Where the Bush Administration fears to tread, college students are jumping in and pushing for clean energy on campus.
By Ady Barkan, Columbia University
With the Kyoto protocol going into effect today, thirty-five industrialized nations are now legally obligated to reduce their greenhouse emission to an average of 5 percent below 1990 levels. But back on good old Capitol Hill, the only environmental action going on is the debate over just how much to cut from the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget. (President Bush is gunning for a six percent cut.) In recent years, as it’s become increasingly clear that the federal government is unwilling to take energy reform seriously, a widespread grassroots movement has begun to pick up steam. And like so many political movements, it’s being led by students.
This spring, student activists across the country are pushing their colleges and universities to adopt smart energy policies. They’re petitioning administrators to reduce energy use by constructing efficient “green buildings” and purchasing electricity harnessed from renewable resources. They’re convincing fellow students to make collective investments in green infrastructure like solar panels and wind turbines, and they’re trying to show the rest of the country that clean energy can be economically viable.
America’s college campuses, the thinking goes, are small cities unto themselves: Over fifteen million students, and millions more faculty and staff, are using up tremendous resources as they work, study and live in buildings that are brightly lit and heavily air conditioned around the clock, as they take buses around campus, as they eat, exercise at the gym, and generally gallivant around campus. The efforts to change energy policy don’t aim to impair that quality of living, just make it smarter. Lights across campus can use energy efficient bulbs and shut off when nobody’s around, windows can be built to insulate better, buses can run on bio-diesel made from the cafeteria’s excess cooking oil, and the whole university can run on energy from renewable sources instead of fossil fuel. Not only do these clean energy campaigns hold great practical promise, but the symbolic stakes are also high. Because if university communities – which tend to be more progressive and innovation oriented – cannot marshal the collective will to make economically and environmentally smart energy choices, then there’s probably little hope for the rest of the country.
Green Victories
The effort to clean up college campuses won its first victory in 2000, when students at the University of Colorado at Boulder voted to pay $1 per semester per student to purchase enough wind power to run all the student centers on campus. On the heels of that success and with the support of Greenpeace, students representing the entire University of California system began a campaign called UC Go Solar that culminated in July of 2003 with what was undoubtedly clean energy’s biggest success to date. UC’s regents agreed to build significant solar capacity on the campuses, to purchase 10 percent clean energy, and to cut total energy use to 90 percent of 2000 levels. Not only was this a substantive victory, but due to UC’s prominence, it was a nationally galvanizing one as well. Since then, a number of student bodies have voted to pay slightly more for clean energy including the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and UNC Chapel-Hill, where two-thirds and three-fourths of students, respectively, approved $4 and $8 per year fee hikes to use renewable technologies.
In the two years since Go Solar, hundreds of schools have taken up efforts of their own. And the campaigns aren’t just limited to the country’s traditionally progressive strongholds in the northeast and California. This weekend, the 2nd Annual Southeast Student Renewable Conference will be held at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and earlier this month, over three hundred students attended the Students United for a Responsible Global Environment Conference at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
And there are more conferences coming up. The Rainforest Action Network is currently on an eight-city tour of the Midwest to discuss America’s dependence on foreign oil, culminating in a conference at the University of Chicago. University of Vermont is hosting a conference for Northeast energy activists this weekend, and later this month, a Jewish environmental group based in DC is teaching college students how to “green” their Hillel buildings at an upcoming conference.
The new clean energy movement has no interest in collegiate navel gazing or a series of endless and unproductive conferences. Rachel Ackoff, national chair of the Sierra Student Coalition (and a high school friend of mine) helps execute their national campus energy campaign, and explains, “We have a training model that ensures that students are strategic in planning their campaigns,” she said. “They’re thinking about goals and about targets and about methods. [That way] they’re launching campaigns that are winnable.” (Swarthmore, where Ackoff goes to school, has committed to getting 2.5 percent of its energy from wind. It’s a start.)
Different Campuses, Same Goals
This movement is necessarily diffuse. Although united by shared goals, leaders at different schools face very different challenges. Some administrations are more open to environmentally progressive policies than others. Some schools, particularly the public ones that have seen widespread budget cuts under the Bush Administration, face immediate budget shortfalls that preclude any investments, even those that will lead to savings down the line. Some campuses, particularly the small liberal arts ones, are brimming with activists willing to work and progressive student bodies willing to fund renewable energy purchase.
Though each campus faces its own particular challenges, campus-based groups like Campus Ecology, Free the Planet, EnviroCitizen and the Green Corps, are trying to network students nationwide.
Billy Parish, 23, coordinator of Energy Action and former undergraduate at Yale who left out of frustration with the university’s intransigence on energy issues, now works full-time on energy issues, with a particular focus on networking the disparate groups taking on the issue. He explains the importance of trying to bring the myriad student environmental networks and alliances under one umbrella organization. Collective action, he says, can “yield some rewarding economies of scale.” When students nation-wide are well-connected, they can better share strategies, give administrators detailed evidence of successful policy changes elsewhere, and, importantly, feel like they’re part of a movement.
Measuring Successes
When asked for a quantitative measure of successful results, Parish sent me a list of about twenty individual colleges that have agreed to either cut energy use or use renewable energy, in addition to the 32 Pennsylvania schools that agreed to make the largest single purchase of wind energy in the U.S., the 56 New Jersey schools that, a la Kyoto, agreed to get their 2005 emissions 5 percent below 1990 levels, and the UC / California State schools that have gone solar. Considering that almost no universities were taking renewable energy seriously before 2000, it’s not a bad beginning.
And every day, he sees interest growing. Parish noted that earlier that week, Energy Action had sent out an email encouraging campuses to screen the documentary Oil on Ice, about the proposed drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge. Within 48 hours, over 225 schools had signed up. It’s a crude measuring tool, but it suggests that this effort isn’t limited to a few hippies at a few select liberal arts schools.
For the movement to continue to grow, Parish notes, unsurprisingly, that the key is money. If being environmentally smart can also be financially sound, universities will be a lot more willing to listen. Parish’s favorite model involves saving money through improved efficiency and spending it on renewables. The University of Pennsylvania, for example, saved $4 million a year by reducing its peak energy consumption 15 percent, and turned around to spend the savings on purchasing power from a local wind farm. “Almost always the efficiency efforts save the college money,” said Parish. “And almost always the alternative energy costs the college money. One of the things we’re trying to do is pair those two.” Parish believes that most universities can reduce fossil fuel use by 20 percent with such a revenue neutral programs.
Moving Forward
The size of these campus victories points to the fundamental issue with global warming. Even if every company and every household in the United States were to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent in the coming years, we wouldn’t be making much of a blip on the long-run global forecast for, say, CO2 parts per million in the atmosphere. And universities and colleges account for only a small fraction of U.S. emissions.
And that’s why understanding these efforts as part of a broader movement is so critical. Colleges and universities have the opportunity to be trailblazers for the rest of the nation. When schools start buying renewable energy technologies (and start doing press around it), they provide economic incentives for private sector R&D. Developing this sector is critical, because in years prior it often sustained itself with the support of green academics and do-gooding benefactors, not the invisible-hand of the market or profit-seeking entrepreneurs. To reach the 50 percent emissions reduction that some estimates say we need to avoid dangerous climate changes, businesses will have to see a new green revolution as in their best interest . As the demand for green energy expands, led by the efforts of college students, R&D becomes more worthwhile and prices will fall for renewable energy products. That is when we’ll see the serious emission reductions.
College students have long been trend-setters, not just when it comes to pop culture, but when it comes to social and environmental justice. There are a long litany of causes over the past decades – from civil rights to women’s rights to divestment from South Africa to fair trade – where students have been at the forefront. Our schools are filled with the young people who will be running this country in a decade or two or three. If supporting smart environmental policies becomes second nature to us now, then eventually global warming will receive the serious U.S. response it has long deserved.
Ady Barkan, 21, is working for a small microfinance organization in Buenos Aires. In the Fall he’ll return to New York for his senior year at Columbia University.