COVID-19 is a violent reminder of the fragility of the current moment. For epidemiologists, it came as no surprise - already in 2007 scientists were predicting a coronavirus emerging from our contact with bats, as we encroach more and more on their natural habitats. It was the speed of the pandemic that was new. As the first airline companies grounded by the travel shutdown have begun asking for governments to bail them out, let's also remind ourselves of the fact that last year there were nearly 69 million commercial flights – a massive 10% year-on-year increase. And because 80% of the global population has never actually experienced air travel, an uncomfortable amount of responsibility falls on those of us living in the rich countries. Together with Greta Thunberg, we know that the task in front of us is simple: carbon emissions have to be reduced fast, and no amount of talk will substitute for this simple fact. And just like we could have saved many lives had we taken the prospects of a global pandemic more seriously and prepared at least an EU-wide emergency plan, we now need to listen to the climate scientists and act together.

Whereas the world is entering the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression (the IMF estimates a 3% decrease in global GDP – the Depression only cut 0.1%), university faculty and students have transitioned to online teaching/learning without much effort, and working from home took little away from our research endeavors. This is a great privilege. STaR Intellectual Community fellows Jan Valendin and Filipe Sengo Furtado, from the WU Vienna’s Marketing Institute, are seeking to use this privileged position to organize a grassroots effort centered around universities in the EU, calling on the European Commission to put a fair price on CO2 emissions.

Other WU colleagues from the Institute for Quantitative Economics have recently calculated that a carbon price is by far the cheapest way of reducing European CO2 emissions, particularly because we can substitute the dirtiest 10% of our energy production, which still comes from burning coal like it's the 1920s, with existing cleaner alternatives like natural gas plants, many of which are kept idle because burning coal is still so cheap. In the long term, we must move beyond the fossil fuels altogether, but with this simple step we could reduce the CO2 emissions from the crucial energy sector by up to 27% *instantly*, sending a strong signal about our future direction, away from dirty energy.

Together with their Marketing for the Climate Crisis class, Jan and Filipe created a website called CO2mustgo to explain the science behind their campaign, which calls on all European universities to support the joint effort. There are some 19 million students in the tertiary education sector in Europe. Together, we can put pressure on our political leaders, support evidence-based economics, free of propaganda and politics, and finally end our costly affair with coal.

For more information and to sign the petition, visit CO2mustgo. For questions, comments, and further inquiries, email the organizers at hello@co2mustgo.eu

Contribution by Jan Valendin and Filipe Sengo Furtado