While a greenhouse gas inventory is an essential tool, it is possible that those conducting one for the first time will be disappointed that there are no big “ah-hah’s!”  If you approach this work from an energy perspective, as I do, then you are probably already aware that your inventory will show that your campus carbon footprint is mostly about campus energy use.  The “biggies” are predictable, namely:

 

 

Your “purchased electricity” component may be more or less depending on how carbon or coal-intensive your source of electricity is.  If you are cogenerating your own electricity on campus, then you can expect fuel use in your power plant to replace all or some of the carbon emissions associated with purchased electricity.  It might turn out that your overall campus GHG emissions volume would decrease if you stopped generating your own power and instead switched to grid electric purchases – especially if you are burning coal to make electricity and/or your regional grid power is disproportionately hydro or nuclear. 

 

If there is a surprise associated with looking at the results of your first GHG inventory, it may be shock over the large carbon footprint associated with commuting.  These emissions, along with those associated with air travel (which might also be larger than you think), are the so-called “Scope 3” emissions which the ACUPCC requires participants to count and address.  (See page 11 of the ACUPCC Implementation Guide for a description of Scope 1, 2, and 3 GHG emissions)

 

When UB Green’s Jim Simon ran the numbers at the University at Buffalo, he found that each year UB students, faculty and staff drove an estimated 79,000,000 miles to get back and forth to school and that commuting represented 24% of our overall 142,000 metric tons of CO2e/year.   Wow!  That’s enough driving to travel around the Earth’s equator 3,000 times.  I think the numbers also work out to an average of about 2,500 miles/yr per student, faculty or staff member – almost enough to see America by driving coast to coast.  There is something crazy as well as unsustainable about all this commuting, and putting numbers to it and publicizing them serves an important educational and motivational purpose.

 

Of course, a lot more can be done with GHG inventory tools like the Clean Air-Cool Planet Campus Carbon Calculator.  Or even with an ordinary handheld calculator! 

 

For example, if we were to normalize UB’s 142,000 MTCO2e/yr in terms of emissions per enrolled student, we would get 6 tons of CO2 per student per year.  Since burning a pound of coal releases 3.667 pounds of CO2, one could do a little simple arithmetic to show that the average UB student is responsible for campus GHG emissions equal to burning 3,272 pounds of coal!  A great visual would be to dump that much coal in front of the student union to dramatize the impact.  Students will walk by and think “Wow!  I never knew!  I better do something!”

 

The important thing is to maximize the educational value of your inventory and GHG number crunching.  Pulling out striking facts and figures and figuring out creative ways to dramatize them will help you get the point across . . . and encourage action to reduce emissions!

 

Your GHG inventory is a great project for students – with guidance from faculty and your facilities unit. While conducting the inventory itself does not represent a full semester’s work for a team of students, an academic course could be created around the inventory by asking students to not only gather the data and run the analysis but also to “unpack” and study the “guts” of the inventory tool (examining its assumptions, learning how the spreadsheet works, etc.).  Students in such a class could also be asked to develop campus GHG emissions mitigation strategies, create a simple climate action plan, and study the problem of climate change generally.  While such a course might not produce your school’s official climate action plan, it may provide substantial input to the planning committee and, very importantly, be a great learning experience for the students as well as faculty.

 

At every step, those responsible for developing and implementing the campus climate action plan should be thinking about how to be inclusive, how to involve students, and how to maximize the educational benefit of this great endeavor.

 

Now let’s look at rolling out your GHG inventory.  I suggest that you roll it out with as much fanfare and pizzazz (and possibly pizza!) as you can muster. Incorporate it into a larger report about the need to reduce campus GHG emissions with examples of what your school is already doing and might do in the future.  Call a press conference, write it up in campus publications, hold “town” meetings, give classroom talks, ask drama students to do street theatre about your newly quantified carbon footprint, maybe stencil or chalk giant black footprints around campus, address it prominently on your green campus website and invite comments and dialogue, etc. 

 

So the sky’s the limit!  Be creative about using your inventory to catalyze awareness, interest, support and action.   While the inventory may not produce great “ah-hah’s” among facilities managers who address campus energy needs on a daily basis, there definitely are ways to use the inventory results to evoke “ah-hah’s” on campus – and that’s what you want.

 

Let me close with a cautionary note.  Sorry to repeat myself from last week but I think this bears repeating.  Be careful not to make your GHG inventory and carbon number crunching an obsession or fetish.  The inventory is a great tool and it can help you:

 

 

But be careful to not get sidetracked doing too much analysis which does not effectively and efficiently facilitate action to reduce emissions.  Is it really helpful to know how many tons of CO2 each building is responsible for emitting each year?  Probably not, so don’t waste time calculating it.  Spend that valuable staff time actually reducing emissions.  Ultimately, that’s the important thing.

 

Next week I’ll provide a recipe for developing a comprehensive campus energy program – a favorite topic of mine.

 

‘till then climateers!

 

Walter Simpson

enconser@buffalo.edu

 

Walter Simpson, CEM, LEED AP, retired 26 year University at Buffalo Energy Officer and director of UB Green, is working with AASHE and the American College & University President’s Commitment to develop a climate action plan wiki which is expected to be initially posted in March 2009.