Williams College Should be Carbon Neutral

I was doing some reading this week, browsing around between the NYtimes and the DrudgeReport, looking for something suitable for a few minutes of healthy procrastination, when I happened to find the Stern report. And no, before you ask, I'm not talking about Howard Stern. I'd heard the report talked about a few times by people here and in some blogs, so I figured it would be worth a closer look.

A year ago the British government, after hearing a sub-par climate report full of fluffy data, commissioned Nicholas Stern to give them the real, scientific and economic deal. According Her Majesty's Treasury website, Sir Nicholas Stern is the Head of the Government Economics Service and was delighted to present his report to the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the Economics of Climate Change. Now that sounded like a rather impressive resume, and surely not the idealistic environmentalist type, more like a hard headed economist, so maybe he was going to talk about the other side of climate change, the one we don't see in this liberal bubble of New England.

What does the former chief economist from the world bank advise the world to do? Cut emissions of climate changing gases by 80% by the year 2050. Globally. Not 10% below 1990 levels,which is a 'reasonable' number thrown around by liberal leaning administrations. 80% is a huge number and it might as well be 100% because we know that whatever plan we make, some things will go wrong, and as a citizen, I'd like to err on the side of caution for once.

These are the two most important things I have to say. The cost of doing nothing will be far, far higher than the cost of acting now. And, this task is not hopeless.

Williams college is not the world, although we try and be rather worldly in our aspirations. But we are a community of 3400 (total students, faculty and staff) living, breathing and lucky citizens who care very much.

We might not get involved in every issue we are aware of or not invest ourselves in justice when there's too much homework, but I believe we do care very much. We don't just care about the big picture, we care about buildings designed with as much efficiency as flashiness. We care about the status of Williams college and our coveted number one status, but not just because we do things by the book. We pride ourselves in being number one because we are the ones innovative enough to be a leader in academics, in sports, in dining and in arts. If we are given the chance to succeed and the will to commit, just as in our other fields of success, we will soon come to be leading innovators in environmental sustainability.

Why should Williams commit to being carbon neutral? Why should we invest more in the initial costs of buildings to achieve vastly lower operating costs in the future? Why should we commit ourselves even more to a local food supply? Why should we be installing solar and wind power, recovering heat from building ventilation and renovating our most energy inefficient buildings? Because we are a conservative financial institution.

We are conservative and we don't take risks with the big money. Part of not taking risks is looking at and planning for possibilities that other people might not think to look at. We need to get our geology professors into the board room to tell us what the price of oil will be in 50 years. Will it be $200 a barrel or more? Is that a possibility? Are we prepared for that, or are we going to be caught off guard just because we thought a finite resource was infinite?

Williams needs to use less energy. Our administration knows this and the ball is rolling. Its still rolling pretty slowly, but then again administrators are busy people who do an amazing job of keeping it all together. And because of that, they need congratulations and encouragement. Congratulations on being good listeners and encouragement to do things better. I wouldn't use the cliche, except the long mailing list of alumni, which we'll all be on soon enough and who pay for most of college, hear this all the time. I'm going to throw it right back at the people who make decisions, whether it be in student groups or Hopkins hall. Aim for the stars.