Episode 40: Carbon Neutrality Should Not Be The End Goal with Alex Barron and Aaron Strong
Dave Karlsgodt 0:00
Welcome to the campus energy and sustainability podcast. In each episode, we talk with leading campus professionals, thought leaders, engineers, and innovators addressing the unique challenges and opportunities facing higher ed and corporate campuses. Our discussions will range from energy conservation and efficiency, to planning and finance, from building science to social science, from energy systems to food systems. We hope you're ready to learn, share and ultimately accelerate your institution towards solutions. I'm your host, Dave Karlsgodt. I'm a Director of Energy and Sustainability at Brailsford and Dunlavey.
Aaron Strong 0:37
And this is one of the tricks of carbon accounting is that we live in a system and yet we're trying to box off these carbon footprints and separate them and assign them to different actors. But we're living in a connected world. And so it's hard, in my mind, to argue that climate action should come down to simply doing what you've always done and reaping the benefits of the fact that people around you are taking steps towards climate action.
Alex Barron 1:07
I'm actually way more impressed with an institution that has a concrete goal to--here's our plan to stop burning fossil fuels on campus--than I am with one that says "We are carbon neutral because we are buying offsets." And it's because that second institution that's buying offsets still has to grapple with that question of eliminating fossil fuels on campus.
Dave Karlsgodt 1:27
It certainly has been a whirlwind couple of years, but we're excited to be back on the mic after a long pandemic pause. In this episode, you'll hear two professors and researchers discussing a recently published paper in the journal One Earth entitled, "Carbon Neutrality Should Not Be the End Goal: Lessons for Institutional Climate Action From U.S. Higher Education." You'll hear me speak with lead author Alex Barron of Smith College, and co-author Aaron Strong from Hamilton College. We also wanted to recognize key collaborators and co-authors who each made significant contributions to the paper we'll discuss. These are Maya Domeshek and Lucy Metz, who were students at Smith College at the time of the publication, as well as Laura Draucker from the Boston based nonprofit series. I hope you enjoy this interview recorded June 22, 2020.
Alex and Aaron, it's great to have you on The Campus Energy and Sustainability Podcast.
Alex Barron 2:21
Thanks. It's great to be here.
Aaron Strong 2:23
Thanks so much. Great to be here as well.
Dave Karlsgodt 2:25
All right. Well, Alex, I'm going to start with you, because I know we've been talking about doing this episode for I think at least two years, in some form or fashion. I went back and looked at my old emails; I think it was October of 2020 when we were debating whether the election would change what we were going to talk about, and then this, you know, kind of kept getting delayed. So it's good to finally be able to talk to you. I know we originally were going to talk about carbon pricing and some of your earlier work on that. But then you went and wrote another paper. I guess you didn't take up knitting during the pandemic, but instead decided to maybe do some more of your, of your day job, which is great. And we're gonna benefit from it today. But before we really dig into the paper that I know we're going to talk about, maybe just give our listeners a little introduction of yourself. And then if you would pass the baton to Aaron.
Alex Barron 3:09
Thanks. It's a pleasure to be here on a long delayed conversation. So my name is Alex Barron. I'm an Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at Smith College in western Massachusetts. And my research focuses on climate policy design and analysis. I've had sort of a hybrid career. I'm trained as an ecologist, but spent several years in DC, working on climate policy design before coming back here to Smith. And the bulk of my research has to do with policy design at the state or federal level, but I've had a sort of sideline, which is what we're talking about here, of looking at climate policy in higher education. And alongside that work, and in concert with it, I've been really quite involved with Smith's climate mitigation work on campus through a number of steering groups and committees. Aaron?
Aaron Strong 3:58
Hi, everyone. So really Dave, thanks for having us. My name is Aaron Strong. I'm an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Hamilton College, which is a small liberal arts college in upstate New York. My teaching and research focuses on climate action pathways. I'm a carbon cycle biogeochemist by training, but I've jumped into studying pathways to carbon neutrality and teamed up with Alex to work on this paper. And like Alex, I'm also working pretty actively on Hamilton's own pathway to doing more climate action. And I also serve on an offsets peer review committee. We don't have to get into those, those details here. But we'll, we'll talk about--carbon offsets are pretty important to these conversations. And this peer review committee is through something called The Offset Network that helps colleges and campuses think about good strategies to use when, when thinking about using carbon offsets.
Dave Karlsgodt 4:52
That's great. I think we probably will get into offsets if we get through the bulk of the conversation here. But let's start with just the paper itself; that was kind of the premise of the show. I think you guys both know that I'm a consultant by day. You know, my, my day gig is mostly working with university colleges on climate action type projects. So I'm doing a lot of climate action planning or utility planning. So it's kind of rare actually that I get to talk to the academic side of the house, because I'm usually talking to the facility folks, or maybe the CFO, which seems kind of silly since I work with higher education institutions. But in this particular case, this paper is something that not only was directly relevant to the work that I'm doing, it was exciting for me to read it and have the opportunity to talk to you today to tease out some of the findings from it. First of all, just say the name of the paper was in One Earth last fall, "Carbon Neutrality Should Not Be the End Goal: Lessons for Institutional Climate Action From Higher Education," or U.S. higher education. I guess you didn't look at Canada. Maybe we can talk about that too. But it was great, because there was academic rigor behind some things that I've really been grappling with as a consultant when we're trying to help a university think through, you know--these are long term strategic decisions that kind of run headlong into things like annual budgets and things like that. But maybe before we get into all the details, could one of the two of you give me just, like a high level overview of what's in the paper for our listeners? Hopefully they'll read it for themselves. But let's just start with that. We can kind of go down different rabbit holes from there.
Alex Barron 6:22
Yeah, so this paper, it had sort of this genesis in our mutual interest in what was going on in our institutions and in higher education. And Aaron and I, I think both brought our lens as people who were thinking about climate policy at these broader scales. And also recognizing that not every institution has someone on the faculty who both knows a lot about climate policy and has the bandwidth to participate in these processes. And so we thought it would be a good place to also sort of collect some of this sort of broader landscape of what's happening here. And because both of our institutions have carbon neutrality goals that we are planning towards, we were doing some benchmarking, looking at other schools, and very quickly discovered that there were a number of schools that had already announced that they had achieved carbon neutrality under the terms of the American College & University Presidents' Climate Commitment, now run by Second Nature. And so in the paper, we looked at the 11 schools that, at the time of pulling together the results, had announced that they had achieved carbon neutrality, and took that sort of snapshot year of their announcement of neutrality and compared it to their baseline to see how they achieved those reductions. And so I think the first thing I should say out of the gate is that the schools deserve a lot of credit for the work that they've done. They have great staff who were really fantastic about answering our many, many questions as we worked through the data. And this is hard work. And so I just want to acknowledge that out of the gate. But what we found when we were looking at the data is that about three quarters of the reductions came from what we call accounting based mechanisms. So rather than reductions on site, they were using some sort of instrument to claim credit for reductions elsewhere. And many of those instruments, like offsets and unbundled RECs, come with, sort of integrity and policy impact concerns. So that was one big finding. And then when we sort of narrowed down and just looked at direct emissions reductions, what is known as scope one, the vast majority of those came from offsets, with a sort of small margin from bioenergy. And then in the most recent data that we've analyzed that now includes 14 schools, only about 8% of the reductions in direct emissions came from what we would consider sort of on-site reductions in combustion emissions, which is, I think, what many people think of when they think about sort of our transition to a carbon neutral economy. And in fact, some schools have even increased their direct emissions between their baseline and their carbon neutrality year. Aaron?
Aaron Strong 9:05
So I think one of the big reasons to pursue a paper like this is that institutions of higher education are some of the first major large institutions that have pursued carbon neutrality. But carbon neutrality is kind of a thing. We see a lot of businesses announcing carbon neutrality goals. We see net zero goals coming from governments all over the world: states, provinces, many countries. And here we have a sort of case study of these 11 institutions that made a very early commitment to carbon neutrality and then announced that they had achieved it by 2020. So we want to look at the lessons learned from their pathways, right? Is this a scalable solution that's going to really advance climate action everywhere? What are people doing right now to achieve carbon neutrality and what should they be doing? And again, echoing Alex's point, kudos to all of these schools. Our intention is not to bash any of the campuses that did this early push for neutrality; it's to try to understand how they were doing it and then ask, "Is that the right way to be doing it into the future as hundreds more institutions pursue this sort of approach in this goal?" And I think it's sort of in the title, you know, it becomes pretty clear obviously: carbon neutrality shouldn't be the end goal, that--it's time for a reframe. And I think one of the reasons we wanted to pursue a paper like this was to say, well, if we're going to reframe what the goals are--and the metrics and the yardsticks that we use for climate action--now's the time to do it, because we have a lot of institutions that are pushing forward on this right now. And if there's going to be any kind of change in the conversation, we want to nudge that forward right now through an empirical analysis like this.
Dave Karlsgodt 10:42
No, that's great. I originally worked in software, I got into this space, and neutrality was kind of a new term at that point, and people were still trying to understand what carbon neutrality would even mean, or how to even define things. So one thing maybe we should do, just for listeners that aren't super steeped in these topics, is define some basic terms like scope one, scope two, scope three. I know, there's also been a shift from talking about neutrality to decarbonisation. Maybe let's tease that out a little bit. Alex, I'm gonna throw that one at you, because I know you get to describe this, like all day long every day, I'm sure in your work, but--
Alex Barron 11:15
Yeah, so I think the basic idea of carbon neutrality is really founded in climate science, which is that what matters to the climate is the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. So if we want to stabilize warming, we have to get to this point where we're not increasing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which means drastically decreasing our emissions. But you can also buy some margin by increasing the degree to which greenhouse gases, particularly co2, are being removed from the atmosphere. And if you can sort of balance those terms out to zero, then you get no net increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and you can start to stabilize the temperature. Right? So that's the sort of big climate goal. And carbon neutrality, as you scale it down to institutions, adopts this sort of similar framework, which is that at the end of the day, you take all your emissions, and you either have to reduce those emissions or have some kind of emissions reduction or carbon removal from the atmosphere that happened somewhere else to balance out those emissions, so that on net you have a neutral impact on the atmosphere. So I think that's how I would describe carbon neutrality.
Dave Karlsgodt 12:30
How does that differ from, say, decarbonization? What's the nuance there?
Alex Barron 12:33
Yeah, so to just sort of give an extreme example, just to take a hypothetical example, you could have a business that burns fossil fuels but decides they want to be carbon neutral, and so they could go and buy carbon offsets to cover 100% of that obligation--that is, they could pay someone else to reduce emissions elsewhere, such that it balances out their emissions. They'd be able to claim carbon neutrality, but they're not decarbonized. When we use decarbonization in our paper, we're referring to looking at the fossil fuels that a college campus or university campus is using, and going from a fossil fuel based energy to something based on clean energy that doesn't emit greenhouse gas emissions. And so that's a, that's a really important distinction that will sort of become clearer as we sort of move through the paper. But I think that the key point is that at the end of the day, what we need to do to reach our broad societal climate goals is to decarbonize the vast majority of the economy. Our paper is in part about sort of linking higher education's efforts back up to that need to decarbonize rather than just thinking about things in terms of carbon neutrality.
Dave Karlsgodt 13:49
No, that's helpful. And Aaron, do you want to take a stab at scopes one, two, and three?
Aaron Strong 13:52
Sure. So when we think about the emissions of an institution of higher education, we use these terms called scopes, and they're used throughout sort of carbon accounting, including for businesses and elsewhere. And I think they're pretty helpful because they sort of separate different sources of emissions--greenhouse gas emissions--that an institution is responsible for into different buckets. So scope one emissions are the onsite greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel combustion. So if you look at an institution of higher education that's primarily building heating, burning natural gas, burning oil, anywhere where there's actually a sort of combustion flame. And scope one also includes transportation emissions from the gasoline or diesel used in a vehicle fleet. And there are a few other sources of on site emissions of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere from things like refrigerants that warm the planet and stuff like that. But mostly you can think of scope one as--okay, we're burning fossil fuels on campus. Scope two emissions are emissions from purchased electricity. So if you turn the lights on, right, you have electricity, and that's energy use. But the reason that it has a climate impact has to do with the sets of fuel sources used to generate that electricity at the power plants which are not, you know, usually on site at at an institution. They might be in some cases; some campuses have their own power plants. But they're emissions that are associated with the electricity that you're purchasing from the electric grid or wherever you're procuring that electricity. And there are lots of kinds of arrangements that institutions can enter into that can affect how responsible they are for, for their emissions. But you can think of scope two as essentially these emissions associated with purchased electricity. And scope three is sort of everything else--indirect emissions that institutions hold themselves responsible for. And this is actually an interesting point to think about. We don't get to into it that much in our paper. But there's a whole lot of different kinds of emissions that you might hold yourself responsible for in scope three. Some of the common ones are emissions associated with travel. So you're flying to a conference as an academic or your sports teams are traveling, they're using buses and planes; those are all sources of emissions that are taking place because of the activities of the campus. Employee commuting is another example of scope three emissions. Many businesses think of scope three as sort of the, the upstream and downstream emissions associated with the goods and services that they're using, things like the food that they're purchasing. By and large, most college campuses have a pretty narrow view of scope three and only choose to account for certain categories of scope three emissions. So you take all these sources--scope one, your fossil fuel on campus; scope two, your purchased electricity and the fossil fuels that are used to generate that electricity, whether it's coming from coal or natural gas or what mix of renewables; and scope three emissions from indirect sources, travel and other things like that--and that gives you essentially the carbon footprint of the campus. And if you have--make a declaration of a target of neutrality, then you're trying to either reduce all of the scope one, scope two, and scope three emissions, or as Alex was explaining, in some other way, pay for accounting metrics, essentially, offsets or other things that you can do to account for those emissions. If you had a decarbonization goal, you'd be really trying to get rid of most or all of those, those sources of emissions, so that you wouldn't be using fossil fuels on campus anymore, or that you make sure the electricity that you are purchasing was 100% zero carbon.
Dave Karlsgodt 17:28
Let's start with scope one. So, combustion of fossil fuels on campus, and I thought it was really interesting, in the paper, you talk about how, you know, while there were some campuses that reduced their scope one, there were even campuses that increased their combustion of fossil fuels on-site while claiming neutrality. So maybe can you tease that out or talk to us a little bit about, like, what was going on there? What conclusions we can draw from that?
Alex Barron 17:55
Yeah, so for on campus, you know, these sort of direct scope one emissions, I think the first thing to acknowledge about them is that although they are the set of emissions, in some ways, most within the control of the institution--this is a power plant on your campus, these are vehicles that you own--the buildings' piece, in heating and cooling and any on-site electricity for buildings is, is a big project for a lot of these institutions. And there's all these kinds of forces pushing against it. Many institutions are growing their footprint, they're adding more buildings, which means more heating and more cooling. So even if you're aggressively deploying energy efficiency to try and sort of bring your emissions down, if you're, if you're also growing your footprint that sort of makes it a real challenge. But what we saw when we looked at the data, I think I was kind of expecting to see a mix of institutions, where some had these really big challenges and they went mostly with offsets, and then some institutions that had really made these sort of big structural changes to their institution, for example, replacing a campus steam heating system with a geothermal heating system that can run on renewable energy and doesn't have any direct greenhouse gas emissions. And when we actually looked in the data, we saw actually, by far the most dominant strategy was to get maybe some margin of emissions reductions through, say efficiency measures or some small decarbonization projects, and then to fill the gap with offsets, paying someone else to make those emissions reductions. And then there were a small set of schools, mostly clustered in the northeast, that took their central heating plant and transitioned it from a fossil fuel to a bio energy fuel. (And there's a whole separate sort of conversation about that in a climate context.) But, but that's sort of the landscape that we saw. And this is very different from what you might see if you look at modeling analysis of what a state, like Massachusetts, or what the entire country needs to do in its building sector in order to reach these goals of net zero emissions for the entire economy. What you see there is that there's a lot of electrification of buildings or conversion of buildings to running on zero carbon technologies, you know, powered by renewable electricity. And that mixed with energy efficiency gets you by far the largest share of the reduction. So there's this sort of mismatch between what we saw these schools doing as their initial step when they're getting to this first year of carbon neutrality, and the mix of strategies that we think, based on modeling, analysis and other work, needs to be happening at the national scale, for example, in order to actually get us to our collective climate goals. You want to add anything?
Yeah, if I can just jump on that. So, if we think about how do you do this, right, how do you solve climate change, and we often use the refrain that we actually have the technologies, we just need to deploy them. And when it comes to buildings, it's about electrification, ground source heat pumps (sometimes called geothermal heat pumps), air source heat pumps, essentially heating buildings with electric power that then comes from renewable sources. And then when we look at the schools that have declared carbon neutrality, first of all, overall on scope one emissions the median reduction is only 28%. And that's by and large driven heavily by the schools that simply converted their fossil fuel plant to a, to a bio energy plant (which has a host of issues that we'll get into). And so what we don't see is this huge push to, kind of, universal decarbonization, in part because it's really expensive to electrify all the building heating out front. And I say that from my own experience in that we did some energy modeling here in Hamilton and looked at what it would cost to electrify all of our building heating in one go. And it was prohibitively expensive, even for a relatively affluent private institution like the one that I'm a part of. We are pursuing a strategy that's based on incremental electrification of heating. But I think it's pretty stark to say that if you look at it in 2020, there's a big difference between what these schools had done on their scope one emissions and sort of what the general understanding of best practices in terms of climate action would be for scope one emissions. They don't, they don't match up.
Dave Karlsgodt 20:48
One of the shticks that I often do early in a consulting engagement is say, "Okay, if you want to reach carbon neutrality, here's the check you'd need to write. You're done. Project's over. If you actually want to do decarbonization, which is what I think we're really here to talk about, you're talking about building roughly the cost of a large science building on your campus." You know, that's a good like kind of rough order of magnitude for most campuses, depending on how big the campus is, and how big the science building is, I suppose. But I try to frame it that way just to like, get people thinking at the right order of magnitude, because they're usually surprised at how cheap it is just to buy offsets. And they're usually overwhelmed with how expensive it is to do decarbonization. But I think as you guys have teased out, it's not even close to the same thing; one's an accounting mechanism, the other is like, systematic transformational change, which is, is hard. I mean, it kind of gets into that idea of like, we all have been taught to worry about our own personal footprint. But that, relative to like the change we can make in society, it's like there's such such a better leverage points. Let's talk about scope two briefly. I think we'll leave scope three, maybe until we get into some more of the offset discussions. But maybe talk a similar conversation about scope two and then, then we can talk maybe about how we can change our framing of the goals, which I know you've alluded to.
Aaron Strong 23:24
Sure. So scope two again, this is purchased electricity emissions, the key thing to understand are renewable energy certificates, these things called RECs in the lingo. And essentially, a REC represents what is often called an environmental attribute or green attribute, a sort of claim of ownership of a megawatt hour of electricity that came from a renewable source. Now, it seems relatively simple to think of this as an accounting metric, where whoever holds the RECs has the right to claim that they got the electricity from a renewable source. And when you purchase electricity, if you purchase the RECs as well, then you're, you're the holder of that title to the claim that you purchase renewable energy. And the reason we have these is that when you think about an electricity grid, you have different generating sources of renewables and fossil fuels that are putting electricity into that grid, and then it's distributed through the grid, and then is this coming out and you can't track the sort of flow from generating source to, to end user directly, so this is a way to do that tracking. And RECs were developed when states in the United States were putting forward renewable portfolio standard requirements. So they'd say something like we need to have 30% renewables by X year. And it was a way to sort of track compliance with that. All sounds well and good. The challenge is that the way that RECs are purchased, they can either be purchased in a way that is bundled or unbundled. And before that sounds too confusing, think about it this way: when you're buying renewable electricity, you can buy just the electricity, which is like you're paying for the kilowatt hours, or you can buy the electricity and the RECs. But there are also markets where the RECs are simply sold as these titles to renewable electricity separately from actually purchasing the electricity. So when the RECs are sold together with the electricity that's called bundled, and when the RECs are sold separately from the electricity that's called unbundled. And even though in all our accounting systems, the holder of the REC has a right to claim that they have purchased renewable electricity, if you're simply buying unbundled RECs on a secondary market--first of all, they're really cheap. Secondly, it's hard to argue that you buying those RECs--that are being resold and resold and resold--that you are actually creating new renewable electricity out there. And, and yet, in our accounting systems, you can use them to essentially offset your scope two emissions. So here you are, using lots of electricity, keeping the lights on, and you don't really care where that electricity is coming from. It's coming from your grid, plenty of fossil fuel sources. You're not putting in energy efficiency measures. You're not putting up new solar farms or things like that. And then you just buy these cheap, unbundled RECs and say, well, that covers that. And yes, technically, you have these certificates. But it's hard to argue that you've actually induced these additional emissions reductions. And because it's hard to argue that you've induced additional emissions reductions, from the climate standpoint--going back to how Alex talked about, you know, what is the climate care about--it's hard to argue that you are actually sort of neutralizing out the emissions that you're responsible for. It's even more complicated when you have states that have these requirements for huge portions of renewable electricity, because even if you do buy the RECs along with the electricity, it's not exactly that the institution of higher education is setting the state's renewable electricity standards or policies. And I find it personally somewhat problematic--and I think the research bears this out--that just sort of participating in a state's policy initiative is somehow akin to aggressive climate action. Not that we shouldn't support states' policy initiatives, but the way it's looking here is that, oh well, you bought this power and it came with these RECs, so you can use whatever electricity that you want. So what we found is that without accounting for REC purchases, the median reduction of scope two emissions across the institutions that declared neutrality was 31%. But with all the RECs, the median reduction was 100%. Meaning that RECs are pretty heavily used. And again, there's nothing wrong with this, it's perfectly allowed. It's just from a scientific standpoint, the argument that purchasing a REC is truly an additional emissions reduction doesn't quite pass the academic rigor test when, when RECs are really probed in detail.
Let me ask you a couple of follow ups to better understand that. So the 30% reduction without the RECs, I guess would imply that the grid itself got 30% cleaner?
Oh right. Right, right. So okay, you might say, "Well, dang, 30% reduction without RECs sounds pretty good, right?" A lot of energy efficiency, energy savings, you know, maybe some, some solar and yes, some of these institutions did put in their own renewable electricity systems and enter into really robust power purchase agreements. It's true. But where a lot of those emissions reductions came from is simply the overall electric grid getting greener. So here in New York State, over the last 10 to 15 years, we've had huge reductions in the emissions intensity of our electricity grid. In other words, a lot of coal has come offline, and we've had an increase in renewables; there's a lot more wind and solar and hydro, so the grid is greener. And if the grid is greener, every kilowatt hour of electricity you buy and that's on your utility bill does less emissions damage, right? You get less dinged for it, so your scope two emissions go down. Even if you purchase the same amount of electricity over time, if your grid's getting greener, the emissions you're responsible for go down, even without the institution doing anything. And this is one of the tricks of carbon accounting, is that we live in a system and yet we're trying to box off these carbon footprints and separate them and assign them to different actors. But we're living in a connected world. And so it's hard, in my mind, to argue that climate action should come down to simply doing what you've always done and reaping the benefits of, of the fact that people around you are taking steps towards climate action. And that doesn't really look like leadership. And so one of the big sources of reductions we did see in scope two emissions just simply has to do with the fact that electric grids have gotten greener in the United States, which is something we should celebrate, but doesn't exactly sound like climate leadership from institutions of higher education.
Alex, do you have anything to add here?
Alex Barron 30:09
Yeah, I can just say, you know, we can talk more in a little bit about sort of how institutions can exert these leadership roles. You know, from, from, from my perspective, as a policy practitioner, the best way to reduce college and university scope two emissions is for states--or ideally, the federal government--to enact really strong policies that decarbonize our electricity grid. Right? And to the extent that colleges and universities are in a position to advocate and support those kinds of outcomes, that's really great. The challenge we get is that in some of these early commitments, we saw a lot of these unbundled RECs where you can just imagine a hypothetical: someone builds a wind farm in Texas; they do it because the economics favor building that wind farm. They're not really factoring in a bunch of income from RECs, because they're super cheap; it wouldn't really alter the project economics. And then the wind is gonna blow in Texas, whether some university somewhere else buys the credit or not, and that thing will generate. And so those credits change hands, but there's no change in emissions. And there's, there's now a number of papers in the peer reviewed literature sort of discussing this dynamic with unbundled RECs. In fact, I was just reading one this morning that came out in Nature about renewable energy certificates. And they basically looked at a bunch of corporate firms that have these science based targets. And they found that they were sort of headed towards the subset where they could get the data--it was headed towards a 31% reduction--but when they backed out all these unbundled RECs, that may not result in changes, it was only a 10% reduction, right. So this can make a really big difference. And so that's what we were sort of seeing in the paper is that there was a lot of use of those credits. We should say that we also saw some people moving to the sort of next emerging practice, which is to bundle these REC purchases in a power purchase agreement. And, and several of the institutions that were in our data in their neutrality are buying unbundled credits have moved to buying these bundled credits. And they're--at least what you can say is that the institution has provided some money to get a project going, and it's more likely that that project wouldn't have happened without these various people coming together to sort of fund the project. But, but even there, I don't think the academic community fully understands what the emissions impacts of buying those bundled RECs are, right, which is just the challenge of working in the electricity space. It's the sort of space where what you do is most connected, in some way, to what everyone else is doing. And it's fantastic to teach my students about it, and to see them get both confused and surprised as they learn how strange the electricity sector is for institutions. It creates this challenge of where can you find the real leverage to drive clean energy. But I think the one thing that, that's clear to me from the literature is that buying these unbundled practices is not on that list.
Dave Karlsgodt 32:57
Yeah, maybe--I've been struggling with these same concepts for a good decade now, and it's been interesting to see how these conversations have shifted. And I--you know, one comment I'll get from a lot of people is, you know, we want to do real carbon neutrality, not the kind that includes offsets and unbundled RECs. Like they, that--there's a kind of a general sense that those are just cheating in some way. And that, you know, I think I appreciated, like in the paper, you're--you did definitely celebrate these early adopters, because they were the ones that tried it; they got there, they did it. And now what's next? So maybe let's shift into how might we reframe our goals to tackle some of these challenges. I know, you know, we can look to the corporate world: Google has been talking a lot about linking hour by hour a generation of electricity from renewable sources with their demand, which is a much, much harder problem to solve. And obviously, somebody like Google with decent budgets and technical prowess, and electricity is an important part of their business, but it's not the--labor is really their largest source. I mean, I guess that's true at a higher education campus as well. But they maybe are in a better position to do something like that, then, you know, Hamilton College or Smith College might be able to individually. Plus, they have much more scale. You know, Microsoft, I know has been really talking a lot about the idea of offsetting all of their historic emissions; not just getting rid of their emissions today, but taking responsibility for all of the emissions they've ever put forth. You know, they're not done with that goal, yet. Neither of these companies are, but those seem like good places that those companies are evolving these goals. But what's right for higher ed? There's probably new spaces. Maybe you've thought about that a little bit. Is it--do you want to go there next?
Aaron Strong 34:39
I think it's important to think about sort of why there might be challenges or problems with an approach that primarily uses offsets or, or unbundled RECs. And we've talked about unbundled RECs a little bit, but just to talk through offsets for a quick second. A lot of these institutions that are declared carbon neutrality are using offsets. They're really commonly used in the corporate sector. And, and I think a lot of times people argue, well, we want to do real carbon neutrality, not just buying these, these different things. And the reason that they say that is that a lot of the cheaper offsets sort of lack environmental integrity; it's hard to be sure that they actually represent real, permanent, and additional emissions reductions. There's lots of recent articles out there about people planting trees and never following up and all the trees die, and yet those trees are supposed to represent ongoing carbon sequestration sources that offset other emissions that are continuing. There're countless examples of the problems with offsets. That's not to say that offsets can't be useful if they are indeed sort of real and permanent and verifiable. But there's a host of problems with them. So we sort of look at offsets and RECs is having these, these challenges. And I think that for higher ed, there's a glass half full way to look at this and a glass half empty, and either way it requires a reframe. So the glass half full says, look, carbon neutrality is really catalytic; it's really beneficial. So even if you're using some RECs, even if you're using some offsets, if your scope one emissions have gone down 20/30%, your scope two emissions have gone down 20/30%, that you're declaring neutrality because you're using RECs and offsets as well, that this creates a sort of culture of climate action and sustainability on campus. It helps brand the institution as a place where this kind of work moves forward. And it can really be a milestone or a stepping stone to further efforts to reduce on site fossil fuel emissions and further efforts to support climate action and climate justice into the future. And I think we could see some examples of that. Some of the institutions that have declared carbon neutrality really used it as a stepping stone or a launchpad into further additional sustainability actions on campus and really creating-- baking it into the ethos of the institution. And in that sense, I think if we say carbon neutrality can be a catalytic milestone on a pathway to more than carbon neutrality--let's say decarbonisation, were you actually getting rid of the fossil fuels--then that's great. That's not necessarily how the goal is really understood by the vast majority of institutions in this country that have adopted this goal, which is hundreds of institutions that have made a carbon--set a carbon neutrality goal. So that requires a reframe, a reframe that carbon neutrality is not the end goal, which is again, the title of the paper. The other way to look at this is to say, we need to take a step back from even thinking about neutrality as part of the goal structure at all. That an approach to climate action that is trying to do sort of ton by ton by ton accounting where you can use offsets and unbundled RECs and slot them in, is itself missing the forest for the trees. And that the role of institutions of higher education in the climate action space really should be about being a testbed for innovation of what society as a whole needs to do. So that might involve decarbonization and getting rid of fossil fuels demonstrating how places where tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people live and work, can get rid of fossil fuel infrastructure for heating, can get rid of fossil fuel infrastructure necessary for transportation. But also taking our role as institutions of higher education seriously, in that we're not just sort of nonprofit out--institutions out there doing nothing; we have a mission, and that mission is education and research. Right? And so there's a role that institutions of higher education could play to advance education research on what's necessary for this societal decarbonization. Be more innovative; focus on new solutions, whether they're in technology systems or structured places. Now, that's hard, because it's not a definable goal. You can just ratch it up there and you know, hang on, hang your hat on that we've achieved the climate goal of doing better climate stuff. Right? Like that, that's hard to argue for. And people like to manage what they can measure, which is why we have done ton by ton accounting in the first place. But I think we want both of those. They're not mutually exclusive at the same time. That if we're gonna have carbon neutrality it needs to be understood as a stepping stone to a broader goal of decarbonization. And let's not just be obsessed with carbon neutrality in higher education, let's really take seriously our, our missions as they relate to climate action. And that can get into all sorts of things, like recognizing institutional service around climate action within the academic structures of things like promotion and tenure, for example.
Alex Barron 34:39
I think, you know, there's a little bit of a parallel here to the notion of carbon footprint that came up earlier; you know that this--carbon footprint was actually amplified by fossil fuel companies as, as a notion of your personal responsibility. And if you were to sort of say to someone, "Guess what: I now don't emit any greenhouse gas emissions at my house, and I never fly, and I drive an electric car that runs on renewable energy, and now I don't have to worry about climate change," they would laugh, right?
Dave Karlsgodt 39:52
Yeah.
Alex Barron 40:08
Because that's a preposterous way to approach a gigantic societal challenge. And, and I think that there's a, there's an opportunity here--as schools really get close to carbon neutrality goals that they set back in 2007, or are refocusing on climate, as the science becomes more urgent, and quite frankly, students and faculty are demanding that focus--to really think about how is it that we can contribute to these efforts. And it's kind of the same advice that you would give a student who's trying to find their place in the climate effort, who's concerned about climate change, recognizes that something needs to happen. And you want to sort of look for this intersection between what you're good at and what needs doing. And I think for higher education that involves, first a recognition of the urgency that this is not a sort of issue that you can afford to push off, you know, year on year. The pandemic has been very hard in consuming a lot of decision making bandwidth at a lot of these institutions and a lot of financial resources and everything else, but like the climate has not stopped being a gigantic crisis. And then institutions need to sort of look at the things that they can do and look for places where they can have leverage and broader impact beyond their institution on both the emissions aspects of climate action and also the equity aspects of climate action. We have some suggestions in the paper about very concrete things that institutions can do in the kind of goal setting space, which is still--institutionally it's, it can be very useful to have goals, and you know, the one that we lead with is setting a decarbonization goal. And I'm actually way more impressed with an institution that has a concrete goal to, here's our plan to stop burning fossil fuels on campus, than I am with one that says we are carbon neutral because we are buying offsets. And it's because that second institution that's buying offsets still has to grapple with that question of eliminating fossil fuels on campus. And every year small decisions are being made, that are going to impact how hard or easy it is to make that transition. At the end of the day, every additional fossil fuel appliance that gets installed, every new building that's designed to run on steam heat, you know, is is a potential headache later when we need to get rapidly to this sort of decarbonized space. And so that's sort of one example of a way in which an institution can sort of reframe in a, in a goal space. Similarly, the original commitments around carbon neutrality, sort of said, "Scope one and two are ours, and maybe we'll take a little bit of scope three, but like all the other scope three are someone else's problem." And I think that made sense in the early 2000s, when we were constructing these frameworks, because we really had no idea how to quantify or assess those emissions. But in the meantime, we've actually gotten a lot better at that. And so institutions can really start to have an impact on the food that's served in their dining hall and its climate impact, or the materials they're using in construction. And if you're the first person to go to your local concrete vendor and say, "We would like low carbon concrete, and we're going to build a giant building with it," you know, that gets people's attention and can start to move markets. And so I think people can also sort of start to think about scope three, and then there's these larger areas that, that Aaron was alluding to where we can sort of even think about the rest of the mission, where we're using these strengths in research and in teaching to engage with the public, engage with the actual mitigation work we're doing on campus to sort of drive this broad--to engage with policymakers to sort of drive this broader effort forwards, and we sort of can think of institutions' responsibility for their emissions in that sort of much broader frame, which also allows institutions to play to their differential strengths if they may be stuck because of funding or infrastructure on that big decarbonization lift that we all have to make as soon as we can, but some will be able to make sooner than others.
Dave Karlsgodt 44:10
You know, let me just summarize a few of the points there because there's a bunch in there. One, I really liked the concept of giving university advice, like you would a 24 year old out of school; like, where are you passionate, and where can you make change? You know, like, if you want to make change, like it's--that's basically right. I think that's, that's a really good way to frame it. It also kind of teases out that idea of it isn't so much about your personal footprint or the campus' footprint; it's really about catalyzing change, which, you know, we've talked about. Coming back to the specific goals, though, I mean, one of them that you've teased out is having a decarbonization goal, which I guess comes down to saying, "We will stop building or using fossil fuel infrastructure directly." I mean, that's, that's maybe a broad way to say it. What other types of goals would you guys tease out, like specific examples might you suggest? I mean, obviously, each campus is gonna have to come up with their own specifics. But if we reframe these frameworks, what would be in your top five list or whatever that might look.
Aaron Strong 45:10
Sure. I, I think the big one is, is that getting rid of fossil fuel infrastructure, setting a target and a goal to say, you know, we're not going to burn natural gas or fuel oil or have gas powered or diesel powered vehicles, and we're going to heat and transport with through electrification; that's a, that's a big goal. And I think we're seeing some institutions move in that direction. And I think we need to keep our sort of goals, targets and accounting norms, those need to keep pace with where the institutions that are really leading this charge into where we all need to go are headed. Beyond that, I'd like to see a little bit more attention to offsets. I think a lot of institutions that take this seriously have grappled with the conversation about what are the principles that we want to use if we are going to use some amount of offsets, right? And some of those conversations--having been a part of them at different institutions, having seen the conversations at other institutions, having been a part of them and my own institutions--some of them initially focus on permanence, additionality, verifiability, enforceability that they're real--the sort of classic, we sometimes call them the paper requirements: permanent, additional, verifiable, enforceable, and real. Increasingly we're seeing a focus on using offsets that also help fulfill the educational mission of the institution. So not just putting a line item on an accounting budget for offsets purchased on a market somewhere that students never see or hear about, and there's just a splashy communications article about we're carbon neutral now. But taking seriously the responsibility that if we're going to spend money on these offsets, we make sure that they're real, but they're also tied into our educational mission, so that students have hands on exposure to the accounting, to the understanding of how and in what ways the emissions reductions are actually taking place. That doesn't mean just sort of more landfill methane emissions or sort of forest carbon accounting emissions, but might mean doing more innovative activities and actions that are on campus. And there's a sort of surge of support for more innovative approaches to paying for and investing in these additional ways to do negative emissions, right, to pull carbon out of the atmosphere or to avoid other sources of unavoidable emissions. I also think that any principles for offsets need to be responsive to justice requirements. One of the challenges with burning fossil fuels is that there are significant negative health impacts in the communities around where a fossil fuel infrastructure is used. And in the United States, the communities that live near fossil fuel infrastructure--factories, refineries, power plants--tend to be marginalized communities and communities of color. And so if you're using offsets, and still allowing those emissions to continue from your, your power plant or your fossil fuel combustion, the negative health impacts of air pollution associated with the burning of fossil fuels creates a real justice issue. One of the things that New York State has been looking at, and others have, is trying to make sure that the benefits of offsets are co-localized with the emissions that they're intended to reduce or offset, meaning that you need to invest in offsets that are local. That also increases community conversations, town-gown relations, all sorts of other things. But I think a principle that focuses on locality is important. And that can come in significant increases in the costs of offsets, right? So offsets are attractive because they're way cheaper than actually decarbonizing, and that's why a lot of institutions look at it. But if you aren't going to keep using them for a handful of reasons into the future, or you, there's some sources of emissions that require the use of offsets, really focusing on ways that they can benefit the community around the institution, that they can benefit the educational mission of the institution, and be aligned with principles of climate justice, in addition to all of the standard requirements about environmental integrity and real and additional. That's really important, I think, as we reframe these goals,.
Dave Karlsgodt 45:30
That's great. Alex, anything to add there? I've got a couple of other topics I want to get through.
Alex Barron 49:26
I think the only thing I would say is that, you know, the reason that Aaron and I keep coming back to this tonic note of decarbonization is that if you look at most colleges, the buildings are the lion's share of the emissions, right? And they're also a source that we, we know, with possibly some exceptions in some climates, like we have good ideas for how to decarbonize those, and when those two things align, you know, we need to work to make the economics happen as soon as possible for the sake of the climate, right? And so you've got like the largest share of emissions, an area you are can make things work. And then we need to be creative with new financing infrastructures and doing it piecewise and green banks that nonprofits can access; you know, you can think about all kinds of ways to sort of solve the finance piece. And that'll really move things forward. And then at the end, I think most institutions, ours included, will still be having conversations about offsets, and we'll still get to have these deep learning experiences with our students where they, they get to see exactly how hard it is to do this work. And, you know, to sort of make sure that you're actually getting the reductions and have these opportunities to, you know, maybe engage with local communities and do those kinds of things. I tend to think about offsets a little bit like risky surgery: it makes sense in some contexts, but you really want to make sure that you've exhausted your other good sensible options beforehand, right? You want the, you want the diet and exercise before you go to the surgery, and you would like the surgery to be as minimally invasive as possible. And so I think about that as this sort of broad strategy to sort of keep institutions focused on the big pieces. But then I--Aaron's exactly right, that there's, there's a rich opportunity for higher education institutions, which, you know, can teach people about these, which can do research about these, who can like work on them with nuance, who can partner with others to really allow us to get better at getting reductions from these other places that are not big campus power plants, or cars and trucks and those kinds of things.
Dave Karlsgodt 51:27
No, that's great. I want to touch briefly on this topic, which is the challenges around data. I know you guys had--your in was relatively small in this paper, partly because that's all you find that people that had both claimed neutrality and had enough information that you could do any sort of analysis on it at all. Can you talk to us briefly about what that was like? And maybe where we need to go within the higher ed community to make this better?
Alex Barron 51:53
Sure. I think the first thing I should say is that we could only write this paper because Second Nature, as part of the commitment, puts all the reported data up on a publicly available platform. And they were great about answering questions. And then all of the sustainability coordinators at these institutions--I don't think there was a single school where we looked at the data and we said, "Yep, everything we need is here." For all of them we had follow up questions to make sure that we were describing them accurately, and, you know, had the right data and could resolve reporting issues. Yeah, and you're right, there's 11 schools in the data set--now 14--because that's the total universe of schools that we, and I think Second Nature, are aware of who have actually announced neutrality under the terms to the commitment, so scope one, scope two, and this little bit of, of scope three. There's always a challenge with working with self reported data. And there's always going to be bugs in there and gaps in there. You know, my hope is that as schools focus on this more, the quality of the data will get better. Schools will have more staff who can be minding the data, more faculty who have students working on improving the data; they'll see more reason to invest in infrastructure to monitor energy use so that they can have a good baseline to make decisions about big shifts in how they're generating energy on campus. This definitely required a lot of cleanup. We feel like the picture is still pretty robust. It didn't change when we added a bunch of other schools. And you know, the hope is that, you know, there are other contexts where you really, really need this sort of detailed, super accurate data. But the sort of broad shape of the picture we're painting here, we think can apply to a lot of schools, sort of, regardless of data quality. Aaron, is there anything you want to
Aaron Strong 53:36
Yeah. Yeah, you know, there's a few steps removed from the sort of on campus crunching of the numbers and then the posting to Second Nature and the public repository. And so I think some of that stuff is sort of inevitable, right? Like, it's great that we have self reported data. It's great that people were so willing to share their, their data. And it's great that it's publicly accessible through this platform. What my experience through this has sort of raised in my mind is that there are so many nuanced details that it's important to focus on because they can have really big impacts. A good example of this is college owned lands or institution owned lands. So we're not talking forest carbon offsets here. We're talking about sequestration and the norms around sequestration accounting in forested lands that a college owns; and what their assumptions are about additionality there are incredibly impactful on how that appears on their ledger, which often is that sort of negative emissions under scope one. And I just think more active conversation about the details--Second Nature is great. They have lots of principles, best principles for accounting, but recognizing that the devils are in the details here about, you know, oh, we don't have to do these additional sets of heat pumps because we can make this assumption about our lands. And then anytime you have a circumstance like that the people in charge of the money are gonna look at this and say, well, if we're allowed to do that, why would we not do it? Right? So we need bigger conversations at the Second Nature level, across institutions, you know, through AASHE and elsewhere--that's the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education--where we have more conversations about setting these norms across institutions, because, because anytime you get into the point where it's to say, well, these offsets can count, these RECs can count, we can just make this assumption here, this assumption here, then the argument for really investing in the meaningful climate action is going to hit a money wall. And I don't fault anyone for that, it really has to be about reframing how we do this kind of accounting and business so that we move away from encouraging simply achieving the goal that's set out there in the cheapest possible way. Because often, that's the least impactful way.
No, that's helpful. And I, there's probably a future podcast where we talk just about that topic. One of my common experiences in working with sustainability folks is the data collection process; the footprint itself can cause lots of anxiety. I've heard people say they almost break out in hives thinking about having to do their annual reporting, because they feel like it's like reporting to the IRS or something, like it's a measurement of how good they are as a, as a sustainability professional. And we need to change that paradigm to make it just more pro forma. Like, that's the accounting department's job, versus it being one extra thing on the sustainability person's desk, necessarily. But topic for another day. Both of you are faculty. And like I said, before, I've been--in my work I don't actually get to talk to faculty that often except for maybe in a stakeholder engagement meeting or you know, things like that, or at conferences, partly because they're not, you're not the ones making the operational decisions about your campus; you're the people doing the work of education of the campus or research at the campus. So it makes sense. But talk to me about--for other faculty members that may be listening, you both have gotten involved in your own institution, how have you done that? What are some of those challenges that you've had to overcome or what's special about your institution that's allowed you to do that? Talk about that briefly.
It's a great point, and thanks for raising it, Dave, that you don't see a whole lot of academics working in this, this space. So there are kind of three things I'll say to that. One, I think there's a real niche here around sort of climate action research, that Alex and I in our variety of ways, both in the sort of state and federal policy realm, and I do a lot of work on carbon accounting in general. So I've sort of carved out an academic niche here around studying carbon accounting. So it makes it very easy to argue that this is part of my research portfolio. There are traditional mechanisms of service, and at Hamilton there's been a lot of support for diving into service that you can link with your teaching and your research. And that's a big refrain in our primarily undergraduate institutions, that if you can do service that also augments your teaching and augments your research, that's great. And I've found it easy to argue that this is doing that by involving lots of my students in some of the kinds of initiatives and accounting that we're doing. And I know Alex has done that as well. And you sort of get, get points and recognition for that. You know, students can present these kinds of things at conferences and stuff like that. And I think the third is that we're starting to see, and maybe this is different from institution to institution, I think a slow shift in recognizing that there are values that come from having faculty doing work that looks a little non traditional, and that there are ways that we can come up with to recognize that. So that even though we have these traditional bins in our evaluations for scholarly research and teaching and service, that putting yourself out there as a real leader in a given space is important. And I would say that I feel recognized at my institution for the work I've been doing on our climate action plan and our push to reframe our--we recently moved up our carbon neutrality date--and our, our pathways to neutrality. You'll see the sort of fingerprints of all the things we've been talking about in this conversation all over that. And I've played an integral role in it. And I've felt supported by my administration, both the dean of faculty's office and the president in doing that, and supported by other faculty in doing that; but I always sort of, always hang the hat of like, this is part of my teaching and my research too, so that's why I can spend so much time doing this, because it counts, right? And I just haven't experienced any resistance in, to my argument that it counts. And so that's felt good.
Dave Karlsgodt 59:53
Yeah.
Aaron Strong 59:53
The letter I just got from the dean of faculty talked about the, you know, getting the board of trustees to do it in her summary of my annual activities, right? Like, so, I think we need to see more of that; we need to have more conversations about that, because it's been so rare for faculty to play an integral role here. The last thing I'll say is that I'm a--and Alex is too--a bit of an odd duck here, right? Like, sort of both a climate scientist, carbon cycle scientist, and someone who studies decision making and policy work kind of a social scientist, kind of a scientist in an interdisciplinary, you know, environmental studies program. So it also kind of fits with that; I'm already a weirdo. So like, doing weirdo things is kind of well, that's just weirdo things that you do. And I think if I were in a more traditional, like, you know, if I were in chemistry, I think that it might be a little bit more odd to do this kind of work
Dave Karlsgodt 1:00:34
Well you're talking to a musician turned software developer turned consultant. So I'm an odd duck with you. Anything to add there, Alex? I have one final question for you guys.
Alex Barron 1:00:55
Yeah. I have, I have lots of thoughts in this area. But I'll try and keep it brief. You know, there's a saying in Washington DC, that if you're not at the table, you're on the menu. And so I think the first thing I would say to faculty is just if you care about these issues, sort of, regardless of your discipline, find a way to engage. I think it's not accidental that Aaron and I are both at small liberal arts colleges, because there is that blurring of teaching and research and service sort of all together--especially the teaching and the research--in the same way that research and service are really closely linked at land grant institutions that often have some kind of outreach or extension component, right? And I think those are the places where there's this sort of obvious space for people to work. If faculty are sort of curious about this and trying to figure out what to do, I would definitely echo the note that classes are often the easiest way to, to sort of launder this work. Because you, you often have freedom to sort of decide what kind of projects your students are working on. But there's actually really strong pedagogical reasons to do this, because we know that these kinds of messy real world problems are tremendous learning opportunities for the students, that they learn different things, they learn higher orders, kind of, kind of thinking. And quite frankly, if we're thinking about one of our missions being to sort of educate people who are gonna go out in the world and work on climate change, why would we not expose them to the real climate work that's happening, you know, right down the hallway, or in another building? Right? We're in some ways doing them a disservice if they graduate and they want to work on these kinds of areas and they're asking questions like, what's the lifecycle cost analysis, or those kinds of things. And, you know, when I think about the work that we've done here at Smith as we've been rolling out our geothermal system, I've been engaged from environmental science and policy, but we've also had faculty and students from engineering; we had students doing archival work; there have been geologists involved. And I think as we sort of roll out and talk about this more, you can imagine the sort of arts and humanities engagements with these things. So I think it's, it's definitely not limited to any discipline; people can just again, sort of find that strength and find a way to sort of weave it in to the work that's going on. The last thing I would say was just to sort of echo this idea that we really do need a cultural shift. If climate is going to be an emergency, which it is, along with many other societal emergencies, then we might want to think how we reward faculty for doing this work. You know, we're both lucky to be in places and the kinds of scholars where there's this ready nexus, but I think that if we really want to put higher education to its best use, then we need to be thinking about valuing, working with a local community to build a resilience plan, or working with EJ community to help them in a PUC hearing, and get your students engaged in the analysis around permitting for some fossil fuel plant, like all of those things are deeply scholarly work, very challenging, and take a lot of time, especially if you want to build meaningful relationships. And if we don't reward those things early on, then we will end up with faculty who don't have as much practice as they should doing that kind of work. And so I think that that's, that's another piece. But that's not for individual faculty; that's more for higher education as a whole to grapple with.
Dave Karlsgodt 1:04:19
No, that's, that's fair. And I guess I framed it up to say that I don't typically get to work with faculty in the work that I do, where I'm focused more on the operational aspects of the campus. But I would say, when I do, those go so much better because you get the whole institution behind it. And it's way more exciting when you've got the President talking about and the provost excited about it, than when you're just trying to convince a bunch of project managers that it's okay to spend more money on this thing today because it's gonna save the world tomorrow. They, they still have to balance their budget, but if it's we're doing this as an institution, it's who we are meant, you can go some pretty interesting places. Well, I guess my last question would be one kind of forward looking. And we've talked a lot about higher education's role. And you know, I've often thought about it being like, higher education institutions are yes, like a little city. But they're also like a benevolent dictator, like, you know, you have the organizational structure, or at least from the operational perspective, where power is really concentrated in a handful of folks. I mean, there's a board and I get that, but it's, it's not like the really messy aspect of like a city or a state or a nation where you've got political people running things versus like, you know, you have a CFO that's really focused on the finance, or you have a facility director that's really focused on the mechanics of the campus. So it's great that we can make change in higher education. But is that really scalable to cities, to states? Like, that's a premise, right, that we can be the leaders and we can do these things. How do you see that actually happening in reality, given kind of like the data you've looked at, or, you know, I know you both have worked at, at bigger scales, like where do you see the leverage point for higher education rather than just being a demonstration project?
Aaron Strong 1:06:04
I think I'd say a couple of things to that. And one is that if you look across institutions of higher education there, there are a lot of people living and working there. And these are institutions that are around for long periods of time, where being at the vanguard of kind of pushing things forward, I think it's really important. The other I'd say is like, we saw that suite of neutrality commitments come out of higher education really first in the, you know, 2007-2008 timeframe. And it's only a decade later that we saw that suite of neutrality commitments coming out of the private sector and coming on in the public sector. So I think there's some argument to be made that higher education, because it's around for a long time, because it has, in some ways, these archaic and somewhat anti-democratic processes, can be a place where it's not just demonstration, but it's actually pushing the norms of, of what, what the things are that we must do. Right? Neutrality was the thing that we must do. No one knew how to do it. Some institutions have done it. And now we're arguing it isn't the thing that we must do; it's a stepping stone, sort of at best, to the thing we must do, which is decarbonization, which is starting to become more of a thing. So if institutions of higher education you can demonstrate not just the physical reality of what it means to go fossil free, but that here's what it looks like systems-wise and sort of mechanics-wise and culturally and all of those things, that's where we need to go. So I think there's an argument to be made that higher ed can occupy that leadership role in, in the pursuit of decarbonization and climate solutions.
Dave Karlsgodt 1:07:43
Great. And Alex, just to kind of shift the question for you to get my last one in, which is, as we start thinking about what these goals might look like, could you describe to us like, you know, 10 years from now, what kind of conversations do you think we'll be having? Like, what will be the next thing? We gonna be arguing decarbonization is not the thing anymore? There's something else like, you know, what's coming?
Alex Barron 1:08:02
I think that, to some degree, may be for future research papers to establish, because this is a remarkable effort that we are undertaking as a society; not only are we having to make this up as we go along, but we have waited so long to start that there's just going to be a lot of learning by doing here. And, and so I think that if history is any measure many of the same debates we're having now will be playing out in some, like slightly different form. Going forward, I desperately hope that one of the biggest things that will change over the next decade is that there'll be a lot more state and federal policy in place. And so the conversation will be the same conversation about how can higher education add value in these efforts, but on a foundation of much more state and national action, right? Because to some degree, if, if you're trying to get your emissions to carbon neutrality by 2030, and your state adopted a zero emissions from the electricity sector by 2030, then maybe your scope two goal is done, right? Like there's, there's gonna be this interplay. And so I think schools are going to continue to play the role that they always have, which leans into their strengths, right? It's about being an example, showing what it's like to have a community that doesn't combust any fossil fuels. It's about sort of teaching and acting as a source of knowledge about the nuance of doing this work and the importance and the many interconnections between climate and equity and quality of life and all of those kinds of things. And our ability to sort of do this research and also share it. You know, one thing that's really different from higher education and the corporate sector is that higher education is much more likely to say we did a thing and it didn't work and we're happy to tell everyone about it or we'll, we'll publish the data; you share those kinds of things. And so we need that kind of learning and mistakes and correction to sort of help guide society as a whole to do this as quickly as possible, because the one thing that we don't have on our side is time at this point,
Dave Karlsgodt 1:08:05
Fail fast, fail often and share your results.
Alex Barron 1:10:13
Yeah.
Dave Karlsgodt 1:10:13
Something like that.
Alex Barron 1:10:15
Yeah. Something like that.
Dave Karlsgodt 1:10:16
I like it.
Alex Barron 1:10:18
Not too often.
Dave Karlsgodt 1:10:19
Yeah, not too often, like yeah, that's fair. All right. Well, I think maybe we will hold it there. Is there--I guess last thing, just to give you guys an opportunity, remind people the paper, where they can find it; how, how you would like people to interact with you going forward. I know you both don't want people asking you to give them a personal lecture for every question they have. But I'm sure there are ways that you can have people connect.
Alex Barron 1:10:43
Yeah, so the the paper is published by the journal One Earth. And if you Google the title, or hopefully check the show notes here, you should be able to find it. And it was very important to us that it be an open access paper. There shouldn't be a paywall for anyone to sort of get access to it. We also wrote the executive summary version of the paper in an op ed for Inside Higher Education. So that's a good piece, if you're sort of trying to start the conversation with someone who's not going to read the whole paper. I'm the lead author on the paper, but Aaron's contact information as an academic is also findable on the web. And if people have reviewed the paper, and they have sort of nuanced questions, we do want this effort to succeed for higher education as a whole. And so people should feel free to reach out. Don't expect an immediate reply; things are very busy. So apologies in advance, if it takes a little while for me to get back to you.
Aaron Strong 1:11:35
So, so I'll close by saying, I'm always astonished at sort of how little academic work there is out there on pathways to carbon neutrality, on offsets, on these really central components of our approaches to climate action. So if you're an academic out there, or a sustainability coordinator, listening to this and saying, I'd like to sort of get involved in studying this, shoot us an email, because I'm always eager to talk to more folks who are interested in this domain. It's so central to the success of our initiatives, whether it's institutions of higher education or state and federal policies or The Paris Agreement, and yet has really not garnered the amount of attention to detail that I think it deserves. So join us in that work, because I think it's really important to addressing the climate crisis.
Dave Karlsgodt 1:12:28
Okay, I'll raise my hand as one of those people, and happy to maybe help collect them so you have more people to talk to at the same time. Great, great. I think we will leave it here. I just want to thank you both for being so gracious with your time, doing some great academic work--like I said, it's not often I get a paper written about the thing that I'm actually spending all my day working on. And so you put academic rigor behind stuff I've personally struggled with my own work. So thank you personally for that. And thanks for taking the time to be on the show today.
Alex Barron 1:12:56
Thanks so much for having us. And I will add one other thing that another great reason to contact us is if you use the paper and--at your institution--and find it useful, we would be delighted to learn that. The traditional way to track a paper like this is how many people cite it. And I'm actually way more interested in how many sustainability staff find this a sort of useful way to shape conversations at their own institution. That's, that's a big part of what the paper's meant to do. The peer review helps everyone to know that there have been other eyes on this and it's not just our ideas, but if other people find it useful, then please let us know that as well.
Dave Karlsgodt 1:13:34
Excellent.
Aaron Strong 1:13:34
Thanks so much, Dave. This was a lot of fun.
Alex Barron 1:13:37
Thank you.
Dave Karlsgodt 1:13:38
That's it for this episode. Thanks to Julia Haupt for her production assistance. Our music is "Under The Radar," courtesy of Dallas-based musician and arranger Gio Washington-Wright and his studio Big Band. If you'd like to follow our show on social media, our Twitter handle is @energypodcast. You can also find us on LinkedIn, just search for campus energy and sustainability podcast. If you'd like to support the show, consider leaving a rating or review on iTunes. As always, thanks for listening.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai