By Ben Wish
Opinion Columnist

Colby already gets 100% of its energy from clean sources. Unity College, a school with an endowment far smaller than our own, has plans to build a windmill on its campus. Thirty-seven percent of Eastern University’s energy, a school of 3,000 students, comes from clean sources, and they should be up to 100% within the next few years.

These schools have made such moves towards clean energy and fantastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions through surprisingly mundane steps. They are steps that Bates can, and should, take.

This past weekend I attended the Northeast Climate Conference at Harvard University, where I heard such campus success stories, and learned about the tools used to achieve them. The strategies used at Colby, Unity, Eastern University and many other schools are relatively simple and potentially applicable to Bates.

For instance, Eastern University added an opt-out box to their tuition bill, which a person could check if they did not wish to donate $20 for ethical energy. Not surprisingly, very few people chose to check the box and the program moved forward.

At UPenn, savings from energy efficiency improvements were used to build a wind farm, where UPenn will soon be generating much of its energy. Of course, cooperation with the administration, student support and outside help from the companies that provided the clean energy were necessary at Eastern University and UPenn, but we have these resources at Bates.

We also have a reputation for environmental consciousness, a faculty that is engaged in on-campus issues and an administration that has a terrific opportunity to bring wonderful press coverage and publicity to campus.

Bates will certainly not be alone in this effort. At the Climate Conference, eight colleges and universities in Maine, including Bates, came together to organize a plan to lower greenhouse gas emissions on their campuses and in the state.

There is now a network of information that Maine colleges and universities can rely on: a group of schools that will prod, encourage and aid one another. Where Colby, Unity, Eastern University and many others succeeded on their own, Bates now has an advantage as part of a comprehensive plan that spreads across the state of Maine. This network provides Bates with an even greater opportunity to succeed.
A move to use clean energy at Bates would be especially well-suited for this time and place.

Maine recently became the first state in the United States to pass goals for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in the state legislature. These goals, agreed to in talks with governors of northeastern states and eastern Canadian premiers, are to reach 1990 levels of greenhouse gas emissions by 2010, 10% less than 1990 levels by 2020 and 75%-85% of 1990 levels at some point in the future.

At this point, legislation articulating the process to achieve these goals has not been submitted to the state legislature, but the governor and state legislature are asking for institutions to step forward take the lead and begin Maine’s effort to undo climate change by signing Voluntary Reduction Agreements (VRAs).

Colleges and universities are places of learning, places of forward progress, and, are therefore the perfect places for effort to begin.

If President Hansen signs onto a VRA in support of the state-wide initiative and backs that commitment with improvements in campus-wide energy efficiency and clean energy purchases (possibly through an opt-out clause in the tuition as at Eastern University), then Bates will become a recognized leader in the effort to undo climate change.

Of course, far more would be accomplished than accolades, press coverage and prestige. Bates is a school with a history of environmental consciousness, and we now have a unique opportunity to put that consciousness to work.

By running Bates on clean energy, at least in part, we can significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, educate ourselves, show that clean energy is a viable and desirable alternative, and garner publicity by being one of the first to strongly support Maine’s new goals that aim to undo the ill effects of climate change.




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