Anne Stephenson, the Buildings & Grounds guest blogger for June, is campus-outreach coordinator at Clean Air—Cool Planet, a science-based, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to finding and promoting solutions to global warming.
Over the past year, there has been much debate on college campuses about climate neutrality. Colleges whose chief executives have signed the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment have taken on the admirable goal of climate neutrality. Over 500 colleges have signed the commitment, but many presidents have yet to sign. While I support the presidents’ commitment, I have the unique opportunity of working with both institutions that have signed and institutions that have not. The one lesson I’ve learned from my campus partners is that the colleges that have signed have a lot to learn from those that haven’t.
Anne Stephenson
Some of the colleges that have not signed have argued that campus carbon neutrality is impossible, because it cannot be achieved through operational changes or on-site renewable-energy installations. A campus could be plastered in photovoltaic panels and still need more power, they argue, so the college would still have to buy offsets to meet neutrality requirements of the commitment.
Other institutions that have not signed argue that their institutions can reduce greenhouse gases more meaningfully by following their own carbon-reduction plans. They haven’t signed, they say, because the commitment would force them to buy carbon offsets before they could complete their own campus greenhouse-gas reductions.
Both arguments may be correct. (There are many other reasons for not signing, of course, but these are the most common.) But what the institutions are really demonstrating—to themselves as well as to institutions that have signed—is that the significance of the commitment is frequently lost when the aspirational goal of neutrality is translated into reduction efforts.
As a practical matter, too many colleges panic about meeting the commitment’s neutrality goal. In this panic, they work toward whatever carbon reductions they can find, pressuring campus planners, facilities professionals, and sustainability coordinators to meet goals based solely on the institution’s physical plant. This focus on operations comes even though the commitment outlines intermediate steps that institutions can take if they can’t meet operational goals right away—a college can offer courses in sustainability, for instance, or adopt an environmental-literacy graduation requirement.
Meanwhile, institutions overlook the educational significance of the commitment, which may be far more important. College campuses account, after all, for a mere three percent of our country’s greenhouse-gas emissions—carbon-neutral campus operations are only a small part of the solution to the greenhouse-gas problem. Colleges can make a much bigger reduction in greenhouse gases by educating every student to act as a leader in a new, low-carbon economy. Raising a thoughtful, environmentally-educated generation of leaders, community members, and parents is the ultimate carbon-neutral solution. —Anne Stephenson
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