Report of the Williams College Climate Action Committee

After months of work and consideration, the Climate Action Committee (CAC) is presenting a summary report of our recommendations for greenhouse gas emissions targets and potential strategies to achieve them. In the spring of 2006 President Schapiro asked us "to recommend by the end of this calendar year a goal for the reduction of College greenhouse gas emissions and ways to attain it." To help understand this goal, we conducted an inventory of Williams' historical energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, made future energy scenario projections, explored ways to reduce emissions, and studied what others were doing. The CAC worked to understand the political and market environments, learned about RECs, carbon offsets, emission coefficients and biomass, visited other campuses, attended conferences, and talked to Williams faculty, staff and students. We read, surfed, and debated and discovered that:

• Williams' energy use and hence emissions have increased substantially over time. We have seen our energy consumption increase 50% since 1990-91 and our emissions increase 44% during the same time period.
• Expansion in our built environment, use of technology, and air handling and conditioning are primary factors for these increases. The CAC suspects that left unchecked our energy use, emissions and costs would continue to increase into the foreseeable future.
• Many campuses are currently engaging in exercises similar to ours - trying to find ways to reduce their contribution to climate change, struggling with understanding the complexities associated with reducing energy consumption and emissions reductions and balancing the goals of sustainability with those of each college's mission.
• Most of us want to reduce our carbon footprint, but the best courses of action are not yet clear.

These observations lead us to recommend that Williams take a leadership role in setting an aggressive target of 10% below 1990-91 levels of greenhouse gas emissions by FY20 and that we be half way there by FY12.

To support these emissions reductions targets we also recommend that Williams hire a director of sustainability responsible for developing and coordinating the implementation of a comprehensive strategic plan for emissions reductions and other issues related to sustainability. Our emissions reductions strategies must be supported by investment in measurement technologies that enable us to better control our energy requirements and consumption patterns, determine our priority areas, evaluate our progress and reinforce operational / behavioral changes. And finally we recommend that the College monitor and publicly report on progress toward our goals.

Because we were asked to consider ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we also propose that Williams adopt a broader definition of sustainability as one of its institutional priorities. We have included a set of guiding principles that will help ensure that Williams approaches its current and future operations in an environmentally sustainable manner.

As the school with the country's oldest Environmental Studies program, formalizing Williams' sustainability principles should be viewed as an active reclamation of our leadership in this arena. When we speak of carbon emissions reduction as an important goal for the College, we refer technically to our "carbon footprint." The recognition that our "leadership footprint" - the scope of Williams' global influence - is substantially larger than that of our campus alone offers Williams a real opportunity and responsibility to contribute to the reduction of greenhouse gases on a much broader scale. We know that when we educate our students, faculty, and staff in both the theory and practice of sustainable living we influence the many parts of the world that our community touches.

We have outlined a strategy to attain our emissions targets yet we recognize that significant study and aggressive but flexible leadership is required to finalize specific actions. Prices, technologies and markets are changing rapidly - new renewable energy services are being developed, global demand for traditional fossil fuels is expanding and supply is diminishing, more organizations are seeking ways to reduce their respective carbon footprints, and regulatory and political entities are beginning to seriously consider polices regulating the emissions of green house gas. We will require an adaptable and thoughtful implementation approach to ensure that we adopt the strategies that will most effectively move us toward our goal.

The Climate Action Committee Members:
Irene Addison - Associate Vice President for Facilities and Auxiliary Services
Justin Bates '07 - Student
Stephanie Boyd - Manager of Special Projects, Office of the VP for Operations - Committee Chair
Don Clark - Utilities Program Manager
Alison Davies '07 - Student
David Dethier - Edward Brust Professor of Geology and Mineralogy
Tom Dwyer - Budget Director
Ken Jensen - Mechanical Maintenance Supervisor
Amy Johns '98 - Environmental Analyst
John Kleiner - Professor of English