We wrote two years ago in "Dartmouth, the Dirty Ivy" that this Ivy League school located in Hanover, New Hampshire, was burning massive amounts of fuel oil on its campus to heat its buildings. It also burned fuel to spin turbines to make most of its electrical power. Per student, it's for sure still the biggest consumer of fossil fuels in the Ivy League, and the largest CO2 emitter. It burns 3.5 million gallons of #6 fuel oil each year, or 530 gallons per student. That’s the equivalent of 12.6 barrels of crude oil per student per year. By contrast, the average citizen in India only uses, in total, the equivalent of 1.5 barrels per year.
At the time of our article, Dartmouth lacked any coherent plan to change its fossil fuel trajectory, much less put its talented faculty and students to work to address this global train wreck. As a leading educational institution in the U.S., with a stated mission to help solve the world’s big problems, Dartmouth needed to do better, and we said so.
We are glad to report that last week the new Dartmouth President, Sian Leah Beilock, made a big announcement. Adopting many of our suggestions, her announcement states: “Over the next five years, Dartmouth will invest more than half a billion dollars in improvements to our physical plant to reduce emissions on campus 60% by 2030, and 100% by 2050 - the largest investment focused on sustainability in our history. Our aging infrastructure - some of which is more than 100 years old - is in dire need of repair, and rather than sinking resources into an outdated system, we will take this opportunity to reduce our carbon footprint in a lasting way. This will include upgrades to improve energy efficiency, continuing the transition from steam to hot water heating, and the installation of geo-exchange borefields and high-capacity heat pumps in order to aggressively reduce our greenhouse gas impact. We acknowledge that our past efforts around campus decarbonization have come up short. Our new, much more aggressive goals are designed to help us lead in campus sustainability - especially in more rural cold-climate locations.”
We are pleased to see this new plan, as it incorporates some of our suggestions, such as air source and geothermal heat pumps, which are now able to heat large commercial buildings even in sub-zero Fahrenheit temperatures. The plan also mentions energy efficiency, which we assume means major upgrades to building envelopes (walls, windows, doors and roofs). However, there’s no mention of where the school will source its renewable electrical energy? In our column we suggested solar, wind or hydro sources.
Dartmouth now seems serious about “doing the right thing” but also must envision a near future when burning fossil fuels becomes excessively expensive, either due to limited supplies or because global policies force fossil fuel consumers to pay to pollute the atmosphere with CO2 and wreak havoc on the climate. That’s bound to happen sooner than later. They also certainly expect to run the Hanover assets for another century or two; thus the need to make long range plans.
Unlike Dartmouth, most real estate owners won’t permanently own the assets they build or acquire. Their goal is to invest and take profits at the earliest convenience. Given their short-range expectations, most think they’ll be in and out of assets before climate change pokes in its nose and devalues them. In denial, most fail to appreciate that climate change has already done damage to Gulf Coast/Florida/Carolinas real estate assets as projected profits have been obliterated by insurance costs that have doubled and tripled in just a few years. Property insurance is the capitalist system for valuing future risk, but only one year into the future as that’s the typical policy term. In addition hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, droughts and fires are all on the march, leaving most assets in harm’s way.
