Colleges Strain to Reach Climate-Friendly Future

On a mid-June day this year, 70 college and university presidents gathered in an overly air-conditioned ballroom in Washington as temperatures outside pushed into the upper 80s and a line of thunderstorms threatened from the Northeast.

In their pressed suits and power ties, the presidents formed a conference of executive Isaiahs, preaching the message that the threat of global warming required American higher education to fundamentally change the way it did business.

One by one, the presidents signed a pledge to make their campuses “climate neutral” as soon as possible — in other words, to have zero impact on the atmosphere. That meant, among other things, doing away with the profligate use of fossil fuels that was right then raising goose bumps in the ballroom.

Just before the ritual signing, Michael M. Crow, president of Arizona State University and one of the leaders of the effort, declared to his colleagues that “we need to speak with a unified voice and to speak with action.”

The message has resonated with Mr. Crow’s counterparts across the country. Since then, the signatory list for the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment has swelled to 448 names as of last week, representing every size of educational institution in this country, from the tiny College of the Atlantic to the vast University of California system. Those institutions, as well as some nonsigners, have embarked on a decades-long diet to curb their appetite for the fuels and practices that spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and help warm the globe.

Organizers of the effort say that colleges and universities have a unique opportunity and responsibility to tackle climate change. “This challenge is so big we need higher education to come together to set an example for the rest of society,” says Anthony D. Cortese, who helped develop the climate commitment and is president of Second Nature, a nonprofit group that supports sustainability projects in higher education.

Academe will have to move quickly to stay ahead of other sectors of society. Under the threat of mounting political pressure for action, Congress is considering carbon-reduction legislation and other actions to combat global warming. And in Bali this week, nations are negotiating a follow-up agreement to the climate treaty known as the Kyoto Protocol.

Although the university presidents’ commitment has just taken effect, some colleges have forged ahead already and have shrunk their carbon footprint significantly. Seventeen institutions, in fact, are buying all of their electricity from green sources, like wind-, solar-, and small-scale hydro-power generators.

American colleges and universities combined are purchasing close to 1.1 billion kilowatt hours of green electricity, enough to power 87,000 average homes for a year, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The agency is even holding a competition to see which athletic conference this academic year will collectively purchase more green power. As of October, the members of the Ivy League held a slim lead over those in the University Athletic Conference, with the Big Ten universities challenging in third place.

Amid all the contests and carbon commitments, however, many college officials harbor skepticism about the current plans to zero-out emissions.

“I think the idea of carbon neutrality is basically a myth,” says David W. Oxtoby, president of Pomona College, who signed the commitment but worries that colleges cannot erase their climate impact without taking unreasonable steps.

Mr. Oxtoby has doubts about the pricing and efficacy of renewable energy contracts and of carbon offsets — projects that balance greenhouse-gas emissions in one place by lowering them somewhere else.

Others wonder whether university administrations are truly committed to making the long-term investments in staff, infrastructure, and renewable energy that will be required to achieve significant reductions. Indeed, the doubts are strong enough that many institutions with strong environmental leanings have not signed the pledge.

Making Money

Whether or not they have joined the commitment, many universities have declared war on carbon dioxide and have sharply reduced their greenhouse-gas emissions without draining their endowments.

One notable record-setter, Mount Wachusett Community College in north-central Massachusetts, has even made money while curbing its emissions of greenhouse gases. From 2002 through 2007, the college saved $2.4-million on its energy bill, largely by switching from electric heat to a biomass plant that burns locally harvested wood chips. Because those chips are scraps and they come from renewable forests, burning them doesn’t produce net emissions of carbon dioxide, says Edward R. Terceiro Jr., Mount Wachusett’s executive vice president. And the college’s energy choice has the added benefit of keeping money in the local economy, rather than sending it across the country or overseas.

With fuel costs rising, Mount Wachusett has slashed its former $400,000 annual heating budget by more than 90 percent since the switch in 2002. In the past two years alone, the college has cut its carbon emissions 24 percent, even as it added 20,000 square feet to its campus, says Mr. Terceiro.

The upgrades did cost $4.7-million, and paying for them has required patching together a variety of financial deals. Mount Wachusett obtained a $1-million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy and $750,000 from the Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust Fund. Some $200,000 in rebates from the local utility also helped pay for the efficiency upgrades. The college financed the rest of the work through a performance contract with an energy-service company named Noresco to build the biomass plant, improve lighting, and make other efficiency changes.

Performance contracts have increasingly become a popular way for institutions to save energy without incurring upfront costs. Under the terms of such deals, the energy-service company, or “esco,” performs the work and guarantees a certain amount of savings over the course of the contract. The esco collects a set annual fee, paid for by the energy savings. In the case of Mount Wachusett’s 10-year contract, the savings vastly exceeded the guaranteed amount, so the college pocketed millions of dollars even after paying Noresco.

Mr. Terceiro says he was not always so focused on making the college green, but his recent experiences have made him “a kind of zealot for this.”

He hopes his college’s success will point the way for other institutions, even relatively modest ones, to take environmentally beneficial actions. “We’re not a Harvard — we’re not a college that has a mega-endowment,” he says.

Going It Alone

Mount Wachusett did, of course, have access to the deep pockets of its home state and local utility, with their green-incentive programs. Georgia, the home of Emory University, does not offer such generous initiatives.

Despite that disadvantage, Emory has surpassed all other universities in its total square footage of green building space, certified under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, rating system. Whereas LEED projects in other states can garner millions of dollars in support from utilities or state funds, Emory has gone it alone.

“If we can do it here at Emory, you can do it anywhere,” says Ciannat M. Howett, director of sustainability initiatives.

As one of the university’s first steps, it installed monitors to track utility consumption for individual buildings and then started billing its business school, medical school, and other schools for their own energy. “They have a huge incentive to get everyone in the school to reduce usage because then those dollars can go to their core mission, rather than energy,” she says.

Yet such efforts will only move Emory a small way toward eliminating its emissions. “In a large residential institution, it may be impossible for anyone to get to neutral,” says Ms. Howett.

After cutting its own energy use as much as possible, Emory would still have to purchase “offsets": supporting activities elsewhere on the planet that counterbalance Emory’s remaining climate impact by reducing greenhouse gases still further.

In one type of offset, a company plants trees in tropical countries, and the trees then absorb carbon dioxide as they grow. But accounting for such trees and ensuring that they live for the specified number of years are difficult auditing tasks, and critics say there are few guarantees that the money an institution spends will actually end up reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

For that reason, Emory is taking the same approach as many other universities and colleges — treating offsets warily and looking for local opportunities. Georgia has no certified offsets yet, so Emory might have to create its own, she says.

Credit Confusion

To shrink their carbon footprints quickly, some institutions have opted to purchase green energy in the form of renewable energy credits. Called REC’s for short, those surcharges are a growing commodity but one that proves confusing to many consumers and university administrators alike.

When a wind farm or a hydro-power facility produces renewable energy, it almost always sends those electrons into the electricity grid, where the green energy mixes indistinguishably with the standard nongreen energy coming from coal, oil, natural gas, and other sources. So when individual consumers or large institutions want to buy energy produced by wind turbines, they don’t actually purchase the electrons that came from a wind farm. Instead, they buy standard electricity and then pay a premium for wind REC’s, providing an incentive for utilities to build more green-power facilities.

When New York University announced last year that it would buy 118,618,000 kilowatt-hours of green energy — the largest purchase by any U.S. university — it was actually buying regular energy off the grid along with credits for wind energy generated, for the most part, in distant states.

Blaine Collison, program manager for the EPA’s green-power partnership, says “colleges and universities have been some of the earliest and strongest participants in the program” in green-energy purchases.

In one recent case, says Mr. Collison, the University of Pennsylvania enabled a developer to finance a green-power project because the university’s credit and its intent to sign a long-term contract made the project less risky.

The sale of REC’s is likely to leap upward in two years, when colleges that have signed the presidents’ climate commitment move into their implementation phase. And politics could rapidly change the markets for energy and carbon if the United States adopts federal policies for cutting greenhouse gases, perhaps as part of a new international agreement, like the options being discussed at a United Nations’ climate conference in Bali.

Despite the growing popularity of buying green power, Mr. Oxtoby of Pomona worries that some colleges are doing it for the wrong reason. “The buying of credits is something that I’d have to become convinced is really meaningful, and not just a way for the rich to make their consciences feel better,” he says.

But John E. Sexton, president of NYU, says that the $375,000 extra his university paid last year for its green power — less than 1 percent of its total energy budget — will yield dividends that will end up saving money. “We’ve made this a campuswide consciousness-raising and activating moment,” he said. “We haven’t bought our way out, we’re achieving real effects that happen to have tremendous, pretty quickly realized economic payoffs.” As part of that effort to motivate the students, professors, and the staff, the university pledged this year to cut its energy use by 5 percent by next year.

Many university officials have held green-power credits at arm’s length, in part because they lack confidence in the current market. There are independent certification processes for REC’s, the largest of which is run by a nonprofit organization named Green-e. They seek to ensure the credits are not sold to more than one user and that they meet other criteria. But the paper trail from producer to the ultimate consumer can be a long one that often passes through many hands and states. And the auditors who monitor the sale of green power are paid by the entities that actually sell that energy.

“There are all kinds of problems with those markets,” says Darin Saul, sustainability coordinator at the University of Idaho. “You have to put a lot of faith that those markets will become more legitimate over time.”

His institution, like most others, has decided that the most important and first steps are to cut energy use through efficiency measures. It has recently entered into a $35-million performance contract with an energy-service company to upgrade its infrastructure.

The use of performance contracts in higher education could expand rapidly, thanks to the William J. Clinton Foundation, which last month announced a major deal with energy-service companies to help colleges perform upgrades. Pending legislation in Congress would provide grants through the Department of Education for green programs on campuses.

While performance contracts have worked for some institutions, other colleges say that they don’t often fit well in academic settings, particularly at research universities where office and lab space can change frequently. Leith Sharp, director of Harvard University’s Green Campus Initiative, says that contracts with energy-service companies are easier to draw up for places with stable use, such as a high school. Universities are much better off developing their own financing models that can adapt to the changing uses and occupants of buildings, she says.

Ms. Sharp worries that many presidents who signed the recent climate commitment don’t realize the scale of the undertaking. Part of her concern stems from an energy shortage, in the form of manpower devoted to this issue. “It’s unbelievable how much work this is going to be, and people are utterly blind to that fact,” she says.

Harvard has 20 full-time staff members working on sustainability along with 40 part-time students. Yet many institutions, even those that signed the commitment, are just now hiring a full-time sustainability coordinator. Harvard has yet to decide whether to sign the commitment, says Ms. Sharp.

Powered by Students

Another notable nonsigner is Tufts University, which has one of the oldest sustainability programs and was the first university to pledge to meet the goals of the Kyoto Protocol. Tufts has committed to trim its emissions 7 percent below its 1990 levels by 2012 and 75 percent over the long term.

The university has already reduced to near its 1990 levels, says Sarah Hammond Creighton, manager of the Tufts Climate Initiative, but future gains will be harder to win because the university did the easiest projects first.

She lauds the presidents’ climate commitment for putting “climate on the radar screen of many institutions, and that is phenomenal.” But she has trouble seeing how a university can reach zero impact. “It’s hard to envision Tufts being in operation and being carbon neutral,” she says, because that will involve offsets.

That statement will not please Mr. Cortese, who served as dean of environmental programs at Tufts in the early 90s. The presidents’ climate commitment is being administered by Mr. Cortese’s group, Second Nature; ecoAmerica, a nonprofit environmental group; and the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.

He says that offsets should not be the mysterious smoke-and-mirrors deal that critics have feared. A college, for example, could work with a local elementary school and pay to upgrade its heating system. “That creates a real offset for the college, and provides a real benefit for the local school, and it improves the town-gown relationship,” he says.

The presidents’ climate commitment includes steps that will force institutions to make interim reductions but also provide them with time to figure out how to reach zero emissions, he says: “We’re not interested in plans that sound good but really have no substantive impact.”

A few-institutions will provide early test cases. The College of the Atlantic, with only 300 students, said in 2006 that it had reached zero net emissions, and Middlebury has vowed to reach that mark by 2016.

Over the long term, says Mr. Cortese, educational institutions will have their biggest impact on the climate through their students. “We have 100 percent of the educational footprint because we train all the future K-12 teachers and we train all the leaders in every sector of society,” he says.

He has seen that training pay dividends firsthand. Some of the students he worked with and taught at Tufts have gone on to lead efforts in Massachusetts and at the federal level that in turn have helped universities reduce their own emissions.

When it comes to protecting the climate, he says, “if higher education doesn’t do this, I don’t see how the rest of society can.”

http://chronicle.com Section: Money & Management Volume 54, Issue 16, Page A1