Colleges Strain to Reach Climate-Friendly Future

Chronicle of Higher Education. 1255 23rd Street NW Suite 700, Washington, DC 20037. Tel: 800-728-2803; e-mail: circulation@chronicle.com; Web site: http://chronicle.com/

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Fuels; Natural Resources; Energy; Climate; College Presidents; Conservation (Environment); Campuses; Colleges; Ecology

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On a mid-June day this year, 70 college and university presidents gathered in Washington and 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. 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. 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 the U.S., 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. As colleges try to curb their emission of greenhouse gases, they are finding it a more complicated and longer-term effort than they had anticipated. This article discusses the efforts of colleges and universities in tackling climate change in order to reach a climate-friendly future.

ERIC

2008

EJ783544