proposed a project to raise bridges across 24 neighborhoods in Pittsburgh, with the goal of accommodating taller, double-stacked trains. The construction, which has not yet begun, would also destroy a local park, cutting off access to green space and chopping down decades-old trees.

Glenn Olcerst, whose organization Rail Pollution Protection Pittsburgh (RP3) campaigned against the proposal, found that 74 percent of the 174,000 affected Pittsburgh residents lived in an Environmental Justice Area (meaning an area where at least 20 percent of residents live below the federal poverty line and/or at least 30 percent identify as non-white). In this way, the project proved consistent with broader trends of inequity in transportation development.

Norfolk Southern assured residents that the proposed route would ease congestion and decrease noise and air pollution. But local university researchers found no evidence to support Norfolk Southern’s promise of lessened pollution. They did find that the firm would significantly increase its freight volume—and therefore its profits. “The tracks [ran] 20 to 25 trains a day on average,” Olcerst said. “But looking at the projections, they were going to be run at maximum capacity, which is 70 to 80 trains a day.”

While Norfolk Southern’s development has not been finalized, the project appears ready to begin development, as of a final town hall meeting in January. But even if RP3 had continued to resist Norfolk Southern’s plans, most towns near rail lines or yards have no real way to avoid being thrown into what Olcerst calls the “blast zone” of petrochemical freight. As of 2022, a rail map of the Pittsburgh region reveals a snarl of at least six different rail lines that crisscross Allegheny County. Zooming out to Pennsylvania as a whole paints a similar picture, with rail lines crossing through almost every single county on the map.

It simply isn’t possible for any individual town to shield itself from pollution that crosses municipal borders, especially if the polluting rail lines lie just outside their regulatory spheres. And as the East Palestine case demonstrates, pollution left behind by freight rail lines may never truly go away.

The only surefire way for any of these towns to avoid the further accumulation of toxic damage would be for rail companies to upgrade existing rail infrastructure to accommodate trains that do not run on fossil fuels,

Railroads, an industry trade group representing most major North American freight rail companies, issued a report in 2023 opposing electrification due to its high capital costs.

In the meantime, Olcerst said he fears for his and other communities. “Every train that passes, I look at as Norfolk Southern playing Russian roulette with that city,” he said. “Every train is a spin of that gun barrel.”

Working Conditions

On top of the freight rail industry’s environmental impacts, its workers face dangerous labor conditions, including direct chemical exposure to diesel and toxic cargo. These dangers are compounded by corporate cost-cutting and efficiency measures that sacrifice safety and livable working conditions on the altar of maximum profit.

In recent years, rail companies have pres- and to tighten safety protocols for shipping hazardous materials. Though accidents like East Palestine have increased calls for greater safety regulation on trains, freight companies have made few gestures at investing in greener technology. In fact, the Association of American sured workers into volatile working schedules and unpredictable on-call hours. Last December, Nick Wurst, a freight conductor and a representative of inter-union caucus Railroad Workers United (RWU), came to Brown to present his work to the Student Labor Alliance. Workers often face 12-hour shifts, 6 days a week, and may be on call 24/7, he explained. And these numbers do not include the time workers might remain on a train after their shift ends, if the train has not yet reached a station.

“We do not have set days off a month like most other jobs. We do not have weekends. We do not have a routine or accurate schedule. Every day is the same for us. We never know when we will be going to sleep on any given day or night,” a locomotive engineer for BNSF Railway told VICE News in September 2022.

These punishing schedules are often paired with unforgiving attendance policies. In 2022, railway corporation BNSF implemented a point-based attendance system, in which employees are allocated 30 points each and lose points for missing a day of work. Employees who lose all 30 points face disciplinary action—up to and including firing. Together, these scheduling pressures often lead to loss of sleep and increased job stress. Since the implementation of BNSF’s attendance system, seven hundred of the firm’s employees have quit.

Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR), a cost-cutting measure popularized in the 2010s, has exacerbated these problems. Originally implemented at Illinois Central in the early 1990s, PSR is a broad strategy that normally involves rigid schedules, staffing cuts, and longer trains. Under PSR, typical freight train lengths have increased several miles, while crew sizes have shrunk.

The result has been significant job cuts across the industry. Over the past six years, Class I rail companies have cut their workforce by 29 percent (around 45,000 employees), with further cuts coming in the wake of the pandemic. Union Pacific, one of the major rail corporations, says on its website that PSR is “intended to benefit customers by providing consistent, reliable, predictable service.” But unions and customers have disagreed, reporting safety and service concerns, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report. Such unsafe labor conditions come at a cost to everyone but the rail companies’ shareholders.

Some companies have even begun pushing for one-person rail crews. This could entail a single crewmember operating a train that is several miles long, likely carrying at least a few cars of flammable or otherwise hazardous freight. Rail corporations and the federal government claim one-person crews would work, in light of contemporary technological advances. Rail unions say otherwise. Greg Hynes, director of SMART-TD, one of the largest rail unions in the country, emphasized that “there’s a check and balance” built into a two-person crew with both a conductor and engineer. The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers (BLE), another rail union, concurred, noting that two-person crews reduce distraction and ensure that the engineer has another set of eyes to help watch for hazards. than spending to improve its own operations). the system currently used in most North American train cars to detect rail car failures. It uses infrared sensors to detect changes in temperatures in the wheel bearings of train cars and triggers alarms for inspection if an overheating is detected.

Workers leaving or being fired costs the industry institutional knowledge. Though hiring efforts have increased in the wake of pandemic supply chain challenges, newer employees often receive less training due to staffing shortages, leaving them less equipped to identify a risk of derailment on the job, let alone run a train alone—once again pushing workers to the brink. If untenable current conditions continue, they might drive a critical mass of skilled workers out of the industry for good.

Just one year ago, Norfolk Southern issued $10 billion in stock buybacks, money that could have instead been used to update technology or distribute benefits to its workers. Some experts now contend that the company’s use of funds for these buybacks (read: shareholder profits) over other uses, such as necessary safety improvements, may have contributed to the East Palestine disaster.

The clearest evidence of these misaligned incentives comes from the mouths of the companies themselves. In a March 7 press release, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the federal agency charged with investigating transportation accidents, highlighted “safety culture” as a key factor in five major accidents resulting in catastrophic derailments or workers’ deaths. Yet none of the three goals for the year from Norfolk Southern’s most recent shareholder presentation mention worker safety or safe operating conditions. The only reference to safety in the entire presentation is in the abstract phrasing of “safe, reliable, and resilient service.” And in Norfolk Southern’s 2021 Annual Report—a federally mandated self-review— not a single section mentions worker safety.

In the hands of the private sector, therefore, the system will remain fundamentally broken. To say nothing of industry modernization or the imminent green transition, losing skill and knowledge could destroy any chance of resolving the industry’s problems today.

Profit Structure

Railway companies have fundamentally different priorities than the communities they supposedly serve. In fact, they often have strong financial incentives to go against the public interest.

The seven Class I freight rail companies employ around 87 percent of all U.S. and Canadian freight rail employees, and bring in 94 percent of freight rail industry revenue. These seven companies produced a combined total of $90.8 billion in operating revenue in 2022. The four largest companies—Union Pacific, CSX, and Norfolk Southern—alone employed over 110,000 workers with a combined total of $78.4 billion in operating revenues in 2022.

This tight concentration of powerful corporations allows them to collude when setting cargo prices for customers. They have few incentives to compete with one another. Though rail rates, measured as revenue per ton per mile, initially fell as a result of deregulation measures in the ’80s and ’90s, one DOT report found that freight rail rates had since increased by 96 percent from 2002–2019. By April 2022, despite these price hikes, delays and service issues had become so severe that the Surface Transportation Board directly issued orders to Class I companies to remediate them.

The companies claim that changes in service quality and rates are due to labor market difficulties. However, those labor market difficulties emerged out of companies’ own making. Service quality cuts have often been matched by increases in the companies’ profit margins and stock growth. CSX, for example, cut one-third of its jobs over the past decade while its stock price has increased over 300 percent since 2011, far outpacing broader stock market trends.

Furthermore, these railway companies lack any incentive to reinvest in their infrastructure. Most of them are the result of mergers in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and many are now publicly traded. BNSF, for example, has been owned by Berkshire Hathaway since 2010. Its business decisions are thus beholden to Berkshire Hathaway and its shareholders. The result is that companies prioritize stock buybacks (when a ‘public’ corporation purchases its own stock to return money to its shareholders, rather

What does get mentioned, though, are the risks to profit posed by increased government regulation around carbon emissions, transport of hazardous materials, and worker unions. These risks, in the words of the companies, include the possibility of “a catastrophic rail accident involving hazardous materials… exceed[ing] our insurance coverage” or “compromis[ing] critical parts of our rail network.” Unionized workers could “significantly increase our costs for health care, wages, and other benefits.” In other words, companies like Norfolk Southern have no significant financial incentive to improve on worker or environmental safety, beyond concerns about potential lawsuits or insurance claims. Yet they have direct financial incentives to oppose climate and safety regulation and unionized labor.

The fundamental problem with a for-profit ‘essential industry,’ is that it is often cheaper to deal with the aftermath of a disaster than to prevent it from happening in the first place. Perhaps companies don’t plan for disasters on the same scale as East Palestine. But certain losses that can be covered by insurance—derailments, loss of workers’ lives, environmental damage— can turn into expected, necessary risks. These risk protections can be written off in budgets. They are considered more cost-effective than an upfront investment in more sustainable, less dangerous systems: more efficient, effective machinery; longer-term job training and employment incentives like better wages, hours, and benefits; stringent safety protocols; etc.

Of course, insurance money does not erase the damage an accident causes to people. Workers who have been seriously injured or killed in accidents do not have their livelihoods restored. Residents of East Palestine may, like most victims of industrial disasters, face unknown health risks for years. While not all accidents are as visible and catastrophic as East Palestine, they continue to add up, and every last one leaves a mark.

A 2019 study by the DOT, however, showed that these detectors often fail to distinguish between healthy and defective bearings. It also found that systems that use temperature to gauge whether a bearing needs replacement did not catch problems in time to prevent accidents.

The East Palestine derailment has since been attributed to a hotbox detection failure: A report by the NTSB found that a faulty wheel bearing was about 38 degrees above the normal temperature when it passed through a hotbox detector 30 miles outside East Palestine, yet no alert went out. Another 30 miles and two hotboxes later, the temperature was over 250 degrees higher than normal. It was only then that the crew was alerted to overheating. Soon after, the train derailed.

In Glenn Olcerst’s words, the incident in East Palestine “was a fiery alarm.” This alarm has been going off for far too long, engineering expert Justin Roczniak told the Indy: The country’s very first derailment, on a freight train owned by “a distant ancestor to Norfolk Southern,” was also due to an overheated bearing.

Alternative technologies that more effectively predict bearing failures exist. One such technology, an accelerometer, detects changes in vibrations in addition to temperature shifts. The director of the University Transportation Center for Railway Safety noted that this system can identify changes in vibrations in defective bearings thousands of miles before an actual failure occurs, giving crew members ample time to stop and inspect bearings. Another technology, acoustic monitoring, checks the sound of bearings as a train passes by its sensors. Though this technology is not considered as precise as an accelerometer, it has still been said to detect failures faster than hotbox sensors.

TECH REINVESTMENT & DEVELOPMENT

Technology that could ease workers’ burden, reduce the risk of derailment, and lessen rail industries’ environmental impact already exists, and is utilized in other parts of the world. Profit structures in North American freight rail, however, have made their implementation impossible.

Take, for example, the hotbox detector,

However, this updated technology is not being implemented due to cost. As Steve Ditmeyer, a former Federal Railroad Administration official, noted in an interview with CNN, “What they’re proposing will work, but it’s very, very expensive, and one does have to take cost into consideration.” While this may be true, rail companies have neglected to even set basic standards on existing hotbox sensors on the basis of cost, which suggests a fundamental deprioritization of basic safety measures among freight rail companies.

That this negligence has been allowed to continue, Olcerst said, comes down to a single core problem: self-regulation of safety standards amongst private rail companies. Companies like Norfolk Southern and other major players in the rail industry are allowed to autonomously change, update, and research their own safety regulations. No independent governing body, at the moment, truly has data on how effective the current systems in place are and whether the data reported by these companies (accident rates, increased safety measures through added brake systems, efficacy of chosen thresholds for bearing failure detections) are accurate.

Even with proposed legislation, such as the recently-introduced bipartisan Railway Act of 2023—which is unlikely to pass due to the adversarial efforts of rail-lobbyist-turned-sena- tor John Thune—self-regulation will remain the industry standard. Moreover, the little oversight this law would require falls within the purview of the Federal Railroad Administration and the DOT, two agencies that Olcerst laments are “almost entirely staffed by former rail or petrochemical lobbyists or rail or oil executives.”

The Biden administration has championed rail as part of its climate and infrastructure strategy, announcing over $368 million in grants to improve rail infrastructure and increase supply chain resilience. It’s easy to see why: passenger and freight rail offer a natural alternative to our current reliance on carbon-intensive modes of transportation and shipping like cars, trucks, and planes.

For rail to truly be a safe and viable green technology within a green infrastructural transition, however, we would need an effective overhaul of the system. In particular, the rail industry would need to shift toward broadscale electrification. In technical terms, this would involve stringing electrified catenary wires across at least the main lines of America’s rail network and replacing aging diesel locomotives with electric ones. This green transition would have added safety benefits: Roczniak noted, for example, that an electrified system would have greater flexibility and could thus safely handle more types of freight.

In a system that still allows companies to set their own safety rules, disincentivizing maintenance and investment in more effective, more eco-friendly technology, this vision of trains leading the way into a decarbonized future is little more than a pipe dream. Grants to encourage innovation will have little impact without greater accountability for the corporations that have resisted that innovation en masse.

PART II: BARRIERS TO ACTION

If companies themselves have little to no incentive to fix industry problems and government regulation has been insufficient, we might turn to rail unions, whose members best know the labor conditions they in the industry face. Their organizing, however, has been consistently hamstrung by the 1926 Railway Labor Act (RLA), passed in reaction to growing union power during World War I.

During the 1910s, rail employees were vital to transporting wartime supplies, providing workers with an opening to fight for better labor conditions and strengthen their collective bargaining power. Historian Jon Huibregtse argues in American Railroad Labor and the Genesis of the New Deal, 1919-1935 (2010) that rail union strength reached its peak during this period, achieving a series of victories that had been previously met with resistance from rail carriers. Rail workers gained significant wage increases, standardization of work rules, and protection from discrimination on the basis of union membership.

After the war, however, the previously-nationalized operation of the nation’s railroads was handed back to private rail companies, who immediately tried to dismantle the union victories of the previous decade. In 1922, 400,000 rail shop workers went on strike, leveraging their status as essential workers to preserve the wage increases, standardization of work rules, and discrimination protections they had fought for during the war.

To limit union power, Congress passed the RLA, which mandated that unions and rail carriers make every reasonable effort to negotiate working conditions. If both parties are unable to come to an agreement, the legislation gives the president power to create an emergency board, which has 30 days to investigate and publish a report on the labor dispute. While the board is investigating, both parties are prohibited from all labor actions such as strikes or lockouts. The publication of the board’s findings sets off another 30-day cooling-off period during which unions are unable to strike or renegotiate their working conditions.

Nearly 100 years later, the private companies that control the railway industry continue to exploit their workers. It was through the invocation of the RLA in negotiations last fall that Congress blocked a potential strike and forced through a national labor contract on terms unions had soundly rejected before.

Before then, 12 of the 13 major U.S. rail unions had signed on for collective bargaining to renegotiate the last, pre-pandemic deal. Widely publicized details from last summer’s interim deals included provisions like a 24 percent pay increase backdated to 2020, three sick days, and one personal day off per year.

Speaking on behalf of RWU last December, Wurst noted that the deal was far from the generous package it was presented as. Adjusted for inflation, the 24 percent pay increase would functionally be a pay cut compared to what wages would have been if they had kept pace with inflation. The additional sick days could only be used on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and would need to be reported 30 days in advance. Despite promises of no increases to out-of-pocket costs, healthcare premiums would double by 2025.

The largest unions in the country rejected this deal, sending the industry into the 30-day cooling-off period mandated by the RLA. An industry-wide strike seemed imminent until Congress voted to block a strike and impose a contract with the 24 percent pay increase cidents entirely—something private companies fundamentally have no incentive to do.

Ultimately, if rail companies prove incapable of treating their workers and the environment properly, perhaps it is time to consider rail nationalization—i.e., putting the railroad under government control. Though opponents try to tar it as an un-American ‘socialist’ policy, railway nationalization has been a part of U.S. history since the 1900s, when the railroads were temporarily nationalized during World War I.

Though privatization quickly returned, rail workers fought tooth and nail to keep trains nationalized. Most notably, the Plumb Plan League, led by rail union legal counsel Glenn E. Plumb, sought a government buyout of the railroads, in which operations would be left to a board of government officials, operating officials, and worker representatives. Excess revenue would be divided between the government for infrastructure investments and employees for wage increases; if the surplus was too high, rates would be lowered the following year. This plan could have yielded higher-quality rail service in the U.S., but it was defeated by corporate owners.

The exact specifics of nationalization today remain unclear. Nevertheless, union members say it is a necessary first step to resolving the persistent issues that plague the industry. “If you were to nationalize the railroads right now, you could have a completely different operating paradigm, other than this precision scheduled railroading, [...] fairly quickly,” Roczniak said. “I have no idea how you’d do it, I just know it should be done.” but without any additional paid sick leave.

Based on the lack of union solidarity during last year’s contract negotiations, Wurst told the Indy that current union leadership isn’t up to the challenge of pushing nationalization. The leadership “shrugs their shoulders and says this is how it is. If there’s going to be a serious fight [for nationalization], that has to change,” he said.

In short, the RLA allows Congress to severely limit unions’ leverage in the fight against increasingly unworkable working conditions, diverting attention and responsibility away from railway companies’ creation of these conditions and refusal to offer workable labor packages in response. The narrative becomes that freight rail, as an ‘essential industry,’ must continue operation no matter the costs.

Wurst, however, told the Indy that even before Congress intervened, unions were not fully prepared for a strike. “The idea of challenging the government is a scary thing,” he said, citing union leaders’ concerns about the precedent of past transport strikes broken by the federal government. (Wurst specifically referenced the 1981 air traffic controller strike, when 11,000 air controllers were summarily fired and blacklisted from future government service.)

To Wurst, however, this failure to organize also comes down to union leaders’ conservative sensibilities. “They don’t think that the power of the union is the ability to take away job action—they see it in the ability to vote, to use PAC money,” he said. “They accept the right of the rail companies to make profit off of our labor…You can’t ask for more than the company or shareholders are willing to give you.”

Challenging the norms of the industry, in short, will require re-orienting collective action away from corporate-friendly approaches—including considering the possibility of eliminating the need for corporate presence at all.

PART III: ORIENTING TOWARD THE FUTURE

Within the current system of privatized rail, it is not enough to call for companies like Norfolk Southern to be held accountable for the harm they cause. Accidents like the East Palestine derailment happen not because the private system has broken down, but because it is working exactly as intended. We need to shift to a system that works to prioritize worker and community safety and avoid ac-

RWU wants that change. Last October, RWU’s steering committee unanimously voted to approve a resolution supporting the consolidated public ownership of railroads across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. In it, the organization calls for transnational, trans-industry organizing—solidarity even beyond the bounds of U.S. rail unions. The resolution calls attention to the reality that the conditions of freight rail—in terms of regulation, labor, and technology—will continue to directly impact everyone.

As ideas for a just transition and strategic infrastructure float through the White House and Congress, we need to recognize that developing the ‘infrastructure’ of an essential industry includes more than investment in new technology. Sustainable infrastructure cannot exist without equally reasonable labor practices for those who work in those industries and know them best.

Given the sluggish response from federal, state, and local governments to the ongoing crisis in East Palestine, it’s unlikely that this change will start from the top down. Instead, Wurst said, “We’re asking for other organizations, whether it’s labor organizations or community groups, to make their voices heard and put out their own statements in support of the idea of public ownership of the railroads.” Proactive stances, organizing, and coalition building will be critical to forcing the issue of nationalization back onto the policy-making table, even if it’s not clear yet exactly what nationalization would look like. Doing so opens up more complex, less resolvable conversations of infrastructural transition and investment, but we cannot imagine a better future without at least starting the conversation.

Sunrise Brown’s new report starts with a September storm, one of the many deluges that have driven a staggering 104 percent increase in “heavy downpours” in the Ocean State. Climate change is already transforming the world around us. The report asks: what is Brown University’s role? “Brown doesn’t really make it that obvious how much money they take [from the fossil fuel industry],” Ethan Drake, Sunrise’s University task-force co-lead, told the College Hill Independent. “It’s not really in their interest to tell everyone … so we went and did the research.”

On Monday, February 27, Sunrise Brown released Dissociate Now: A Fossil-Free Brown Meticulously written and researched, Dissociate Now argues that Brown University has a responsibility to go further in fighting the climate crisis by becoming “the first university ever to completely dissociate from fossil fuels.”

“We’re sort of following the footsteps of a few other school student activist groups that had done similar things,” Drake said. In September 2022, Princeton University announced that it would dissociate from 90 fossil fuel companies— including a prohibition on fossil fuel research funding. “We really liked that idea,” Drake said.

The report’s release marked the launch of Sunrise Brown’s broader DIRE campaign, which aims to push Brown to “dissociate from fossil fuels and reinvest in Rhode Island.” Notably, DIRE pairs fossil fuel dissociation with a call for Brown to increase its financial commitment to Providence, joining groups like the Graduate Labor Organization and Students for Educational Equity, as the Indy has previously reported.

“Brown is very well positioned to do this,” Caitlyn Carpenter, one of the authors of the report, told the Indy. “It holds a lot of weight in its name, and is able to be a really good building block to strip an industry [of] that social license to operate.”

After the conclusion of a protest to launch DIRE on Friday, March 3, demonstrators brought a copy of the report to University Hall. “Our next step will be to review it in full,” Brown spokesperson Brian Clark told nonprofit newsroom ecoRI.

This recent mobilization heralds a new era for Sunrise Brown, one of 400 ‘hubs’ of the national youth-led Sunrise Movement, which pushes politicians to act on climate change. Brown’s campus environmental movement has enjoyed unprecedented success in the past few years: in March 2020, President Christina Paxson announced that the university would stop investing in fossil fuel extraction, and last spring the university committed to stop doing business with purveyors of science disinformation “to the best extent practicable.” These wins built on a long history of environmental activism at Brown, a history that the new report painstakingly documents.

But during 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic pushed student organizing online,

Sunrise’s Brown chapter dissolved. It was only this past October that Sunrise Brown relaunched with a bang: even before the group’s first meeting, dozens of protesting Sunrise members flooded a classroom where an ExxonMobile representative was holding a recruiting event. “We have a lot of stuff on the agenda and a lot to do,” hub coordinator Isaac Slevin told the Brown Daily Herald at the time. With Dissociate Now and the DIRE campaign, the hub is taking its next big step.

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If Brown has already divested from fossil fuel, what does the report call for? The key word is dissociation, which entails more than divestment—a complete severing of financial ties. In this spirit, the report puts forward three main recommendations.

First, Sunrise Brown calls on the university to stop accepting gifts and research funding from fossil fuel companies. Since 2010, journal authors affiliated with the university have published at least 63 articles “with funding from the world’s fifty largest oil and gas companies,” according to the report, and from 2003 to 2019, Brown took in more than $20 million in donations from nonprofits associated with these firms or the “climate denial movement” more broadly. However, the report’s sum total only includes donations from nonprofits, which must report their giving to the government. Unreported contributions from individuals and private organizations mean “much more fossil fuel money flows to Brown.”

The $20 million figure comprises 93 contributions, but these were not all equal. The charitable arm of investment management company The Vanguard Group, which also funds “dozens” of right-wing think tanks, donated at least $10,157,039 to Brown over the 16-year period—nearly half of the total. For tracking donations, Sunrise Brown got help from Fossil Free Research, a coalition that works to stop fossil fuel funding in university scholarship. The work was not easy: these companies “have a lot of adjacent but related foundations that donate to universities or nonprofits,” design lead Dawson Phillips told the Indy. “It can be difficult because it’s kind of a convoluted and oftentimes intentionally opaque process.”

Second, the report recommends that Brown stop helping fossil fuel companies recruit Brown students. The university shouldn’t allow these companies to “market themselves to students as ethical and sustainable firms,” the report says, as ExxonMobil attempted last fall.

Finally, the report’s third recommendation is for Brown to offer retirement plans that are not tied to fossil fuels. Though Brown itself has ended such investments, many of the retirement portfolio options currently offered to faculty and staff are still reliant on the success of the fossil fuel industry.

At times it waxes antagonistic—“fossil fuel executives talk out of both sides of their mouths”—but mostly the report maintains a measured, scholarly tone, dissecting industry talking points and earnestly laying out the group’s case. And like a good legal brief, the report adopts several avenues of attack. “The devastating impacts of the fossil fuel industry are not felt in statistics and risk assessment reports,” the authors write. Environmental pollution and climate change harm everyone, but especially marginalized communities. Even if one eschews ethics, allowing fossil fuel companies to fund scientific scholarship also creates an obvious “research bias,” the report says. And, of course, there is the “reputational damage associated with … planetary destruction.”

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With an executive summary, a methodology section, and a detailed appendix, the report has the feel of a professional piece of scholarship. The bright orange design, Phillips said, was meant to convey “a sense of urgency and seriousness.” The group didn’t want to use the “stereotypical green” of conventional eco-friendly projects, he continued—the issue of climate change is “destructive.” And the banners that run alongside the report’s text? Strips of collage made with photos of solar panels, wind turbines, and “photos of wildfires and money and businessmen,” according to Phillips.

“We were hoping to show how interconnected all these systems are and how it’s hard to talk about one without the other,” he said. “It’s hard to talk about the problems without addressing the solutions and vice versa.”

According to Ava Ward, a report contributor, research for the report started in the fall semester. Many members dedicated their time during winter break, and the team went through a process of “very rapid, kind of hectic editing, putting it all together, trying to get it ready as soon as possible” after the spring semester began, Ward said.

“We felt like investigative journalists,” Carpenter said. “You get to know people in a different context than you usually get to know people.” She added that the team began to “have these odd little inside jokes that are in relation to these very specific sentences that you put in a 20 page report that nobody else will ever [understand].”

“There are real students behind this,” she continued. “There are people who really care and who put a lot of time into it.” Research meetings included “digging up the dirt sessions,” where they worked on spreadsheets “for hours and hours.” But “all of that just went out the window when we were like ‘this is not efficient,” Carpenter said. “We need to streamline [a] consistent process for doing the research, because that’s what gives us validity in the end.”

Drake mentioned that the report shows not only Brown’s connections to the fossil fuel industry, but also that “it wouldn’t be impossible to dissociate.”

“It’s not like the majority of funding for research is coming from these companies. It’s just a really small percent,” he said. “We see this as an opportunity to pursue a better path.”

SACHA SLOAN B’23.5 likes appendices. KATHY WANG B’25 says ‘read the report!’

Arrangement of Talents

Found object (ガシャポン) digital collage

Restarting my childhood collection… in search of something smaller

Dori Walker B’24 MILK! Digital Video (5:18), Photography

This portrait aims to practice a refusal of access to someone’s mind and thoughts. A lot will be said that you will never hear or understand. What I give you access to as the auteur will require a watchful eye. Maybe wonder why you think you ought to understand just because you know someone must be talking. Behold what is given to you and take what you can from that. You are never entitled to another person. The person you’re privileged to know for a short while is quite wise and beaming.

Look up into the stars. How vastly, immensely expansive our universe is, how unfathomably complex, how full of infinite iterations of possibilities of opportunities. How does one chart a path through the nebulous and murky world in which we live? This week’s readers are facing cosmically challenging dilemmas, questions so intricately baffling that even yours truly, Indie, found herself lost in the maze of their nuances. Is there ever truly one correct answer to life’s deepest questions? Like, probably not. This week, instead of presenting my adviceseekers with one ultimate answer, I’ve invited guest columnist Jonathan Green to offer some alternative wisdom.

Okay, the truth is that the Managing Editors put me on probation after I made that joke about them refusing to get naked at crit last week, and now they’re making me share the column with a more “responsible” and “pure-minded” Indy staff writer who’s supposed to “keep me in check” and make sure I “keep my clothes on.” So go ahead—read my advice, read Jonathan’s “advice,” and choose for yourself who you want to listen to.*

Dear Pal-y-amorous,

This is simple. No. Of course not. Never. Frankly, I’m offended by the premise. Once you’ve hopped on one homie, the rest are off limits. Too many times have I seen beautiful friend groups torn asunder by the misguided maneuverings of foolhardy philanderers. Deep bonds of love and trust, built over years, obliterated. And all because some floozy (gender neutral) couldn’t exercise even the slightest bit of self-control.

But seriously—judgment gets cloudy when you start adding more homies into the mix. Of course, it takes two to tango. People know their friends, and probably understand what boundaries might or might not be crossed better than you do. But even if the responsibility is not entirely yours, there’s just no need to risk getting entwined in the tendrils of a tiff between friends.

Let’s think pragmatically here. Picture all the ways this could blow up in your face, all the countless people you might piss off. Who knows—it just might be one of their dads deciding if you get that Goldman internship this summer. Is any lust, or even love, worth losing that?

Also, just on principle—it’s not cool.

Dear Extra Virgin,

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, I really do. But some people emit a vibe so searingly sexual, so viscerally venereal, that people cannot help but throw themselves in their direction. And others give off an energy more suited to cheek pinching. That’s just the way it is. It’s preordained. We have no say in the matter. And I’m sorry to say it, but it seems to be you’ve found yourself in the latter category. The best advice I can give you is to embrace it. Be proud of your chaste charm. Use it! By now, I’m sure you’ve discovered your strengths—you’ve had to. So play them up. Wear them on your sleeve. Know what you’re good at and do it. Walk up to someone at a party and tell them you have all of the presidents memorized in order. Or that you can recite every line of Revenge of the Sith. Someone, somewhere is bound to be into it. Because no matter how hard we may try to will it otherwise, no matter how many haircuts we get or new styles we try or how hard we work on our posture, we can only ever really be ourselves. So just accept it. Let it be. Shuffle off the coils of corporeal consternations, sublimate yourself to the unknowable whims of the cosmos. Now that’s sexy.

Respectfully,

Dear Pal-y-amorous,

This is complicated. When considering hooking up with more than one homie in the same friend group, there are a whole bunch of factors you need to take into account. First of all, what was your relationship with the first homie? What’s the first homie’s relationship with the second homie? Is the second homie hotter than the first homie? Is there a third homie in the picture? Homie hopping is kind of like parkour—if you’re going to jump from one thing to another thing, you better make sure you’ve taken distance into consideration. If these homies are extremely close friends, getting between them could be messy. If one of these homies was in a serious relationship with you, your hop to one of their friends could really hurt them.

There are no truly ideal conditions for a stunt of this kind, but if you really must, hesitate before you hop. Leave some time between one homie and the next. Maybe stick with homies in different subsets of the friend group. Ask yourself: Is it worth it? If you’re only interested in a casual dalliance, there have to be at least 500 other friend groups full of options—why double-dip in this one?

But maybe Homie #1 and Homie #2 have a chill agreement about hooking up with the same people. Or maybe it’s true love with Homie #2, and Homie #1 seems like they could find it in their heart to someday understand. Or maybe Homie #2 is INSANELY hot and you’ll regret not leaping for the rest of your life. In that case… go on and hop. Homie hopping might lead to broken hearts, but parkour can lead to, like, broken arms. And that’s way worse.

Dear Extra Virgin,

It’s true—some people walk into a room and just ooze sex uncontrollably. Like, it cascades from their pores. All they have to do is stand there, sex emanating from their very being like a force field of radioactivity, but in a hot way.

The good news is: There’s no reason you can’t be one of these people, too! Just like radioactivity, extreme sex vibes aren’t something you have to be born with. Like a soon-to-be superhero stumbling into a vat of toxic waste, you can start developing your sex-vibe superpowers at any time. It’s a long, hard process, but I’m here to be your wise old man mentor figure, your sexy Obi-Wan Kenobi. Well, that’s redundant, but you get the idea.

It sounds cliché, but one of the most important aspects of emitting a sexy vibe is maintaining a sexy mindset. It’s kind of like a Jedi mind trick, when you think about it. Walk into the room as if your radioactive sex force field is already there. Tell yourself, “Sex is cascading from my pores and everyone in this room can taste it.” If you don’t believe it at first (and you probably won’t), fake it! Then fake it again! (This is the only circumstance in which Dear Indy condones faking it.)

The process of developing an uncontrollably sexy aura is the process of pretending to have an uncontrollably sexy aura. There’s nothing about you, or anyone, that is inherently non-sexual. I referenced Star Wars twice in this answer and both times it was very sexy—because I decided it would be. (And that’s impressive, because everyone knows Jedi are celibate.) With practice, you can get there, too.

It won’t be easy, but the path of a hero never is.

*You choose me, right?