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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
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Yale’s Big Green
Experiment What happens when a town like this tries to go green? The bus company lobbies the mayor for more time. The science labs threaten to move out. The chamber of commerce complains about costs, and the town council frets about taxes. Now imagine there’s no town council. There’s no chamber of commerce. There aren’t even any business owners. The whole place is run by one man. And he’s just had a
conversion. Brenda Naegel wants everybody at Yale to buy recycled paper. Holly Parker wants to get Brenda Naegel and thousands of other Yale commuters out of their cars and onto buses, trains, car pools, bikes, and feet. Robert Young wants cleaning products that are toxic to germs but not to people. Gus Speth wants Yale to be climate-neutral. Rick Levin wants Yale to become the greenest university in the land. Actually, Levin—Yale’s president—never said that. A lot of people on campus think he did, thanks to a misleading headline in the online edition of Newsweek. What Levin did say was more limited, but also significantly more specific: by 2020, Yale will cut its greenhouse gas emissions down to 10 percent below their levels in 1990. That would be a 43 percent cut from the levels in 2005. And there’s more. Yale has created an Office of Sustainability and launched a wide-ranging reassessment of all its operations, in order to make the university a far greener place. Yale’s environmental change of heart was relatively recent. “At the turn of the millennium, Yale was not a leader in the area of sustainability,” the president admitted to a gathering of campus sustainability directors in November 2006. In the first half of Levin’s tenure, which began in 1993, standard practices prevailed. Energy was cheap, and fuel-guzzling was business as usual. Think of any pre-1960 building where the radiators get so hot in winter that you have to open the windows, and you start to get a sense of Yale’s large environmental footprint. Speth, dean of the environment school and a prominent player in the environmental movement, invited an energy-efficiency expert to review Yale’s practices in 2002; he “basically got stonewalled,” the dean recalls. The next year, the university paid a half-million dollars to settle state Department of Environmental Protection complaints about the central-campus power plant. (The complaints were over monitoring and pollution violations; Yale says they arose from an upgrade that improved energy efficiency and cut pollution.) At the medical campus’s power plant, located in a poor area of New Haven, it took pressure from City Hall before Yale agreed to switch from a high-polluting grade of fuel oil to a cleaner-burning, more expensive grade. And Yale’s recycling efforts lagged far behind Harvard's. Part of the reason, says longtime recycling coordinator C. J. May '89MEM, was that the key step of collecting paper from people’s desk-side bins “was perceived as too expensive.” Perhaps most crucially, the university embarked on a massive construction and renovation program in the 1990s with only a passing thought for energy efficiency and other green considerations. Eighteen new buildings went up and 41 more underwent major renovations. In all this construction, energy efficiency was not made a top priority. True, it’s hard to measure the environmental impacts of that choice. For example, the 2003 renovation of Timothy Dwight College nearly doubled its energy use, but much of that was probably due to the installation of air conditioning in common areas—and even the greenest air conditioning systems are energy sinks. But one can guess at the lost opportunities by looking at what Yale is doing now. Today, all new buildings and renovations have to get LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification. Rob Watson, founding chair of LEED, says that “on average, a LEED-certified green building saves between 30 and 35 percent of the energy compared to standard code-compliant construction. That’s a reasonable figure” for a ballpark calculation of how much excess energy Yale’s renovations and buildings from the 1990s are consuming, he says. For experienced green builders, “frankly, it’s not that hard,” says Watson, now head of New York-based EcoTech International. “If you’re not saving 50 percent or more, you’re not really trying.” Yale has wised up in its old age : as part of its 300th birthday celebration in 2001, the university committed to become greener. Then-provost Alison Richard set up an Advisory Committee on Environmental Management, composed of faculty, students, and staff. Among its top recommendations: hire a director of sustainability and create a $1 million Campus Green Fund to underwrite innovative ideas from students, staff, and faculty. It took a couple of years, but Yale did both. In 2004, Julie Newman became the university’s first director of sustainability. A new directorship may sound like merely an additional layer of bureaucracy, but in most bureaucracies, nothing new happens until someone is put in charge of making it happen. A year later, her work—and the urgency of the task—had impressed the provost and vice president of finance and administration enough to create an Office of Sustainability, which now has four staffers and about a dozen student research assistants (in a newly, greenly renovated office: see “Everyday Green”). Newman’s role is both far-reaching and, in another sense, highly restricted. She is responsible for developing sustainability—which she describes as a balance of “ecosystem health, human health, and economic viability”—in virtually all campus operations: efficient lightbulbs and waterless urinals one day, ceiling panels made of recycled newspaper the next. That means Newman needs to understand the environmental issues involved in areas as diverse as purchasing, cleaning, transportation, waste management, and building design and construction. Yet she has no authority over those operations. “It’s not a matter of going to procurement and saying, 'You have to buy recycled paper.' I have to build bridges,” she says. “I have to get to know what each department does”—and find ways for sustainability to advance, not impede, its day-to-day goals. That’s a tricky assignment. “There’s a political landscape there that has to be navigated,” says May, the recycling coordinator since 1990. (Yale Recycling is probably the university’s oldest continuing green project. After years of toiling in the wilderness, it is enjoying the current burst of interest from the administration; see page 42.) May thinks that “Julie has rocked the boat just the right amount. People used to come and ask me—the recycling guy—about energy. They used to ask me about what kind of paper to buy.” Now there are people focused on those questions full-time. “Solar panels appeared at the Divinity School and I didn’t even know about it. At first I thought, ‘Gosh, I’m out of the loop.’” But then he decided that that’s a good thing: so much is happening that he can’t keep up with it all. The centerpiece of all the green initiatives is the carbon reduction project, which Levin announced in October 2005. “It became clear,” he recalls, “that this was a major opportunity to step up and do something significant on greenhouse gas reduction, and to attract a lot of attention toward these issues. The scientific evidence is widely accepted that we’re on a very dangerous trajectory. But we have a window now where we can correct it.” Two years into that window, Yale has achieved 21 percent of its goal—even as the campus is projected to expand 15 percent by 2020. (That doesn’t count the huge new West Campus, newly acquired from Bayer Pharmaceutical in nearby West Haven. Its environmental impact hasn’t yet been factored into Yale’s plans, but it will be within the next year.) There’s a long way to go. And big questions remain unanswered: what happens after 2020? Will Yale agree to green its endowment along with its operations? How can the university make sustainability a core value, to be transmitted to students along with intellectual curiosity and a global outlook? Still, Yale is in the midst of a striking environmental transformation. “This was a huge sea change and an act of very strong leadership on the part of Rick Levin,” says Dean Speth, whom Levin credits as “a constant goad” for better environmental practices. The kicker, according to Speth: “Rick now gives a better speech on the climate issue than I do.” Yale was not the first American university to establish a concrete carbon-reduction goal, nor has it set the biggest target. Tufts University was among the earliest; in 1999 it committed to the Kyoto Protocol’s 7 percent cut below 1990 levels by 2012. This year alone, more than 400 college presidents have signed the Presidents Climate Commitment, which pledges its institutions to take steps toward a goal of climate neutrality. But Yale drew international attention when Levin spoke on Yale’s global warming goal before the 2,500 global leaders gathered at the Davos World Economic Forum in January 2007. “We cannot wait for our governments to act,” Levin told the delegates. “Large organizations with the power to act independently should take matters into their own hands and begin to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions now.” Among the resulting international headlines was the one on Newsweek’s website that declared, “Yale President Richard Levin Explains His Plan to Make His University the Greenest in the United States.” Levin says he never used that phrase. There’s no glimmer of it in the interview itself, a wonky discussion of Yale’s carbon-reduction plan. But the coverage had a profound effect on campus. “In October '05, people internally didn’t understand what we had just done, to be honest,” Newman says. After Davos and Newsweek, they sat up and took notice. (Months after the headline appeared, one manager interviewed for this article explained that “President Levin has been very outspoken about wanting Yale to be the greenest campus in the world.”) Yale expects to meet its goal for less than 1 percent of its operating budget. “If everyone around the world had to pay one-half of 1 percent of income to save the world from overheating,” Levin observes, “most would think it a small price to pay.” Some changes are highly visible, like campaigns to get undergraduates to unplug their electronics before vacation. Others, like saving energy by reducing the air-change rate in labs, are invisible. Some changes are dramatic, like the environment school's cutting-edge Kroon Hall (see “Building for Keeps”). Others are as mundane as compact fluorescent lightbulbs. Cutting energy use due to Yale’s enormous construction and renovation campaign is key. The university is developing its own sustainability standards for building design and construction, but Levin has also made a specific commitment that “we are going to seek LEED certification for every one" of the new campus buildings and renovations. Yale started with high-impact projects—those that get the biggest carbon bang for the buck—such as buying some of its electricity from a Midwest producer of wind energy. Now, “I think we’re getting into the more difficult things,” says John Bollier, associate vice president for facilities operations. “They get more capital-intensive.” And, sometimes, more environmentally complicated. For instance, geothermal heating and cooling systems—in which water from underground is cycled through a building as a heat transfer medium then returned to the earth—“are a lot more effective” than solar panels, Bollier says. But using groundwater means that special attention must be paid to monitoring the condition of the aquifer below, which leads to other concerns—such as how much of the campus is covered with impervious paving. Like others before him, Bollier has found that in environmental planning, “you pull on a string and it leads to a lot of other things.” Yale also plans to buy carbon offsets—that is, to balance some of its carbon emissions on campus by paying someone else to cut an equal amount of carbon (by planting trees in tropical forests, say, or installing scrubbers on a power plant in China). Such offsets are traded as credits on the open market. But it can be hard to tell whether they’re working. “There’s a lot of greenwashing going on in the marketplace,” Bollier says. Yale might end up “just lining somebody’s pockets with profits” for projects that would get built whether Yale helped fund them or not. Bollier wants Yale’s offset money to produce new, and verifiable, energy savings or renewable energy. He’s exploring programs by which Yale offsets would encourage faculty and staff to reduce their own carbon footprints. Next spring, for example, the university will launch a pilot program to subsidize mass transit for employees. “Wouldn’t it be great,” he asks, “to improve the air quality in New Haven, as opposed to some remote project that was going to happen anyway? We’re trying to channel people's creativity.” One major carbon source hasn’t even made it into Yale’s greenhouse gas plan yet: the almighty automobile. The university created a new position, director of sustainable transportation, and filled it in April by hiring the aptly named Holly Parker. “Yale is running out of parking,” she says. “Part of my job is to encourage people not to bring their cars here.” At this point, nobody knows how many Yale employees commute by car or how much carbon they put out. Parker is charged with cutting, by a yet-t o-be-determined amount, the number of single-occupancy cars coming to campus. She’ll start this fall, with an employee survey to find out how people get to work and what it would take to make them stop driving alone. Parker will use that data to estimate the greenhouse gas impact of Yale commuters—a number that Yale will plug into its overall carbon-reduction goal. She’ll also use the survey results to concoct incentives. Subsidies for train or bus fares? An enhanced carpool program? Showers and lockers for bicyclists, plus better bike storage? All of these are under consideration, as well as, potentially, a telecommuting policy. One change has already arrived: Zipcar, a company that offers inexpensive, hassle-free car rentals by the hour, installed a fleet of six cars at Yale in September. Now carpoolers and mass-transit users have access to cars on campus when they need them. It may take all those enticements and more to get people to stop driving to work alone. At Harvard, where Parker worked previously, “it took six years to reduce the rate by 10 percent,” she says. “Driving alone to campus was a really good solution for a long time. It’s only recently that that has changed, and it hasn’t changed perceptibly.” Ask Brenda Naegel. As associate director of communications and training for Yale procurement, she is passionate about green purchasing. “I’ve always been a nature girl,” she says. “I've been recycling for as long as I can remember. I’ve greened my food and my cleaning products. But I still drive my car to work”—45 miles a day, five days a week. Some people make the case for stronger action by Yale. The Sustainable Endowments Institute issued a College Sustainability Report Card this year. Yale got straight As in all the operational categories. But because it doesn’t reveal its endowment holdings and doesn’t screen investments for environmental impact, it pulled a C for investment priorities and a D for endowment transparency. Its overall grade was B+. Levin shrugs it off with a chuckle. “We’re probably going to stay at B+ overall,” he says. “I’m happy to get As in all the practical areas. But to actually tilt your portfolio through screens that advance a social agenda—whether it’s civil rights or anything else—we haven’t done that, and we don’t plan to.” Even on climate change, where Yale has the most bragging rights, the university comes in for some criticism. The co-chairs of the Yale Student Environmental Coalition have called on Levin to add his name to the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment. Gus Speth believes Yale should sign “in the near future.” But Levin says the pledge lacks specifics. (In fact, it contains no dates or numeric targets. It does require signatories to choose two steps from a list of seven, such as meeting LEED standards and providing access to public transit.) By signing the pledge, “all you’re doing is advertising yourself as supportive of fighting global warming, without any meaningful commitment,” he says. “I believe in making commitments that I can honor.” Anthony Cortese, co-coordinator of the Climate Commitment and a Massachusetts-based consultant on campus sustainability, says Yale has “a stellar reputation” on environmental matters. Nonetheless, he thinks Levin should sign the pledge. “I think sometimes the more elite schools think that they don’t have to join efforts cooperatively with other schools,” Cortese says. “The effort to get to climate neutrality is such a huge effort that all the schools need to collaborate.” In the end, though,
Cortese believes that operational green-campus efforts pale compared to a
university’s core business. “Ultimately, the impact of higher education is
education,” he says. “The most important thing is: all the graduates who come
out, give them the training and education that will allow them to carry out
their professional goals in ways that will result in environmentally
sustainable behavior. Because that’s the only kind of behavior that will allow
people to progress.” |
Related Greasing the Skids The Basics: What You Buy and How You Clean Everyday Green Down in the Dumpster Getting Ourselves Back to the Garden |
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