Recently, my team over at the Climate Reality Project’s Chicago Metro Chapter released a report that draws connections between existing citywide energy benchmarking policies and climate goals, energy usage and emissions on college and university campuses, and strategies for working toward emission reductions.
Check out the report “Addressing Greenhouse Gas Emissions on Chicago Campuses” or just get the highlights through the coverage by Illinois PIRG and The Columbia Chronicle.
With about 70% of climate-destabilizing greenhouse gas emissions in Chicago coming from buildings, it is important to know which ones are among the highest emitters, so that we can make the changes necessary to meet the goals in Chicago’s Climate Action Plan.
As I learned while working with my team at the Climate Reality Project’s Chicago Metro Chapter, university buildings are among Chicago’s top emitters of climate-warming gasses per square foot. Seven university buildings ranked among the top ten most emissions intensive buildings in the city in 2021!
We recently released a report, Addressing Greenhouse Gas Emissions on Chicago Campuses, which relies on data from electrifychicago.net. That website allows users to get specific, publicly available energy usage and emissions information for individual large buildings that owners are required to report to the city under the Chicago Energy Benchmarking Ordinance. The website also helps users rank and group buildings to allow for better understanding of the data.
Using that excellent resource as a starting place, we identified a number of college and university campus buildings that are making outsize contributions to the climate crisis, as well as multiple institutions of higher education that have failed to comply with the benchmarking ordinance in recent years. We also uncovered a systemic failure on the city’s part to enforce the ordinance – foregoing as much as $30 million in potential fines.
We issued the report to spur universities to decarbonize their buildings by improving energy efficiency and by moving away from fossil fuels like methane gas. The report also highlights actions at the state and city level to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and provides strategies for students and others concerned about climate change to work toward emission reductions.
The Climate Reality Project’s Chicago Metro Chapter is an all-volunteer group of Chicago area activists working to catalyze local solutions to the climate crisis since 2017.
Around the country, professors are hard at work creating and updating syllabi for fall, which can be both exciting and exhausting. Thankfully, Philosophers for Sustainability is here to help!
They’ve just posted a new section on their website, called Teaching Modules, with resources that can easily be slotted into existing courses, used to create new courses, or shared and discussed in philosophy clubs.
The first module is called “Moral Courage, Environmental Style,” and it contains a bunch of materials to accompany an article I published (gulp, 10 years ago) called “Courage as an Environmental Virtue.” We’re talking: a 15-minute summary video made by yours truly, a set of slides, an hour-long video conversation between myself and Dr. Nora Mills Boyd, video transcripts, discussion questions, activity prompts, and a list of related resources.
These free materials may be particularly useful in courses that discuss virtue ethics, activism, sex & gender norms, courage in military contexts, and climate change.
I had a lot of fun working with both Nora and Sadie Warren on this project and I’m hoping that this module will be the first of many shared there, so if you have an idea or a request for other materials of this general sort, please don’t hesitate to reach out to Nora at nboyd@siena.edu.
This week, the Illinois Clean Jobs Coalition announced a comprehensive legislative platform to boldly and rapidly accelerate the state’s climate, equity, and clean energy goals.
The platform is a set of bills (the Clean and Reliable Grid Act, the Clean and Equitable Transportation Act, and the Clean and Healthy Buildings Act) that will lower greenhouse gas emissions, create green jobs, and improve health and safety in our communities. Together, these bills would be transformative in helping us work toward climate stability, financial security, fairness across communities, and health statewide.
If you live in Illinois, I invite you to join me in supporting the ICJC platform.
Ror folks who don’t live here, with your help, the ICJC’s work can serve as a model for related efforts elsewhere!
Recently, Charlie LaBerge, a student at DePaul University taking a course in climate change communications, interviewed a couple of my fellow Climate Reality Project volunteers and me about our chapter’s work – our past, present, and future efforts to respond to the climate crisis locally here in Chicago.
I really got a kick out of the experience – working with students is something that I miss, and it was a great opportunity to reflect on our collective efforts!
Charlie used that interview, along with some other materials, to create an impressive podcast for his class project, and was generous enough to share it publicly, so you can listen here to check it out.
This past week, as a team leader for the Chicago Metro Chapter of the Climate Reality Project, I hosted a Zoom event about building decarbonization for various student groups around the city. Since about 70% of greenhouse gas emissions in the city come from our buildings, we simply must reduce emissions from buildings in order to meet our climate commitments!
It was great to be able to share what my team has been learning with folks from multiple universities, and to help energize and support the students’ own campaigns for greater on-campus sustainability. We’re in the beginning phases of some collaborative efforts, and here’s hoping for many fruitful interactions to come!
If you want to watch the presentation, you can find it on our chapter’s YouTube channel.
As part of my volunteer work with the Chicago Metro Chapter of The Climate Reality Project, last week I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Rose O’Keeffe, a student journalist at DePaul University.
The short version of the story is that, in response to learning about some of the high-emitting and energy-intensive buildings on their campus, the student government leadership at DePaul has called on the university president to direct the development of a campus climate action plan. I’m delighted to have been able to play a small role in pushing DePaul’s decision-makers in a more climate-friendly direction, but more importantly, I’m really impressed with what the students are doing under their own steam and I look forward to supporting them in any way I can!
Take a look at Rose’s article here.
In Chicago, about 70% of greenhouse gas emissions come from our buildings. Part of that is because here, it is common to get heat our homes and cook our food with gas appliances (unlike in some other parts of the country where I’ve lived).
To make matters worse, because of repeated, record-breaking rate hikes, 1 in 5 of Chicagoans are behind on gas bills. And in some neighborhoods, up to 50% of households are in chronic debt due to high gas bills. But if folks switched from using gas to electricity, they could save $15,000 to $20,000 over 20 years, according to a study by NRDC.
Burning gas inside your home or business is not only expensive, but it is also detrimental to your health. For just one example of the harms it can do, 1 in 5 cases of childhood asthma in Illinois is attributable to cooking with gas.
The good news is that a Clean & Affordable Buildings Ordinance (CABO) is being considered by City Council. This ordinance would insure that (with a few exceptions) new buildings and substantial renovations to existing buildings would have to meet a strict indoor emissions standard.
CABO is just a first step away from reliance on fossil fuels, and it is supported by a coalition of more than 50 consumer, community, environmental, environmental justice, and faith organizations as a way to lower utility costs, improve public health, create jobs and reduce pollution.
For more information, and form for contacting your alderperson in support of CABO, check out the Citizens Utility Board Q&A.
Food waste makes up about 22% of municipal solid waste in America. When this organic material is sent to landfills, it produces methane, a very potent greenhouse gas. Composting food scraps avoids that and also creates a nutrient-rich soil amendment that can help manage stormwater, prevent erosion, and improve plant and soil health. Plus, composting creates more jobs and revenue than landfilling or incinerating garbage!
Chicago residents can now, for the first time, at no charge, drop off their food scraps at one of 15 sites that are open 7:00-7:00 daily.
To get started, check out the city’s food scrap drop off website to watch a short instructional video and find your nearest drop off site on the map, and sign up to receive updates about the program and show that Chicagoans support the composting of food scraps.
ONLY food scraps can go in the compost bins. NO BAGS, not even ones labeled ‘compostable’ can go into the compost bins – but there will be a regular black bin for bags and other trash at each site. Preventing contamination is key to the success of any composting program!
I recommend storing food scraps in the freezer to avoid attracting bugs or generating smells – as an added bonus, this makes storing and taking out your regular trash easier and less yucky!
Yale sociologist Justin Farrell’s new book, Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West, is an amazing piece of scholarship that provides detailed insight into how wealth concentration is shaping the human (and more-than-human) communities in Teton County, Wyoming, which is both the richest county in the United States and the county with the highest wealth inequality (on various measures).
Farrell’s research, both qualitative and quantitative, is meticulous and presented in clear and accessible prose. The excerpted interviews provide candid (and sometimes stomach-churning) insight into the hearts and minds of both the ultra-wealthy and the working poor whose labor makes their lifestyles possible in Teton County and thereabouts. For various reasons that Farrell thoughtfully articulates, rural communities are under-researched, and accessing the ultra-wealthy for research purposes is challenging. But we can no longer afford to neglect such research and this book provides a model for much work that is yet to be done.
I strongly recommend this valuable book to anyone who is working on or simply interested in issues relating to climate change, conservation, wealth inequality, and/or social justice more broadly.