July 23rd, 2007
After months of pressure from student activists and internal deliberations that have stalled a formal announcement, the University said today that it would join hundreds of colleges across the country in pursuit of an increasingly popular goal: carbon neutrality.
In a statement issued to students, faculty and staff, University President William Brody announced a series of measures and a vision for achieving “carbon neutrality” – a slightly nebulous benchmark meaning essentially that the University’s net use of greenhouse gases would amount to zero.
As we have previously reported, the initial details of the climate change commitment announced today were agreed upon in early May, and those details were transmitted by James McGill, vice president for finance and administration, to Teryn Norris ’10 and Blake Hough ’07, co-leaders of the Hopkins Energy Action Team, by email.
At that time, McGill said the University’s announcement would stop just short of a commitment to carbon neutrality, which HEAT and its coalition members had lobbied for rather intensely.
The message has undergone some tweaking since then, however, and today it included “a vision for carbon neutrality,” which Brody said the University would commit its considerable scientific and technological resources toward achieving.
Hopkins will also cull as many experts and high-profile figures as possible – both within and beyond the University – to fill its Climate Change Task Force, which will be charged with innovating ways to wean the University off its dependence on fossil fuels.
One such leader may just be Hopkins’ newly appointed board chair, Pamela Flaherty, who as the director of corporate citizenship at Citigroup has overseen that company’s environmental and sustainability initiatives. Flaherty was unavailable to comment on that speculation today.
See the text of the University announcement here.
sal.gentile@jhunewsletter.com
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