Swarthmore College Signs the Climate Commitment, and Prepares for a Steep Road Ahead

This week’s Chronicle features an article about Elizabethtown College, which is (for the third time in recent years) mulling whether to sign the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment. The discussion on the campus is coming down to a serious debate over the college’s goals and resources.

Coincidentally, Swarthmore College, which also has spent years deliberating whether to sign, took a leap last week and joined other colleges in the commitment. “I guess in a nutshell the answer is that we weren’t in a hurry,” said Maurice G. Eldridge, vice president for college and community relations, when asked why the college signed now, years after the commitment was first announced and after nearly 700 other colleges had already signed up. “The timing seemed right. We are a pretty deliberative and consensus-based community.”

E. Carr Everbach, a professor of engineering who is co-chair of the college’s sustainability committee, offered more details. In some ways, the decision to sign came out of a change in leadership at the college, he said in an e-mail message sent as he traveled to Cape Town, South Africa. Mr. Everbach explained that the sustainability committee had matured over the past two to three years, and that its members felt comfortable that the new president, Rebecca Chopp, would sign at the committee’s recommendation. Ms. Chopp had signed the climate commitment in her previous job as president of Colgate University.

“The previous president, Al Bloom, wasn’t so much adverse to signing the PCC as that he wanted the college to see a path to satisfying its commitments in spirit as well as name,” Mr. Everbach wrote. “Many signatories planned to satisfy the carbon-neutral objective by purchasing carbon credits on the open market, their only issue being ‘How much money will it cost us?’” But Swarthmore, he said, is trying to understand how much carbon the campus greenery and watershed could capture.

“I believe Swarthmore waited to sign the PCC only after it understood the steepness of the road ahead” and had mustered the willingness to climb it, he wrote. That road will be steep indeed. For example, the campus is heated in winter by burning No. 6 fuel oil, and Mr. Everbach said that biofuel replacements for that are far too expensive.

“But Swarthmore College will move forward with the rest of the country (and world) into technologies and policies not yet developed,” he wrote. “That is the spirit as well as the letter of the PCC, and I’m happy that we as an institution have a leader like Rebecca Chopp who is willing to move forward.”