Sustainability Office Hosts Series on Personal Climate Accountability

written, and there were meetings around the world and various different places to draft it.”

Beginning January 23, The Davidson Office of Sustainability hosted an event series titled “Finding Your Place in Climate Solutions. The series began with an interview with Dr. Henry Shue ‘61 and NPR Reporter Camila Domonoske ‘12, titled “Unseen Climate Urgency: Delay as the New Denial.” The series also included a workshop called “Unpacking Climate Science to Uncover Points of Intervention’’ on Wednesday. A dinner with members of the Davidson community involved in environmental and sustainability work is planned for February 1, and the series will culminate in a community circle on February 3rd.

Shue, Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for International Studies (CIS) of the Department of Politics and International Relations at Merton College in Oxford, UK, is a rare climate activist in a movement made up mostly of Generation Z. During his time at Davidson the idea of sustainability was practically non-existent.

It was not until the 1990s that Dr. Shue began to fully understand the importance of climate awareness. While teaching at Cornell University, he began to work with many agricultural economists on researching underdeveloped countries. When asked by a colleague why he did not talk about issues surrounding the climate, Dr. Shue responded, “Well, it’s because I don’t know anything about the climate.” While he did not know much about the ethical issues at the time, his background in philosophy and international relations helped him understand the prevalence of the issue. “So in a way, I learned from [...] grad students, and then from the Framework Convention on Climate Change that was adopted in 1992 in Rio. [...] First it had to be

Shue continues, “One of the drafting meetings was in New York City and Manhattan, so since I was up in Ithaca, I just sort of invited myself down to the negotiations. And that made a big impression on me.”

As Dr. Shue attended these climate conventions, he met many people from all over India. “They were saying, ‘You guys in the West keep saying, ‘We’ve got a problem.’ Who is ‘we?’ You are the ones who industrialized and emitted all these greenhouse gasses. So we think you’ve got a problem,” Shue explains.

“This has been one of the big debates in the negotiations. [...] Since the countries that are now rich cause the problem, the countries that are still poor say that we should fix it.”

Director of Sustainability Yancey Fouche touched on the significance of the series.

“A unique element of this talk [...] is centering the learning and collaborations,” Fouche said. “We [in the Sustainability Office] feel like we have this sort of twofold opportunity and responsibility, which is to think about campus operations [...] and then also the education program.”

Additionally, Domonoske believes that younger generations have the chance to have a significant influence on the future of climate.

“There is the responsibility that is profound and almost overwhelming. [...] The urgency and scale of action that needs to happen now and what it asks of us feels so overwhelming, but it’s also in some ways, an honor. It’s a privilege to have the opportunity to have as transformative an impact on the future as everyone living today could.”

According to Dr. Shue, the most important takeaway from the talk and the workshop is “communicating the urgency.” As the need for sustainable methods becomes more urgent, Davidson has its own Climate Action Plan that aims to reduce the college’s emissions by 50% by 2026. Fouché explains that the idea behind the plan was to create it within a timeframe that the people currently involved with it would still be held accountable and would continue to be excited about making it happen in the near future. Fouché says,“I feel good about the plan. It’s more project-based, which makes it more practical.”

As for Davidson students worried about their own climate footprint, Fouché urges students to not take on more than they can manage.

“When I look at our climate footprint, it’s just a tiny, tiny fraction of our overall carbon footprint,” Fouche said. “I have only so many hours in the day. It’s finding your place in the middle of these things.”

Dr. Shue continued to emphasize the importance of taking action.

“I really do think that what happens in the next 10 or 15 years is going to make an enormous difference, because, you know, we have to turn it around,” Dr. Shue said. “Every year, the emissions are greater than the year before, except for the pandemic year of 2020. There’s never been a year when we reduced our emissions, and so we’ve got to do it. We’ve got to do it soon, if we’re gonna get them all the way down.”

Adam Hickey ‘96 Finds Career in National Security

Adam Hickey is a Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division at the U.S. Department of Justice. He attended Davidson College (‘95-’96) before transferring to Harvard and then received his J.D. from Yale Law School. Hickey is a career federal prosecutor and oversees the National Security Division’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section and the Foreign Investment Review Section. The National Security Division has recently made headlines in cases involving Chinese intelligence operations, cracking down on lobbyists representing foreign countries, and the Mar-a-Lago classified document retention investigation.

PB: Can you provide an overview of your position at the Department of Justice?

AH: I’m a Deputy Assistant Attorney General, a sort of number two, along with three other colleagues, in a division that’s responsible for our national security work.

The National Security Division (NSD) is responsible for the Department of Justice’s work countering national security threats. You can divide the world of national security into two parts: counterterrorism, which is countering violence that has an ideological component to it, and counterintelligence, which is countering the activities of foreign governments. I’m responsible for the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section or CES, which covers most of our counterintelligence work. This includes criminal investigations that relate to statesponsored computer hacking […] efforts by Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea to hack into the U.S. government systems, critical infrastructure, or the private sector. It also oversees cases related to economic espionage, that is, efforts by foreign governments or stateowned enterprises to steal intellectual property from US companies.

CES also enforces export controls which limit where you can send certain products and technology around the world in the interest of national security; for example, to prevent an adversarial country from improving its military by incorporating U.S.-origin technology.

We also enforce sanctions. When the Treasury Department imposes sanctions on, for example, a Russian oligarch, it becomes a violation of law to do business with that oligarch and to move assets belonging to that individual through the U.S. financial system. There are criminal penalties that apply if you intentionally violate sanctions, and we would take the lead in prosecuting such a case.

CES also enforces laws to prevent what we call “malign foreign influence” or covert foreign influence, which means foreign efforts to influence public opinion or policy in a way that is not transparent. There’s a statute called the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires public relations firms, lobbyists, and others to register if they’re trying to influence public opinion on behalf of a foreign government or entity.

I also supervise the Foreign Investment Review Section, which is responsible for a kind of regulatory work. For example, if a foreign company wants to buy an American company, the President of the United States has the power to block that acquisition if it poses a risk to national security. Let’s say a foreign company wanted to buy a U.S. email provider, which stores a lot of sensitive personal data related to U.S. persons; that’s a transaction we’d scrutinize pretty closely.

PB: I want to ask you later about the prosecutions and purposes behind each of those individual offices, but first, tell me more about your journey to your current position.

Previously you worked in the Southern District of New York (SDNY), and you also spent time in private practice. Why were you interested in public service?

AH: I’m a little embarrassed to say this, but I always wanted to be a lawyer, and at least since middle school, I wanted to be a prosecutor. I liked the idea of being a lawyer who helps protect people. After law school, I clerked for a couple of years, and I went to a law firm, in part, because it’s hard to get into the DOJ unless you have a little bit of legal work experience. But going to SDNY was something I wanted to do pretty much as early as I knew a place like SDNY existed. I worked