University Announces Carbon Neutrality
The next steps towards a sustainable campus
Campus operations at Santa Clara have run throughout 2020 with zero carbon emissions, becoming one of the few universities to reach the first stage of carbon neutrality.
Acting President of the University Lisa Kloppenberg announced the achievement in an email sent out to the Santa Clara Community on March 29.
The announcement detailed other components of Santa Clara’s carbon commitment, including neutralizing emissions associated with campus energy use by 2020, as well as neutralizing emissions associated with energy use and transportation, or commute and business travel, by 2029. It also reported that Santa Clara has decreased energy use per square foot by 42% since 2005.
Acting President Kloppenberg also mentioned the university’s “Energy Master Plan,” describing the plan as “a continued, ambitious course to reduce energy usage through efficiency upgrades, metering and retro-commissioning building systems.”
Emily Pachoud, the program coordinator of ENACT, a campus advocacy and discussion group to work towards fighting for environmental justice, spoke with The Santa Clara about the magnitude of SCU’s carbon neutrality stating, “It’s a pretty significant impact even for just a small part of campus functions to be carbon neutral.”
“In my opinion it seems like they’re picking more of an easy route,” Pachoud continued. “A route that’s not as hard on their profits, from what I know. There’s definitely bigger things that they could be doing, but it is still significant.”
One of ENACT’s greatest roles is putting pressure on the university to divest from fossil fuels.
The campaign to divest in fossil fuels began at Santa Clara in 2013 and was known as Fossil Free SCU (FFSCU). The university declined the request by FFSCU in 2015 to divest of energy stocks in the endowment portfolio. In 2019, the Investment Committee indicated its ongoing support for that decision.
According to Pachoud, Creighton University, a fellow Jesuit institution, recently divested from fossil fuels. They committed to divestment within a year of the start of their campaign.
Other universities across the country have divested from fossil fuels for both environmental and financial reasons.
Georgetown University, another fellow Jesuit institution, has been committed to divestment since February 2020, as reported by The Washington Post. According to the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, 16 other universities have committed to divestment, including Stanford, San Francisco State University and California Institute of the Arts.
According to Rolling Stone, the University of California system decided to go fossil fuel free for business reasons.
“We cannot label ourselves as a sustainable campus that cares about environmental justice as long as we directly have money funding the most influential industries degrading our planet and robbing us of a future,” said FFSCU leader, Sophia Smith. “Any ‘carbon footprint’ that our small university campus could potentially have is absolutely miniscule compared to the actual industries poisoning our land, water, air, and people.”
“SCU not only claims to be a sustainable institution, but they claim, especially recently, to be working to be an antiracist institution,” said Pachoud. “It’s really important to recognize that black people, indigenous people and people of color are hit hardest by climate change now, and will continue to be hit hardest by climate change impacts in the future. The fact that SCU is not taking the climate crisis seriously and not taking the threat of fossil fuels seriously does not live up to their goal of working to be an antiracist institution.”
To learn more about SCU’s next steps towards carbon neutrality and sustainability, visit the SCU Center for Sustainability’s Sustainability Strategic Plan.