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The Citadel Launches New Research Center

The Citadel is welcoming a new research center to campus centered around climate change. The Lt. Col James B. Near Jr. Center for Climate Studies will focus solely on climate change research, with a substantial focus on the impact of climate change on the city of Charleston.

Lt. Col James B. Near Jr. donated $2 million for the center to be enacted. Near was a 1977 Citadel graduate and former meteorologist.

Citadel’s new research center will be headed by Scott Curtis from East Carolina University, who has previously worked at the NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center and has extensively studied the El Niño climate pattern. Curtis is committed to learning and better understanding the research efforts already occurring in the Lowcountry. 

“The center’s already trying to get itself ingrained in what’s happening here as much as possible,” Curtis explained. “We don’t want to reinvent the wheel. We don’t want to duplicate efforts.”

This news comes in the wake of a new lawsuit out of Charleston county, targeting fossil fuel companies for their role in climate change. 

News

Charleston Becomes First Southern City To Sue Big Oil

On September 9th, the city of Charleston, SC filed a lawsuit against fossil fuel companies, claiming they have been misleading the public on the realities of climate change and caused devastating flooding throughout the city.

The lawsuit was filed in the S.C. Court of Common Pleas in Charleston and named 24 fossil fuel companies including Exxon Mobil Corporation, Hess Corporation, Shell Oil Company, BP America Inc., and Chevron Corporation.

Charleston has been plagued with frequent flooding for quite some time that experts predict will only get worse overtime – a problem that the city says is due to the effects of fossil fuel companies and the rising sea level. 

“As this lawsuit shows, these companies have known for more than 50 years that their products were going to cause the worst flooding the world has seen since Noah built the Ark,” Charleston Mayor John Tecklenburg explained in a statement regarding the lawsuit. “And instead of warning us, they covered up the truth and turned our flooding problems into their profits. That was wrong, and this lawsuit is all about holding them accountable for that multi-decade campaign of deception.”

Charleston is now the first southern city to sue oil companies for their alleged role in climate change.

While there has not been a direct response from the defendants listed in the lawsuit, Shell officials have stated they “do not believe the courtroom is the right venue to address climate change.”