Beyond School

From the LA Times:

The presidents and chancellors of 284 colleges and universities nationwide have signed a pact to combat global warming by making their campuses “carbon neutral” as soon as possible, leaders of the initiative announced Tuesday.

The institutions pledged to carry out short-term strategies to conserve energy and reduce emissions while they develop long-term plans to convert their facilities so that they would no longer produce greenhouse gases, which contribute to global warming.

Advocates said the colleges and universities were the first sector of society to make such a vow. Signatories included community colleges and Ivy League universities; the largest institution on the list is the University of California, with its 10 campuses.

“Global warming is a defining challenge of our time,” said Arizona State University President Michael Crow, a leader of the climate campaign. “Colleges and universities must lead the effort to reverse global warming for the health and well-being of current and future generations,” Crow said.

The institutions that signed the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment agreed that they would within two years devise an action plan and a target date for making their campuses “climate neutral.” . . . .

Organizers said they hoped to enlist 1,000 institutions by 2009.

The presidents and chancellors wrote in the pledge that they were “deeply concerned about the unprecedented scale and speed of global warming” and that they accepted the scientific consensus that the change in climate was being caused largely by humans.

“We further recognize the need to reduce the global emission of greenhouse gases by 80% by midcentury at the latest,” the signatories said, “in order to avert the worst impacts of global warming and to reestablish the more stable climatic conditions that have made human progress over the last 10,000 years possible.”

Henny Penny was wrong: The sky is not falling; like the Wicked Witch of the West, it’s melting. And only the scientifically illiterate deny that we’re causing this problem, and exacerbating it with simple waste.

So are K-12 schools in any country leading by example the way the above universities are? (Harvard, to its shame, didn’t sign.) Does anybody have input into how to make administrators buy in?

Because education for our kids is a minor issue compared to this.

(My principal was cool today. He asked me if I was proud of him for emailing e-copies of grade verification sheets to all the teachers, rather than mindlessly printing them out and stuffing them in our boxes. That shows something in itself. Now if we can just institutionalize that attitude.)