Graduating to green

Kyle Maxwell, a junior at Tufts University, has spent the last two years lobbying his school's administrators to go green by investing in renewable energy credits.

Sorry, Al Gore. No luck at Tufts.

Now, Maxwell and his Tufts ECO group is taking the campaign directly to the students. He is peddling wind energy credits individually to students in Tufts dining halls and dorms. As of last week, they had sold about 400 of them.

"Obviously, we're not going to be selling as many as we would if the whole university was shifting in focus, but we're also trying to make students aware of the issues," Maxwell said. Tufts has made other sound conservation efforts, he said, but "they're just not doing it outright by buying credits, which some schools are doing."

Credits, or offsets, are bought by individuals or institutions who want to make up for their harmful carbon dioxide emissions, in effect, by investing in projects that absorb or destroy an equivalent amount of pollution.

As Earth Day, April 22, approaches and grass-roots and political efforts increase on global warming, students at Tufts and other local campuses are urging their schools to be environmentally smarter by designing energy-efficient buildings and offsetting emissions. Some say the efforts are signs of a reinvigorated environmental movement not seen on college campuses since the build up to the first Earth Day in 1970.

"It used to be that if you wanted to draw a crowd at a university, you had to put up a sign that said you were talking about threats to polar bears and pull them in that way, then talk about global warming," said Seth Kaplan of the Conservation Law Foundation. "Now we've moved to the point where you can talk about global warming and you can say so on the sign."

Katie Flynn-Jambeck, a student organizing manager for Greenpeace, says the Internet, which allows college activists to be "more strategic" than their predecessors, is a driving force behind the movement.

"I think they also have a real sense that this is a critical point when they need to be taking action as young adults, and that the effects of what they do will really have an impact on their future."

Last month, MIT students won a national competition for their proposal to create a first-of-its-kind, solar-powered refueling station to convert used cooking oil from dining halls into biodiesel fuel to power the university's shuttle-bus service. They pulled in $25,000 in a corporate-sponsored award to fund the project.

At Northeastern, the student-led Husky Energy Action Team, or HEAT, created last fall, recently finished an energy-efficiency contest that pitted residence halls against one another to see which could save the most energy over three weeks.

To stir interest, HEAT members went from door to door to more than 7,000 students on campus with a petition calling on the university to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

"The reaction was a lot more positive than I thought it would be," said Sherrie Waller, a junior. "I didn't come across anyone who refused to sign the petition, and overall the students seemed very encouraged by it and very willing to jump on it right away, which really encouraged us as a group."

Addressed to university president Joseph E. Aoun, the petition calls for a timetable for achieving complete climate neutrality, ensuring that all new buildings achieve national green construction certification, and retrofitting existing buildings as much as possible.

Waller said she could see the competition "definitely having an effect" on students' energy use as the dormitory competition wound to a close last week.

"I would say that more than half of the residence halls are actually pulling through with this," she said. "And after the three weeks are over, maybe students will get used to turning off the lights."

Of course, not every campus green effort has been led by students.

Although Tufts did not act on the student-passed referendum for a hike in its activities fee to buy wind-energy credits, "I think the administration feels at this point that we're taking on a whole bunch of initiatives," said Sarah Hammond Creighton, program director for the university's Tufts Climate Initiative. The university opened its first "green" dormitory, Sophia Gordon Hall, late last year.

"I think we're probably doing more in the Northeast region on the whole than in other parts of the country," said Barbara Batshalon, founder of the Green Roundtable, an independent nonprofit group that aims to mainstream green building practices. "There are so many colleges and universities around here, which I think is why the market has accelerated so much. When Harvard starts making noise that they want green buildings, every architect around here is going to look into it so they can start the bidding."

Harvard University has certified 20 new-construction and renovation projects for green construction credits under a nationally recognized rating system since 2002, more than any other university in the country, according to Harvard.

"The more we do it, the better we get at doing it," said Leith Sharp, director of the Harvard Green Campus Initiative, a university-sponsored operation that employs about two dozen full-time staff members who know about green building design and energy conservation.

Sharp said the university spends $100,000 each year on renewable energy research, and purchases enough renewable energy credits to offset about 7 percent of its energy consumption, a move that has been advocated "by students, staff, and faculty alike."

These credits are at the heart of Gore's "carbon-neutral lifestyle."

Kaplan, director of the Conservation Law Foundation's clean energy and climate change program, says student activists "are having some direct impact" on environmental issues at universities but cautioned that it may also be "an interaction between pressure intersecting with opportunity."

"It's true that a lot of student effort has gone, by and large, into largely symbolic activities, but that's probably a necessary part of the process as you move toward real efforts."

For students like Tufts senior Douglas Kingman, the student referendum to increase the university's $248 annual student activities fee by $20 to fund wind energy credits was symbolic at most, misguided at worst.

"I think cost is always an important factor, and the $20 hike is not necessarily a good investment," said Kingman, former editor of the student-run Primary Source, which bills itself as "the journal of conservative thought at Tufts University."

"I think the moral of the story is that a lot of people are looking at these initiatives and they feel good about themselves, but when you look at the real savings, it isn't doing a whole lot." At the Simmons College School of Management, dean Deborah Merrill-Sands is convinced she'll see such "real savings" from construction now underway on an $80.5 million, five-story environmentally friendly building to house the School of Management.

"You can align profitability and social responsibility," she said, "and there's no reason we can't integrate concerns about long-term sustainability into every business decision that we make."

A longtime environmentalist, Merrill-Sands lives in a New Hampshire home that uses both passive and active solar energy systems. It has a wood-heating stove that burns only two cords each year, she says, to cover more than 3,000 square feet.

Tufts, meanwhile, expects to use 30 percent less energy and 30 percent less water in its new "green" dormitory than it would with conventional design. The 126-bed dormitory uses solar thermal arrays on the roof to help heat water and photovoltaic panels that generate power for the building; dual-flush toilets in the bathrooms, and motion sensors controlling the lights. Signs describing the conservation effort are scattered throughout the halls, and an exhibit near the entrance greets visitors with the building's real-time energy statistics.

At Boston College, a sustainability committee composed of faculty and students was created about 18 months ago as the college prepared its master plan for development.

"By doing this we can probably save money," said Charlie Lord, director of BC's Urban Ecology Institute. "That's one of the things that's quite powerful about the basics of sustainability -- discovering that it's less expensive to operate sustainably."

As MIT students learned last month, thinking sustainably can also be a reason to party: On Earth Day, the school has its young environmentalists, "Biodiesel@MIT," to thank for a free concert.

A performance by alternative rock band Angels & Airwaves, led by former blink-182 guitarist Tom DeLonge, is part of the prize, along with $25,000, for winning the "ecomagination Challege." The competition, co sponsored by General Electric Co. and mtvU, the music channel's 24-hour college network, asked students nationally to propose new ways to green their campus. Their winner was selected by a panel of environmental experts, with input from students who cast votes for their favorite projects over the Internet.

The runner-up, a team of Northeastern students, proposed installing green roofs and bringing plants into narrow tracts of land to reduce urban runoff.

As for whether efforts like students selling energy credits are more symbolic than truly climate-saving, Maxwell is adamant.

"If every school can get some portion of their students to do this, then I think it can definitely make an impact on the global level."

Think we'll float away?
Climate warming used to be a topic mostly for serious environmentalists -- or comedy writers. Now it's a subject that confronts all of us. Do you think the threat is being blown out of proportion? Or is the Boston area, like the rest of the planet, facing serious changes? Send your response to City Weekly at ciweek@globe.com. Please include your name, a daytime phone number (for verification only), and your neighborhood or community. Responses may be edited for length and grammar.