Carleton College: Sustainability: News

“Now I know the only one who cares about the environment out of 1.3 billion people who don’t,” said an American friend of mine after he was approached by a…

A Renewable Summer Spent Under the Midnight Sun

October 12, 2010 at 2:41 pm

One Carleton student's adventures in Iceland, land of renewable energy.

Carleton wins Climate Crews Contest

January 19, 2009 at 11:26 am

The Sustainability Assistants recently applied for and won the UN Climate Crews Contest, aimed at helping schools get at those issues that are most weighing them down in the quest for a more sustainable campus. The grant money was awarded to proposals that would best address those points of the Sustainable Endowments Institute’s Annual Sustainability Report Card that the institution most needed to improve.

Senator Amy Klobuchar Speaks on Climate Change at St. Olaf

May 13, 2008 at 10:43 am

Kloubachar in Greenland

This past Saturday, Irwin Hall at St. Olaf was full of St. Olaf students and faculty along with a handful of Carleton students eagerly waiting to hear what Amy Klobuchar had to say on climate change. She began by showing some fun video clips about her visit to Greenland last summer in which, decked out in rain gear, she floats in fishing boats around icebergs. As the video is geared towards kids, Klobuchar frequently uses it when she speaks at schools about climate change.

Though Greenland’s melting ice sheets may not seem directly linked to the lives of Minnesotans, Klobuchar made the issue if rising global temperature hit home by drawing a connection with the decreasing water levels that we are currently experiencing in the Great Lakes. She explained that barge traffic is an essential part of the economy and supplies many jobs in northern Minnesota. The dropping water level of Lake Superior has already done damage to the barge traffic industry.

When Klobuchar approached the issue of what is being done to address such problems, she made it clear that leadership is coming from individual states, not Washington. It was evident that she feels that Minnesota is doing its part to be a leader on climate change. She was beaming as she referenced Minnesota’s renewable energy standard which commits the state to using 25% renewables by the year 2025.

A Bargain? $1.19 Trillion for a Cap-and-Trade System

April 21, 2008 at 10:43 am

Smoke Stacks

It seems like everybody’s got a blog these days. Over at the Congressional Budget Office Director’s Blog is a newly-released cost estimate of S. 2191, otherwise known as the America’s Climate Security Act of 2007 or the Lieberman-Warner climate bill. This Senate bill proposes a series (well, two) of greenhouse gas emissions cap-and-trade systems which initially gifts permits to greenhouse gas emitters (such as power plants, any facility importing or producing petroleum and/or natural gas, and any facility which produces a certain amount of hydrofluorocarbons) while, over its decade-long implementation, segueing to an auction-based permit system. The cost estimate of the system between 2009 and 2018? 1.19 trillion dollars (read the whole report here). This large influx of revenue would, however, be allocated and spent by the government. The bill allocates:

$64 billion to the Energy Assistance Fund, which would support various energy assistance programs for low-income families;
$12 billion to the Climate Change Worker Training Fund, which would promote training programs for “green-collar jobs;”
$31 billion to create the Adaptation Fund, which will support research and education to assist fish and wildlife in adapting to climate change;
$16 billion to the Climate Change and National Security Fund;
$6 billion to the Energy Independence Acceleration Fund, among other allocations.

With such immense costs of implementation for the private sector (but also noble programs like the aforementioned which are funded as a result), most of these costs will be passed onto consumers through higher prices. Given this reality, the American public may not be so keen for the bill’s passage. We at Shrinking Footprints, however, will closely monitor its progress throughout the remainder of the congressional session.

An(other) Inconvenient Truth

April 15, 2008 at 2:29 pm

An(other) Inconvenient Truth Perhaps it’s naturally a bit easier to talk of turbines and solar here on the Carleton campus. Most students are from the United States, unarguably one of the richest nations in the world, and our priorities of preferential premiums reflect this wealth. I specifically remember that when David Shipler, the author of The Working Poor, asked a large group of Carleton students whether we would approve vastly higher taxes, at least 75% of the 400-some students raised their hands with pride. It’s also a bit easier for this group of people to speak of clean energy priorities, both because it can afford the cost premium which sometimes occurs, as well as because the clean energy generally remains to be small projects which still supplement a primary fossil-fuel system. However, there are two billion other people on the planet who can neither afford these premium preferences nor supplement their pre-existing energy infrastructure with renewable choices because they lack ANY viable choices.

This inconvenient truth spurs decisions such as the International Finance Corporation’s announcement that it will issue a $450 million loan to India Tata Power, which is planning to build a $4 billion, 4-billion watt coal-burning power plant complex in the country. To give some perspective, that’s 2,425 of Carleton’s wind turbines or eight large-scale (500 MW) American coal power plants. India has 400 million people without regular access to electricity, and is expecting to expand its energy generation by 160 billion watts over the next decade. Is there a way to meet such demand—and help a country develop—with a more environmentally-friendly approach?

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