The Magazine of The University of Montana
Email Article | MONTANAN SPRING 2010
COMBATING CLIMATE CHANGE
CAMPUS LOOKS AT WAYS TO NEUTRALIZE ITS CARBON FOOTPRINT BY 2020, STARTING WITH INITIATIVES RIGHT NOW
Erika Fredrickson
UM Regents Professor of Ecology Steve Running in the Missoula Rattlesnake
“That’s millions and millions of people in the U.S.,” says Running. “We never imagined we’d have to re-argue the same case over again with the same data. But it shows you how shallow the understanding of climate science really is.”
Running says the setbacks stem from a controversy that erupted over two typos in the 2,000 pages of reports. The errors show a failure in the editing process, he says, but both proved to be isolated and easily fixed. The point is, he says, neither typo changes the science of climate change.
“None of this recent public controversy has brought forth any new data that shows that climate change is not happening,” he says. “We’ve let the skeptic crowd go wild, and they obviously aren’t impeded by the facts. And now they’ve made a real dent in the public’s understanding.”
Climate change politics keeps Running constantly in Washington, D.C., where his scientific expertise is required. Public debate on climate change roars on while governments haggle over energy bills and climate policy. Meanwhile, at UM something different is happening. Instead of debating climate change and doing nothing, faculty, staff, and students have gotten the ball rolling on a sustainability plan that will work to reduce the campus carbon footprint in a real local effort to combat climate change.
In fact, UM has worked on the issue for almost a decade. In 2002, President George Dennison signed the Talloires Declaration, which called for greater sustainability awareness on campus, and the same year a Sustainable Campus Committee advisory group was created. But it’s really been over the past four years that climate change action has exploded. In 2007, Dennison was one of the first 100 university presidents to sign the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment. Whereas the Talloires was a sort of general declaration, the 2007 commitment sets the stage for a commitment to concrete action.
“It’s been really exciting to see the student involvement,” says Erica Bloom, a graduate student and the Associated Students of UM sustainability coordinator. “They’ve pushed this so much over the years. It’s really the students who have made this happen.”
Under the commitment, UM created a Greenhouse Gas Inventory in 2008 to determine the current campus carbon footprint. Since then, students, faculty, and staff have created several sustainability projects to directly and quickly begin reducing carbon emissions. And on April 21, just in time for Earth Day, UM released the final Climate Action Plan, an aggressive step to make campus carbon neutral by 2020. From small changes to major ones, UM is building a model for tangible climate solutions from the ground up.
You can’t green a campus unless you know the root of the problem. Cherie Peacock, the sustainability coordinator for the UM Office of Sustainability, says the 2008 greenhouse gas emissions report helped provide a starting point for action. Using the Clean Air-Cool Planet campus carbon calculator, the emissions report group deduced exactly from where the emissions stemmed. It also predicted a continuous rise in emissions if no action were taken.
“There’s great information that came out of that report,” she says. “You look at it and go, ‘Oh, now I see that two-thirds of our emissions come from our buildings and one-third from transportation.’”
Cherie Peacock (left) and Erica Bloom ride bikes, that any student on campus can check out.
Peacock and Bloom collaborated with a multitude of campus community members, as well as technical experts from outside campus. In just more than a year, they took information from the emissions report and transformed it into the Climate Action Plan, a full-fledged, ninety-six-page emissions-reduction plan. They encouraged public involvement throughout the process.
“We tried to involve as many people as we could with the time that we had,” Peacock says. “We did that for quite a while, and then we started taking those ideas and consolidating them and categorizing them into more specific strategies.”
Those strategies read like a wish list for a dream campus: Solar thermal Grizzly Pool. Four-day workweek. Hybrid fleet cars. Alternative energy. But the truth is, UM’s climate action groups are taking the ideas very seriously. The four-day workweek might be far down the road, but other strategies are not. UM’s car fleet already uses some hybrids, for instance, and UM currently is talking with companies about wind and biomass solutions.
Other strategies are being implemented immediately. One of the plan’s categories is energy efficiency and conservation. While the action plan was being put together, UM did an energy audit to look at the efficiency of sixteen campus buildings. That audit spawned $6 million worth of campus retrofit projects. Another strategy the plan addresses is behavior. Turning off lights and taking shorter showers in the residence halls are just a few choices people make that affect emissions. A campus behavior group is currently working on how to encourage campus consumers to make everyday decisions that could pare down the carbon footprint.
As was the case with the emissions report, the Climate Action Plan used the Clean Air-Cool Planet campus carbon calculator. But this time instead of looking at dreaded predictions for a status-quo situation, they were able to take the strategies, plug them in, and see how each one could reduce emissions over time.
“We looked at direct reductions that we could reasonably do within five years,” Peacock says. “We thought we could reduce our emissions by 10 percent below 2007 levels by the year 2015. We’re kind of on track for that one. But the students really pushed for a particular date of carbon neutral by 2020. And that’s what’s in the plan as a very aggressive goal to achieve.”
Carbon neutral, according to the presidents’ climate commitment, means reducing emissions where possible and offsetting the rest of the emissions. A basic amount of business takes place on campus every day that could only be carbon neutral if all energy used was renewable, says Peacock. And, for instance, if UM is going to participate in indirect energy use such as air travel, some emissions will continue to emerge. Buying carbon offsets means UM is investing in projects that reduce emissions elsewhere and getting carbon credit for that. Those offsets could include tree carbon sequestration projects or traffic rerouting that would reduce car idling.
Peacock is an environmental engineer and architect who worked for the U.S. Forest Service for twenty years and has a history with green building. The technology aspect to greening a campus is exciting to her, and she says incorporating sustainability into UM’s curriculum is one of the other important parts of the action plan. But throughout the process of working on the climate plan, it’s been people’s energy that most inspired her.
“One of the greatest things that has evolved is this spirit of collaboration,” she says. “A lot of this process is really organic. It is what the people on campus want to do and want to take on. And that’s been really important to foster, because I think that’s what’s going to help us make great reductions.”
| “ | …But the students really pushed for a particular date of carbon neutral by 2020. And that’s what’s in the plan as a very aggressive goal to achieve. | ” |
Bob Duringer has big projects in his sights. The UM vice president of administration and finance took a trip to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in March to check out the campus’ recently installed biomass co-generation system. The system uses steam, which can be used to generate large amounts of heat and electricity. And it may be the perfect fit for UM.
Some people might not be aware that UM already uses some alternative energy sources. Many campus buildings are temperature regulated through geothermal cooling and heating and have been for several decades.
“In fact, in almost all of our buildings we have wells that pull out water from the aquifer, and we use it in our air conditioning and then pump it right back down into the ground so it never is exposed to the air,” Duringer says. “We save hundreds of thousands of dollars in our heating and cooling bills.”
But in the end, it’s not enough to keep the carbon footprint from increasing. The Montana state government’s energy bill in 2007 was $27.5 million, and just the cost for heating and lighting the state’s university system was responsible for 58 percent of that bill.
Duringer evaluates sustainability projects to see if they’re cost effective. For the Climate Action Plan, he and other staff rated the proposed projects from smallest return to biggest return. Then they designated which projects were easy to do, hard to do, and really hard to do.
“When you start to add up the things that are easy to do, whether you do them can make you feel good but it doesn’t really go much toward getting rid of your carbon footprint,” he says. “But when you get right down to the very bottom of the list, the two things that we’re studying really hard right now will [make a difference].”
One of the big ideas is wind. Montana ranks fifth in the nation for potential wind energy. But the Missoula Valley isn’t ideal for it. UM is currently in negotiations with a wind farm company (which they can’t name until plans are solidified) to find out if it’s economically viable to invest in wind generated in Judith Gap.
“The steps you have to go through to put up a wind farm are really quite complicated,” Duringer says. “I’ve got a proposal from this company, but I’ve yet to find out if it’s something a university would really be interested in because of the [cost] risk involved.”
But the co-generation system has real potential. The process uses biomass—tree trimmings and chippable wood—as opposed to UM’s current natural gas system. Construction of the plant would cost around $10 million, and UM could begin the building process as soon as this fall, if all goes according to plan. And, best of all, it’s projected to reduce 22 percent of UM’s footprint.
You can’t set foot on campus without seeing some sign of climate change action. The momentum is apparent in the UM Forum for Living with Appropriate Technology, also known as UM FLAT—a retrofitted campus house that’s used as a demonstration project for sustainable living. Last spring, environmental studies students constructed an infill strawbale wall, while carpentry students poured new concrete footings and installed energy-efficient windows. Currently UM FLAT students are working to build passive solar shelf walls on the south face of the garage. And the house uses a real-time energy monitoring system so the live-in students can track how much energy each appliance uses in order to tailor their behavior to more sustainable action.
Then there are projects such as the Revolving Energy Loan Fund. Students have created an optional fee which allows them to tax themselves each semester to fund projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and eventually create cost savings that pay back the loan. It’s one way to take ideas from UM FLAT’s experiment, for instance, and implement them on campus without needing further UM funding. In fact, Derek Kanwischer, UM FLAT program coordinator, says he and other organizers are working on a project to get the real-time energy monitors in UM residence halls. It won’t mandate a change in behavior, he says, but it will make students more tangibly aware of how each student’s appliance use impacts energy consumption—or conservation.
| “ | If you teach all the students that are coming through the University about sustainability and climate change issues, then they take that out to the bigger world at large. | ” |
Climate change action isn’t just about projects. Part of the Climate Action Plan puts heavy emphasis on education efforts—actively incorporating sustainability and climate information into the UM curriculum. Green Thread started last spring in an effort to ignite creative sustainability teaching into any classroom, no matter the subject. The two-day workshop this spring will add faculty from Montana State University, Flathead Valley Community College, Montana Tech, and The University of Montana-Western.
Students also can actively incorporate climate change into their studies. Last fall UM introduced a climate change studies minor. The minor is interdisciplinary and, in that sense, one of the only of its kind in the nation. Whatever their majors are, students can incorporate the new minor to add another dimension to their education track.
“That could potentially have a bigger impact,” says Peacock. “If you teach all the students that are coming through the University about sustainability and climate change issues, then they take that out to the bigger world at large.”
Out in the wider world of climate change, politics rage on. But for people like Steve Running, it’s UM’s conversation about large projects like the co-generation plant, as well as these student-run campus projects, that make it hard to be a pessimist. For him, the recent conference on climate change in Denmark didn’t produce serious changes. And now, Congress is battling over language for an energy and climate bill that he feels is not set to do anything big. It’s students in whom he’s put his faith.
“It’s your generation that just has to not take ‘no’ for an answer,” he says. “From those highly pessimistic observations then, what’s interesting is down in the trenches there’s a lot happening. And maybe we’ll look back decades from now and say that’s what really mattered anyway.”
Erika Fredrickson is the arts editor at the Missoula Independent. She graduated from UM’s Creative Writing Program in 1999 and received a master’s degree in environmental studies in 2009. She was a contributing writer to the 2008 Greenhouse Gas Inventory.
Email Article | MONTANAN SPRING 2010
