Global E-mail Lists and Reduction of Global Carbon Emissions

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Opinion

Global E-mail Lists and Reduction of Global Carbon Emissions

11/15/2006

By Terry Calhoun

A month or so ago I was at the kickoff meeting for an interesting new initiative to get college and university presidents to commit their institutions to major accomplishments toward solving global warming. It’s called the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) and I presume that you will all be hearing more about it as we move into 2007.

At that meeting, at Arizona State University in Tempe, I nearly made a suggestion that seemed at first to be a really good one, but then like a really bad one. It’s rare that I actually manage to keep my mouth shut under such circumstances, and I am proud that I did. On the other hand, I’m going to share the idea with you here, so that you can see just how bad it was, or not, so the effort did not last.

I had recently been reading a piece, originally in The New York Times called “The Green Diet” by Andrew Postman. In it, the author decried his own inability to make lifestyle changes that had positive sustainability effects and detailed his attempt at “weight loss,” where the “weight” lost was his carbon footprint from energy usage in terms of pounds of carbon.

It is an interesting article and I recommend it. If you are interested in your own “footprint” you might want to stop by and use the easy calculator here. I did it as I wrote this. I’m not much worse than the average American, but it takes 26 acres of land to support my habits. If everyone in the world lived like me, we’d need 5.7 planets to make it happen. Yikes.

Where higher education information technology comes in here is that the idea I had was to get, as part of each president’s commitment during the forthcoming ACUPCC, that his or her institution would allow an outside agency – the ACUPCC – to send a single mail message once a week to the institution’s “global e-mail list.” In other words, send it to every single faculty, staff, and student (and perhaps alumnus) with a related “.edu” e-mail address.

That e-mail would include one very brief, short “tip” that recipients could implement to reduce their own carbon weight, and thus that of their college, university, and/or community, along with a plea from the president saying that this is important to them and to their institution and planet.

Well, you can see why I managed to keep my mouth shut in that meeting. The thought of reaching all of those people every week so easily is pretty cool. The global e-mail lists, combined, of any large number of colleges and universities would easily reach into the millions of people, and thus have a huge potential impact.