This month, Anthony Cortese, higher education’s leading sustainability advocate, gave a speech at the recent Council of Independent Colleges conference in Marco Island, Fla., reminding college leaders once again of the perils of climate change and the difference colleges could make in creating a sustainable world. It was a variation on an inspirational speech Mr. Cortese has given at a number of venues — reminding people of higher education’s moral responsibility to improve society.
But persuading colleges to embrace climate neutrality, efficiency, and sustainability may take more than a moral argument. “It felt like a revival, like we’re supposed to do this to be good,” one president said later of Mr. Cortese’s talk. Many of the council’s member colleges are small and financially stretched. After the talk, a few presidents said climate neutrality was admirable but out of reach.
The financial incentives for sustainability were part of Mr. Cortese’s presentation that day in Florida, but apparently some people in the crowd weren’t hearing them. Mr. Cortese shared the stage with Ray Anderson, chief executive of Interface, a major carpet company that has gone green in a big way and saved lots of money in the process. Interface has retooled its manufacturing processes to run on renewable power and to eliminate waste. But such projects take investments that may payoff over many years; many small colleges are just getting by year to year, and don’t have the resources of a billion-dollar carpet company.
The bottom line: Advocates of sustainability will have to continually help small colleges find the business benefits of climate neutrality, and that may involve helping college leaders think differently. A recent deal between the Clinton Foundation and the organizers of the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment is one such effort, but more are needed.
This week the National Wildlife Federation released a report, “Higher Education in a Warming World: The Business Case for Climate Leadership on Campus.” The report is full of stories of efforts at colleges to reduce emissions and cut energy use, and the paybacks on those projects. According to a 2001 survey conducted by the federation, 64 percent of campus leaders said that environmental stewardship and sustainability efforts fit with their colleges’ values, but almost 50 percent also said that such efforts were good for public relations, 40 percent said they were cost effective, and 17 percent said they helped recruit students. As energy costs rise, and as sustainability becomes the movement of the decade, those numbers should go up in a follow-up survey, due out this year.
The report points to institutions like Concordia University, in Texas, which in 2001 set a fixed price on renewable energy, which provides all of the university’s power. At first, the college paid slightly more per kilowatt hour compared with conventional power, but now the college saves almost 80 cents per kilowatt hour because of rising oil and gas costs — savings that will likely continue through the university’s 10-year contract.
The rising costs of maintenance should be something for campus leaders to consider. Costs to heat, cool, and light buildings will no doubt continue to rise as the U.S. imports a larger percentage of its power, as oil and gas become more scarce, and as those resources increasingly come from hostile or unstable nations. The report says that between 2001 and 2006, the University of Wisconsin at Madison saw a 7-percent increase of square footage on campus. But the university’s energy costs went up 77 percent in that time.
The report includes some unconventional strategies colleges have used to switch to green power, like Green Mountain College’s effort to draw electricity from cow-manure methane. “Cow power,” up to 50 percent of the college’s energy consumption, comes from the farms around the college.
A chart in the report also details the emissions reductions at four institutions, along with the savings associated with the efforts. Pennsylvania State University has a plan to cut carbon emissions by 12 percent by 2012 through a building-retrofit program. The plan will yield savings of $8-million a year, which will allow the university to get a payback on the program within five 10 ten years.
But colleges are in the business of educating students, not setting up methane digesters and landfill-gas generators, and the report addresses the business case in academics, too. The report cites a study by Daniel M. Kammen, director of a renewable energy laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley, which said that more than 160,000 jobs in renewable energy will be created by 2020 — more growth than the fossil-fuels industry will see. The nation will also face challenges, relevant to scores of disciplines, in reviving local agriculture, preserving soils, constructing energy-efficient and renewable buildings, and retooling our transportation systems and city designs.
Whatever power the report has in persuading colleges of the business case for “doing good,” the most needy colleges will still need help getting started — and perhaps that’s a place where higher-education institutions can help one another. A small-college president at the CIC conference, who said that his entire operations budget was roughly equal to the return on Williams College’s endowment, had an intriguing, outside-the-box idea: As wealthy colleges move toward climate neutrality, they might need to buy offsets, he said. He was more than willing to offer up his college as a charity case.
“If Harvard University wants to replace the boilers in my buildings and count that toward their offsets, I’d be totally fine with that,” he said.
So, Harvard, how about it?
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