Faculty, administrators, and students gathered in Rockefeller Hall on May 7 to hear a presentation by Sightlines, a company hired to assess Vassar’s carbon footprint and compare it to those of our peer institutions.
The presentation was delivered by Sightlines’ Director of Business Development Jay Pearlman ’98. Sightlines was founded in 2001 to help colleges compare operations statistics with one another. “Colleges like to compare themselves to one another. When applying to schools you can get numbers on all sorts of things, such as student to faculty ratio… but colleges like to compare numbers like operations,” he said.
The presentation was part of Sightlines’ Greenlines program, which was designed to help colleges assess their carbon footprint as part of the American College University Presidents Climate Commitment (ACUPCC). Vassar is not currently a signatory, but chose to hire Sightlines in order to facilitate its own move toward carbon neutrality.
So far, over 620 institutions have signed onto the ACUPCC pledge, which is supposed to commit a college or university to have zero net carbon emissions by a certain date. An institution’s specific date to be carbon-neutral is set by that institution. The pledge requires colleges to pass three milestones, the first being that within two months the college has to adopt three tangible options for reducing emissions, such as switching to energy star appliances. Within one year of signing, the college has to complete a carbon emissions inventory, where Sightlines is brought in to help, and within two years the college has to develop a strategic plan to reach carbon neutrality.
The goal of carbon neutrality is to have zero net emissions. Of course, as Pearlman pointed out, “Every school that owns a car will have some gross emissions.” The goal is to somehow offset emissions as well to reduce them. For instance, Vassar currently offsets less than one percent of its emissions by composting, a program which is set to expand to include post-consumer waste in the Retreat.
For the purposes of conducting a carbon emissions inventory, Pearlman explained how emissions were grouped into three scopes. The first scope consists of “emissions that come from the direct activities of the institute,” according to Pearlman’s PowerPoint presentation, and includes emissions from company-owned vehicles and fuel combustion for heating.
The second comprises “emissions from utility production not at the
institute,” which is almost entirely composed of electricity that the College purchases from the local power plant.
Finally, the third scope includes indirect emissions, which are currently defined as daily transportation to campus, air travel and waste disposal, but will be expanded to encompass more factors in future years.
“If you’re aiming for zero and each year new things are getting added to category three, you’ve got a moving target,” said President Catharine Bond Hill, expressing her disapproval of this system of measurement. “That makes problems worse, because if we’re comparing things over time that won’t make it apples to apples.”
Hill was also concerned that many offsets seem to be counted twice. For instance, Pearlman mentioned that there have been cases where a college composted and counted that as an offset, while the composting plant also counted it as an offset. Hill said that the current system lacks an enforcement mechanism to ensure that net emissions are being counted correctly.
According to Pearlman, 46 percent of Vassar’s greenhouse gas emissions come from utilities in buildings, such as heat, while 35 percent come from electricity consumption, meaning that 80 percent of Vassar’s emissions are building-related.
However, he pointed out that Vassar’s emissions have fallen by 10 percent over the past three years, mostly due to reductions in scope one, the direct activities of the College. “This downward trend right now is a great thing,” said Pearlman, “We don’t see it in most schools. We’re in the middle of an expansion in higher education and spaces that are being built and expanded on are requiring more energy.”
In addition, Pearlman said that Vassar is fortunate that it is not in the process of building any major facilities, citing such construction projects as a drain on college utilities. “There are no walls, no roof – you’re leaking BTUs all over the place,” he said.
Sightlines placed Vassar into a group of peer institutions for comparison purposes. In the group, Vassar is ranked the second lowest in the level of scope two emissions, which is mainly comprised of the electricity that the school purchases. This scope is measured in terms of emissions per square feet. The College is also does well, ranking well below average, in the other categories.
However, when the presentation switched to measuring emissions per student, Vassar performed relatively poorly. The level of the College’s emissions ranked well above average by this standard, due to the large amount of square footage per student. Pearlman said that this phenomenon is common for schools that have small class sizes and that don’t cram all of their students into triples. “The bottom line is that, to be the school you want to be you need to have buildings,” he said, noting that Vassar must put its services to the students ahead of its environmental goals.
Pearlman explained that Vassar is also fortunate to be using natural gas, which is much cleaner than burning coal. However, he pointed out that many types of fuel are regional. “We have a lot of coal, and it’s very inexpensive. Natural gas costs $9 to $10 dollars, coal costs $3 to $4.” A school that is currently relying solely coal would have a difficult time switching to natural gas. However, he encouraged Vassar to become even more dependent on natural gas over other dirtier sources of energy.
Unfortunately for Vassar’s carbon footprint, many Vassar students choose to go abroad, which adds a lot of air travel to Vassar’s scope three, but once again Hill poked holes in the measurement mechanism. “We’re being held accountable for the airplanes that we’re using, so we’re being treated as a final consumer,” she said.
“Shouldn’t the households who pay for our services be held responsible?” President Hill is still undecided as to whether she will sign the ACUPCC, but the College remains determined to become more sustainable.
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