Archives for Getting to Green

One quick way to conserve electricity is to turn off the damned monitor and have the computer go into low-power mode when you’re not using it. Turn the printer and scanner off. Don’t leave laptop battery chargers plugged in; they don’t have a “power-down” mode. Even if your laptop in in Standby, your charger is happily consuming power and using it to warm the room.

My husband works late hours in a room full of cubicle offices. He routinely walks down the aisles and turns off his colleagues’ monitors before he leaves.

Karen, at 4:35 pm EDT on April 15, 2008

But we have to leave ours on

We generally leave ours on because the antivirus update is at night.

Faculty Person, at 4:40 pm EDT on April 17, 2008

Institutional mechanisms for implementation

Public reporting is another benefit of the ACUPCC, providing a mechanism to “steal a song” or at least borrow some lyrics.

http://www.presidentsclimatecommitment.org/html/overview.php

If the following case studies do not provide the institutional mechanism(s) for implementation that you are looking for, you can contact the institutions directly to get support in writing your own song.

Example Campus Climate Neutral Reports and Studies

UC Berkeley Climate Action Partnership 2007 Final Report (PDF)

Changing the Campus Climate: Strategies to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions at The University of California, Santa BarbaraCampus Climate Neutral Group, May 2006.

University of Florida Carbon Neutral Assessment ProjectInternational Carbon Bank and Exchange, April 2004.

Carbon Neutrality at Middlebury College: A Compilation of Potential Objectives and Strategies to Minimize Campus Climate ImpactIsham, Jonathan et al. June 2003.

The Carbon Neutrality Toolkit, An Annotated Guide to: A Proposal for Carbon Neutrality at Middlebury CollegeMiddShift, January 2007.

Oberlin College: Climate Neutral by 2020Rocky Mountain Institute, January 2002.

Other Campus Greenhouse Gas Reduction Studies

Yale Climate Initiative: Mitigation Strategies ReportLacy, Virginia et al, April 2005.

Report of the Williams College Climate Action CommitteeWilliams College Climate Action Committee, 2006.

Yale’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Strategy 2005-2020Yale University.

Additional Resources

* Summary of Case Studies from UC Berkeley and Middlebury (PDF) * Climate Biz: The Business Resource for Climate Management * EPA Climate Leaders Program* Climate Neutral Network

Steve, at 10:00 am EDT on April 18, 2008

Lacking infrastructure

Parking is already quite expensive on my campus — and while it would be nice to get some money back for the few days a year that I don’t use the campus lots, my guess is that the administrative costs of this would outweigh the benefits.

I would love to walk to campus or ride my bike. However, the developers of my neighborhood did not build sidewalks along the main highway between the development and campus making walking or riding your bike a highly dangerous behavior.

The ideas you mention for parking and carpooling may work well on some campuses — however, in many other places the city itself is not designed for carpooling, public transportation, walking or bicycling, making the task of decreasing the number of solo drivers much more difficult.

T-bone, at 9:55 am EDT on April 30, 2008

Whenever people propose these sorts of shifts in hours here, one of the main roadblocks that comes up is the need to have large numbers of people present over a given set of hours because of the fact that it is already hard enough to set meeting times that all attendees can attend, without the additional irregularity in the schedule. This is especially true in understaffed organizations where everyone’s in multiple committees and task forces. Some work can be done online, granted, but some of it also has to be done face to face.

Rachel, Humanities Librarian at Univ. of Missouri, at 4:45 pm EDT on May 7, 2008

Comment period deadline extended: May 30

Thanks for the great post!

In response to suggestions from reviewers, AASHE has extended the deadline for providing feedback on the latest draft version of STARS to May 30.

Laura Matson, AASHE, at 8:30 pm EDT on May 5, 2008

read Breakthrough

You might want to read the book Breakthrough, it describes how to move away from deficit thinking and towards the politics of possibility. I’m on my second read of it...

PhD and an environmentalist, at 8:45 am EDT on May 8, 2008

two audiences

I’ve come to view this contradiction in terms of two audiences: internal and external. Internally we spur on action by framing a situation as a sustainability issue that needs to (and can) be resolved. Externally, we celebrate even the smallest victories as tremendous accomplishments. Of course a little mix of both is sometimes needed.

JB, at 9:15 am EDT on May 9, 2008

I think you’re absolutely right, we’ve internalized certain disciplinary codes far more than is good for us, and too many economists don’t count elements that reside outside the “cash for commodities/services” model. For example, every third bite of the food we eat is made possible by pollinators like bees, a reality that is only now getting attention with colony collapse disorder affecting the bee population. I read that it would take billions upon billions of dollars to manually do that ourselves. It’s the same idea with soil filtering groundwater which we later drink, plants cleaning our water, etc. Those costs are only now coming to the mainstream.

However, as I get more involved with sustainability, and particularly writing about it with a non-science background, I have definitely made some gaffes (in the public eye, no less) based on lacks in my scientific knowledge. Imagine if someone had invested millions in a “green” building based on my faulty information.

Journalists/editors like me spend a lot of time skimming along the surface, and while it’s GREAT for combining disciplines and seeing larger trends, it does make us more prone to error. Does the same thing happen with sustainability workers? So far my best recourse has been to find a credible expert to vet certain tech articles before publication, but that is not always possible. Critical thinking only gets you so far if you are lacking fundamentals.

So what is the best way to use that in the context of sust. coordinators? Especially since many colleges only have the budget for a few FT staffers, if that much. A lot is being published, which helps, and I for example tend to take reports by reputable organizations such as the IPCC at face value, but I worry that the pendulum could swing too far in the other direction, making the experts out-of-favor because they are too one-dimensional. Interdisciplinary is unquestionably good and necessary, but my question is whether it’s always better? My guess is collaboration between experts and multi-dimensional thinkers is really the way to go, but I’d be interested in what you think.

Xarissa Holdaway, Campus E-news Coordinator at National Wildlife Federation, at 5:50 pm EDT on May 9, 2008