Council for Sustainability and Eco Practices at SCAD

With high gas prices on everyone’s mind, Friday, June 20 is a great time to Dump the Pump, again! While Dump the Pump continues to promote the use of all forms of alternative transportation (bikes, scooters, feet) this month’s event focuses on encouraging people to leave their cars at home and ride public transportation to save money, conserve gasoline, and help reduce traffic congestion.

Chatham Area Transit Authority offers an extensive system of routes throughout the Savannah/Chatham County community, free downtown shuttles as well as ferry service across the Savannah River to Savannah Harbour. Bus, shuttle and ferry schedules are available on CATs website at catchacat.org or by calling 912-233-5767. Once in downtown, three free shuttle routes are available. To encourage increased bus ridership, the Savannah Mall continually offers parking for commuters choosing to access bus routes at the stops located at the mall.

Recognizing that public transportation may not be a feasible option for some commuters, those who want to participate in Dump the Pump are encouraged to find carpool partners through Coastal Commuters. Dump the Pump also encourages commuters to take advantage of the connectivity offered by Savannah and walk or bike to their destinations.

And finally, remember to take the pledge to Dump the Pump at savannahtransit.com.

Dump the Pump is a collaborative effort of the Savannah Development and Renewal Authority (SDRA), Chatham Area Transit Authority (CAT), the City of Savannah, Coastal Commuters, Council for Sustainability and Eco Practices at SCAD, the Savannah Bicycle Campaign and the Pedestrian Advocates of the Coastal Empire.

Click here to download a .pdf of the Dump the Pump poster to post in your workplace. To download a map of free downtown shuttle routes, click here.

The Council for Sustainability and Eco Practices at SCAD has begun the process of drafting a plan to determine the current level of greenhouse gas emissions produced by the college. The idea is to determine where we are at now, what the sources are, and the most cost-effective ways to reduce total emissions. No doubt, one of the options on the table will be purchasing carbon offsets. Carbon offsets are payments made to companies that can more easily reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, thus allowing the buyer to continue producing the amount of emissions that are “offset.” Sometimes, this is more cost-effective than the buyer reducing their emissions. Say, for example, one company would have to spend $1,000 to change some process to reduce emissions by X number of units, but another company can do the same thing for $500 because whatever process they are going to change just costs less to implement. The key is that the seller of the carbon offsets must be doing something other than business as usual to achieve the reductions. Well, it turns out there are issues that have to be carefully considered if and when we put this option on the table.

There has been a lot of hub-bub in the news about carbon trading these days. For advocates of carbon trading as part of the solution to global warming, it was a major disappointment when the Senate republicans used procedural rules to effectively kill the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act. However, there is apparently some controversy over this approach. I had read an recent article in Mother Jones called “Turning Carbon Into Gold.” MJ is a highly regarded progressive magazine known for its investigative journalism. As such, they are not cheerleaders for the left and have been known to write many articles over the years that really annoyed the progressive crowd. As such, they are considered a pretty reputable source of information. According to the article:

[P]rominent environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and Greenpeace are resisting the inclusion of offsets in the bills. “We feel that offsets are very suspect,” says Shawnee Hoover, legislative director for Friends of the Earth. “The whole system is just rife with the potential for corruption.”

Opponents cite the perverse incentives that have been created under Kyoto’s CDM, which last year authorized hundreds of offset projects to be converted into $1.2-$1.8 billion worth of carbon credits. At the heart of their concerns is the question of whether these projects are “additional”—in other words, do they create new emissions reductions, or simply bankroll endeavors where carbon credits are incidental, yet profitable, byproducts? A 2006 United Nations investigation found that a third of CDM-approved offset projects in India would have happened even without Kyoto funding. In China, almost every new hydroelectric and natural-gas-fired power plant has applied for CDM money, casting doubt on whether they really require the offset revenue to be built. “It looks like the CDM is just turning into a production subsidy,” says Stanford University climate policy expert Michael Wara, “and that’s not a good way to spend our money.”

It seems to be a clever idea to use market incentives to reduce carbon emissions. After all, we live in a world where corporations often do as they please unless they are restrained by the government. However, corporations are pretty good at preventing government from doing things they don’t want or mitigating the true effects in some way. In this case, selling carbon offsets has created a very lucrative market. Thus, an opportunity arose for money to be made in one market while money was lost in another. However, the amount lost to the carbon buyers was not near as much as if they had been forced to clean up their acts. It was a compromise that managed to get a law passed in Europe regulating carbon trading. However, the results are questionable. Consider one out outcome of Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM):

In total, CDM-approved offsets have captured or destroyed the equivalent of 135 million tons of CO2 emissions worldwide, slightly more than the annual emissions of Pakistan. Yet an astounding 51 percent of those offsets have been generated by paying refrigerant manufacturers to incinerate HFC-23, an industrial byproduct and potent greenhouse gas, instead of spewing it into the atmosphere. The price of HFC-23 offsets can be worth more than twice the market price of the refrigerants themselves, which has had the unintended effect of encouraging refrigerant companies to produce (and then destroy) even more greenhouse gases in the name of eliminating them. The 43,000 tons of HFC-23 incinerated between 2003 and 2012 will generate $6 billion worth of carbon credits, but cost just $150 million to destroy, according to Wara. He describes the practice as “an excessive subsidy that represents a massive waste of resources.”

Now, just because the system has been abused does not mean it cannot be properly regulated. There are already agencies and mechanisms in place to prevent this type of thing from happening. John Bennett has an informative post on this subject on his Sustainable Savannah blog. This part seems to be the key:

If you are interested in purchasing carbon offsets to mitigate airline travel, car travel, all those burgers you’ve been eating, etc. make sure that the company you are purchasing them from VERIFIES and VALIDATES their greenhouse gas reduction projects using an independent standard (TerraPass uses the Voluntary Carbon Standard). Verification and Validation ensure that offsets are producing authentic benefits that are “additional” to business-as-usual activities, measurable, permanent and unique.

My sense is that this is potentially a viable approach, but the current system used in Europe has already been corrupted. That is probably the reason that while the EU claims to be on target for their emissions reductions goals, the details of their own report suggest it has little or nothing to do with carbon trading. As reported on the Breakthrough Blog (a site run by two progressive environmentalists):

When you take out the UK and Germany, whose emissions decreased due to factors exogenous to Kyoto or EU climate and energy policies (UK emissions declined precipitously after Margaret Thatcher broke the coal miners union in the 1980’s and the UK switched over to North Sea natural gas. German emissions declined by similarly after reunification, when East German heavy industry collapsed), the remaining advanced developed economies in the EU (call them the EU 13) saw their emissions increase by almost 12 percent between 1990 and 2005. With full implementation of existing policies, projections for 2010 are in fact marginally worse among these nations, exceeding 1990 emissions by over 12 percent.

Even under the best case scenario in the report for EU 15 emissions, which projects an 11 percent reduction in GHG from 1990 levels, over 70 percent of that reduction can be accounted for solely by the reduction in actual emissions in the UK and Germany between 1990 and 2005 (put another way, the 8 percent reduction required by Kyoto can be almost entirely accounted for by the reduction in emissions in the UK and Germany since 1990).

The guys who run this site are not a couple of hacks or trolls. They have written a best-selling book on the subject, which got rave reviews from major liberal and mainstream publications. Since the CDM does not seem to have accomplished much in its present form, it might be a mixed blessing that Lieberman-Warner failed. So, what’s to be done? Well, we are going to have to wait until the next administration, that’s for sure. Luckily, for the greens among us, both of the presidential candidates have green leanings. If I recall correctly, both of them also supported this bill. While SCAD will likely make voluntary changes regardless of government regulations, we must be careful in the how we implement our options and also prepare ourselves for regulations that may influence the process.

Scott Boylston, Professor of Graphic Design, has created a pretty comprehensive outline of the steps necessary to make SCAD a more sustainable campus. While I have been lingering on my pet ideas for the last two posts, it’s time to get down to business. Scott recommends a series of incremental steps to get us where we need to go. Like all good plans, it begins not with a series of random moves, but rather the laying of some important foundations.

STEP ONE
Join American College & University Presidents Climate commitment (ACUPCC)
Within 1 year — complete a comprehensive Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory
Within 2 years — develop an institutional action plan for becoming climate neutral
— initiate 2 or more of the tangible actions recommended by ACUPCC
Institute action plan according to our own goals and objectives.

While there are any number of things we could do now to make SCAD more sustainable, a careful analysis will be necessary to determine which of the myriad things we could do, we should do. Once we determine what our level of emissions is, we will then need to determine the primary causes, the corrective actions we can take, and the strategy to get them accomplished.

Joining the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment sounds easy enough. I am not sure if we have already done this, but I’ll look into it. Doing a Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory sounds trickier as there is a lot of data to gather and I am not quite sure where to access it off hand. However, that is a question that can probably be answered easily enough once we have the right heads together. It may sound a little bureaucratic to some out there on the green scene who might think we should just take action now, but in order to get all the vested parties on board, we have to plan something that is actually manageable and affordable. A little analysis will go a long toward identifying the most cost-effective way to achieve the council’s goals.

District TV News, the television news arm of SCAD’s student newspaper, produced a nice profile of Jason Dean. In it, he describes his role in recycling efforts at the Oglethorpe House residence hall. Watch it here.

Meghan Woodcock, an interior design M.F.A. candidate at SCAD, was awarded Best of Competition for the 2008 Student Sustainable Design Competition, sponsored by the International Interior Design Association. Woodcock will receive $1,000 and a complimentary IIDA student membership for the 2008-09 school year for her “Disaster Relief Transportable Schools” design. Read more here.

I was going to write on another issue, but then I saw this op-ed piece in USA Today titled “Want to save the planet? Stay home.” Since my last post, I have become even more convinced that allowing some degree of telecommuting might be the single easiest thing an institution could do to become greener. As the columnist states:

…every morning, 76% of America’s commuters drive, alone, an average of 25 minutes to their workplaces. Many of these people then proceed to e-mail or call people in other places. Indeed, about 40% of the U.S. workforce has jobs that, largely, do not need to be done from a central location. If the millions of Americans who never work from home, but could, stayed in their PJs, this would save a sizeable chunk of our oil imports from the Persian Gulf.

“This takes windmills and all the other alternative fuels combined and tops them,” says Kate Lister, founder of the telecommuting research company Undress4Success.

Switching to alternative fuels to such an extent that they will actually have short-term impact on greenhouse is just unfeasible. The technology and infrastructure do not currently exist and most people are unwilling or unable to pay the added costs at this time. Contrast to telecommuting. The technology exists; it reduces costs, and the typical worker would absolutely buy in wihtout a second thought. As mentioned previously, the oft-stated concern has to do with worker productivity:

“Management still thinks people need to be in the office for eight hours a day in order to be productive,” says Makower. “Anyone who works in an office eight hours knows that probably three hours and 45 minutes are spent being productive.” (Are you reading this at work?)

However, a rather large body of peer-reviewed research shows overwhelmingly that this belief is just dead wrong:

Partly because people waste so much time commuting, and waste so much time at work while consuming electricity and office space, companies that have implemented telecommuting programs have seen economic benefits — rather than productivity losses — from this decision. A meta-analysis of 46 studies, published in the November Journal of Applied Psychology, found that telecommuting was associated with higher supervisor performance ratings, increased job satisfaction and a reduction in intent to leave the company.

The abstract from the actual study lends support to my previously stated position about partially telecommuting being the most beneficial arrangement for the workplace:

What are the positive and negative consequences of telecommuting? How do these consequences come about? When are these consequences more or less potent? The authors answer these questions through construction of a theoretical framework and meta-analysis of 46 studies in natural settings involving 12,883 employees. Telecommuting had small but mainly beneficial effects on proximal outcomes, such as perceived autonomy and (lower) work–family conflict. Importantly, telecommuting had no generally detrimental effects on the quality of workplace relationships. Telecommuting also had beneficial effects on more distal outcomes, such as job satisfaction, performance, turnover intent, and role stress. These beneficial consequences appeared to be at least partially mediated by perceived autonomy. Also, high-intensity telecommuting (more than 2.5 days a week) accentuated telecommuting’s beneficial effects on work–family conflict but harmed relationships with coworkers. Results provide building blocks for a more complete theoretical and practical treatment of telecommuting.

The Council for Sustainability and Eco Practices at SCAD has joined the Savannah Development and Renewal Authority, the City of Savannah, Chatham Area Transit Authority, Coastal Commuters, the Savannah Bicycle Campaign and Pedestrian Advocates of the Coastal Empire to encourage people who work downtown to Dump the Pump and leave their cars at home on Friday, May 16.

The purpose of Dump the Pump: Leave Your Car At Home Day is to raise awareness about the benefits of using alternative modes of transportation and to encourage people from throughout the community to commute by carpooling, mass transit, bicycling and walking.

Scheduled during National Bike-to-Work week, the next Dump the Pump will focus on promoting bicycles as a viable mode of transportation in Savannah. Featuring connectivity, level terrain, great weather and tree lined streets, Savannah is a great town for bicycles. In addition to having a great city to cycle in, commuting by bicycle reduces fuel consumption and traffic congestion while providing economic, health, and environmental benefits to individuals and to the community. Furthermore, it has been proven that bicycle commuters provide significant economic benefits in downtowns including increased sales at local restaurants and retail stores.

On May 16th, a Dump the Pump Coffee Break will be held in Davant Park located at the south end of Colonial Park Cemetery on Abercorn from 7 – 9 a.m. The Dump the Pump Coffee Break will celebrate Dump the Pump participants by offering free coffee provided by Jittery Joe’s Coffee, doughnuts provided by Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, and fresh fruit from Fresh Point Produce. Prizes have been donated by Bicycle Link, Georgia Bike Law, and the City of Savannah.

Recognizing that distance might serve as a deterrent for some commuters to ride bicycles, those who want to participate in Dump the Pump are encouraged to use the public transportation system offered by Chatham Area Transit or find carpool partners through Coastal Commuters.

May 16 will also feature a PACE Crosswalk Action at Liberty and Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard from 12:00 p.m. – 12:30 p.m. Crosswalk Action is an organized event in which a group of pedestrians repeatedly cross a street in a marked crosswalk in a legal fashion. The goal is to communicate pedestrian safety messages in a fun and friendly way. Members of the organized group carry cheerful, non-confrontational signs featuring educational and advocacy messages. Successful crosswalk actions require people! So if you are interested in participating please let us know or just meet us at the southwest corner of Liberty and Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard.

The spirit of Dump the Pump will continue on Sunday, May 18 with the Savannah Bicycle Campaign’s second Savannah Wheelie ride. The ride will begin at 1 p.m. from Grayson Stadium in Daffin Park. Participants will be eligible for a discounted Sand Gnats ticket to that afternoon’s game.

Information regarding Dump the Pump: Leave Your Car At Home Day will be featured at www.savannahtransit.com. We ask SCAD community members to pledge to Dump the Pump and mention SCAD in their pledges.

There are a wide range of things an organization can do to make itself greener. Many revolve around the concept of decreasing the institutional carbon footprint. This is the first in a series of posts on such measures. I’d like to think of them as conversation starters. We often hear about stuff like using mass transit, riding one’s bike, getting a more fuel-efficient vehicle, using compact florescent bulbs, and the like. These are all important steps one can and should take (within the limits of reason and finances, of course). However, one option I rarely hear about in the context of becoming greener is telecommuting. Telecommuting seems to come up most often in the context of flex time, allowing parents time to care for their young children, for example. But, what has it got to do with going green? Well, I think a moment’s reflection makes this obvious. When people work part of the week from home, they don’t drive their cars to work, thus conserving gas and reducing traffic congestion and air pollution. According to the Green Living Ideas Web site:

Seeing as the typical U.S. household spends 18% of its income on driving costs– more, even, than it spends on food– telecommuting offers a viable way to offset the steep expenses of gas and automobile maintenance. One study reports that we could save about 1.35 billion gallons of fuel a year if everyone who was able to telecommute, did so just 1.6 days a week.

The implications for a greener planet are clear, but there is an important corollary here that should not be overlooked. If one didn’t have to spend 18% of his or her income on transportation, that would make one’s salary go a lot longer. Many are not easily convinced of the necessity or desirability of a greener planet, but some of these very same people change their tunes when they realize the economic benefits, especially to those in the middle class struggling in an economy on the brink of recession. And the one sector in the economy we don’t have to worry about is the energy sector; they are still making record profits even today. A little telecommuting won’t hurt their bottom line that much. And, based upon the law of supply and demand, it could very well bring prices down on oil for those times and things we would still need it for. Less demand means more supply means lower prices.

Telecommuters also do not use campus resources like electricity, water, heat/ac, etc. According to this article on “The Many Benefits of Telecommuting“:

More and more green businesses are encouraging telecommuting and there are a great many reasons why. Telecommuting not only saves the earth by decreasing transportation-based greenhouse gases, but also provides employees a peaceful place to complete key projects without interruption. Productivity increases of up to 40 percent have been reported through telework programs. Not only does telework reduce transportation-based emissions, it also reduces total energy consumption at the work place. Smaller businesses can inhabit smaller premises by rotating telework days amongst employees.

Now, of course, some jobs just must be done on campus. Faculty must be present to teach ground courses, and physical resources can’t be serviced from a distance, to name a couple that come to mind. However, other jobs could easily be done from home, at least part of the time. Personally, I would not advocate that positions typically be 100% telecommuting. I may be old-fashioned, but I still think there is significant benefit to the office experience, especially in areas where inter-staff collaboration is common and crucial. You can certainly accomplish a lot through modern communications technology, but some times nothing beats a face-to-face brainstorming session. There are obviously a lot of variables to consider with regard to who and how and such things. However, if there could truly be increases in productivity that are concurrent with decreases in energy consumption, it seems like a potential win-win-win situation (worker, organization, and environment).

The SCAD Sustainability Council reminds the SCAD community that Tuesday, April 22 is Earth Day, and encourages participation through one or more of the following activities.

What you can do to make a difference:

• Practice a paperless teaching day
• Ride your bike to class or carpool
• Reduce energy use by turning off lights and computers, and using natural light when permitted
• Do not buy bottled drinks or use takeout containers
• Eat locally and buy locally, particularly in your neighborhood

The 12th consecutive annual celebration in Savannah Earth Day will begin at 11 a.m. on Saturday, April 19th at Forsyth Park. Events include:

RecycleRama (8 - 11 a.m.),
Earth Day 5K Run (9 a.m.)
Earth Day Festival (11 a.m. - 3 p.m.).
Savannah Wheelie Earth Day Bike Ride (3 p.m.)

Attractions include:

• Live Oak Exhibition Alley with information and giveaways to make households more energy and water efficient.
• Green Bistro: more than 15 food vendors preparing tasty delights using local produce.
• Frees classes on Kitchen Composting, Rain Barrel assembly, and Native Landscaping
• Live Reptile and Bird Exhibit
• Coast Guard Helicopter
• Music and Entertainment featuring the Cajun band Feufollet from Louisiana.

For more information, visit the Earth Day Savannah Web site.