This article was originally published in the BFEC newsletter, Vol. 20/No. 4, Fall 2016.
By David Heithaus, Director of Green Initiatives
Last February, Kenyon College joined many other colleges and universities across the nation in a commitment to action in the face of global climate change. Understanding our responsibility as an institution of higher learning, President Sean Decatur signed Second Nature’s Climate Commitment, setting Kenyon on the road to carbon neutrality.
When embarking towards such a lofty goal, one should not expect a journey without challenges. Our first hurdle was establishing exactly how much carbon we currently contribute to the global milieu. Motivated by love of planet and $10.41 per hour, a group of intrepid students tackled the challenge with reckless abandon. In so far as a colossal data mining venture can be tackled with reckless abandon.
Pouring over thousands of pages of bills, travel receipts and mileage logs, Dani Huffman ’19, Matt Meyers ’17 and Laura Langner ’16 began piecing together a picture of Kenyon’s greenhouse gas emissions over the last decade or so. They focused on three emission sources or scopes: scope 1 emissions from sources controlled or owned by Kenyon College, like vehicles and portable heaters; scope 2 emissions from purchased energy, considered indirect emissions that are essential for operations, like lights and A/C; and scope 3 emissions which are optional but financed by the college and includes funded travel, commuting, etc.
Being a bit over-zealous and perhaps even masochistic, Dani, Matt and Laura went well beyond what many other institutions have claimed in their inventories. These three hard workers were painfully honest about scope 3 emissions, including student vacation and summer travel to/from the hill, away games for athletics, travel for study abroad, and more. They included pretty much everything except FedEx deliveries, which are technically on FedEx.
Going into this exercise, the Office of Green Initiatives assumed that the purchased energy from scope 2 emissions would represent the bulk of Kenyon’s Greenhouse Gas contributions; however, these scope 3 emissions — and the thorough nature of our students’ analysis — represented a nerve-wracking unknown, especially considering our rural location.
With the callused fingers of seasoned data entry gurus, the students plugged in the last of the numbers to the “office paper; glossy/other” column. The carbon calculator whirred and buzzed (in my imagination) and out popped the number: the equivalent of around 17 metric tons of CO2 per student, per year. Not bad, not great. Between one-fifth and one-sixth of that was associated with some form of travel to our beloved hill — those scope 3 emissions.
It was a sobering moment, but short-lived. You see, knowing that the bitter shot of revelation was coming, we had prepared a “lemon slice” in the form of that final field labeled “other data.” It was in that last field, tucked behind all of the fancy ‘scopes,’ that one of Kenyon’s finest features was about to dial back that 17 tons per student. Our remote location may have added a few extra miles but it also added green spaces, and those green spaces added one of the best mechanisms on earth to offset emissions: trees. Using data collected by Dr. Andrew Kerkhoff’s Ecology lab, we were able to estimate the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by the forests managed by Kenyon, the BFEC, and the Philander Chase Conservancy. When all was said and done, those wonderful trees removed about one-fifth to one-sixth of our annual emissions.
The road to carbon neutrality is a long, steep hill and we are not yet at the top. We will face many more challenges along the way. But from this hill — working together — we will manage that charted course. Just keep hugging those trees.