Wait, those aren't my greenhouse gas emissions
When you fill out the EPA’s carbon footprint calculator, the program estimates the annual quantity of CO2 that you release into the atmosphere. An average American family of four with two cars estimates about 45,554 pounds of CO2 per year. And one with three cars estimates about 56,038 pounds of CO2. And if that family turns down their heating 3 degrees in the winter, and their AC up 3 degrees in the summer, and replaces 10 incandescent light bulbs with ENERGY STAR lights, they will save an estimated $76 yearly and reduce their estimated CO2 emissions by 978 pounds.
But what does that really mean? Doesn’t it all just become gibberish after a while? Not to pick on the EPA, but what good is this estimate if it doesn’t include your airline travel, the gas burned from your lawnmower, the electricity you used to charge your phone at your friend’s house, the methane cow farts from the hamburger you ate from McDonalds yesterday, the gas that it took to get that dead slab of Texan meat into your Minnesotan mouth, or heck, why not even the CO2 you exhaled while reading this blog post? Your decisions affected all of these scenarios, so why don’t they count in your carbon footprint calculator? If they aren’t my greenhouse gas emissions then whose are they? And not to sound futile, but if we can’t accurately estimate an average American family of four, how are we supposed to estimate Macalester’s micro-society of 2,216.2375 weighted campus users (according to our 2020 AASHE STARS report)? And they serve hamburgers in Cafe Mac everyday! These sorts of line-drawing questions are what myself, along with some very smart people (Macalester’s Energy Manager, Mike Pumroy, and the Sustainability Office’s Director, Christie Manning, and Coordinator, Alyssa Erding), are asking.
Institutions will generally break down their emissions into three Scopes: Scope 1 includes our direct emissions, emissions that were produced from sources owned and controlled by the campus, such as our heater which burns natural gas to create steam/hot water; Scope 2 includes our indirect emissions, ones that affect operations within our bounds, but we do not own/control - this includes any sort of purchased electricity, cooling, etc. from Xcel Energy/our community solar farm; and Scope 3 includes any sort of indirect emissions we have sway over not already covered under Scope 2, which are most of the things I was picking on the EPA for earlier - airline travel, carbon lifecycles of goods/services we purchase, waste generated in operations and the like. Scopes 1 and 2 are simpler than Scope 3—we can easily follow the paper trail to our Xcel Energy receipts to see how much energy we purchased in August 2017, or find the amount of natural gas burned in March 2019, but Scope 3… Where do you draw the line?
Macalester has historically counted some Scope 3 emissions such as how our campus commutes, our waste operations, and most noticeably (and most infamously to Sustainability Office workers) our study-away airline flights. This data is collected via survey at the end of the semester once all study-away students come back:
Then the 133 study-away programs worth of data must go through the hours-long, mindless process of cleaning (Just the flights though! No bus rides…) to input into our system called Figbytes, which calculates our emissions based on some unlinked sources. This is no joke; and, as a former office worker put it, “Recording the airline data has haunted—and will continue to haunt—generations of student workers in the Sustainability Office.”
It takes us back to a question I asked earlier: “What does that really mean?” Is it really worth nit-picking the boundaries in our squishy Scope 3 emissions? Is it worth a painstaking process with an annual $4,000 Figbytes price tag? We’ve decided that time and money could be much better spent than on invisible sand-counting projects; instead, around campus on more visible acts of sustainability, such as hiring more student workers to advocate for more student programs and campus involvement, and to advocate for more purposeful justifications for why sustainability is important to Macalester (environmental justice!), and so on, and so on, and so on. It’s not to say that we shouldn’t be wary of our airline emissions, but more so that we get a stronger utility purchasing offsets than getting lost in the sometimes arbitrary nature of numbers.
But what does that really mean? Doesn’t it all just become gibberish after a while? Not to pick on the EPA, but what good is this estimate if it doesn’t include your airline travel, the gas burned from your lawnmower, the electricity you used to charge your phone at your friend’s house, the methane cow farts from the hamburger you ate from McDonalds yesterday, the gas that it took to get that dead slab of Texan meat into your Minnesotan mouth, or heck, why not even the CO2 you exhaled while reading this blog post? Your decisions affected all of these scenarios, so why don’t they count in your carbon footprint calculator? If they aren’t my greenhouse gas emissions then whose are they? And not to sound futile, but if we can’t accurately estimate an average American family of four, how are we supposed to estimate Macalester’s micro-society of 2,216.2375 weighted campus users (according to our 2020 AASHE STARS report)? And they serve hamburgers in Cafe Mac everyday! These sorts of line-drawing questions are what myself, along with some very smart people (Macalester’s Energy Manager, Mike Pumroy, and the Sustainability Office’s Director, Christie Manning, and Coordinator, Alyssa Erding), are asking.
Institutions will generally break down their emissions into three Scopes: Scope 1 includes our direct emissions, emissions that were produced from sources owned and controlled by the campus, such as our heater which burns natural gas to create steam/hot water; Scope 2 includes our indirect emissions, ones that affect operations within our bounds, but we do not own/control - this includes any sort of purchased electricity, cooling, etc. from Xcel Energy/our community solar farm; and Scope 3 includes any sort of indirect emissions we have sway over not already covered under Scope 2, which are most of the things I was picking on the EPA for earlier - airline travel, carbon lifecycles of goods/services we purchase, waste generated in operations and the like. Scopes 1 and 2 are simpler than Scope 3—we can easily follow the paper trail to our Xcel Energy receipts to see how much energy we purchased in August 2017, or find the amount of natural gas burned in March 2019, but Scope 3… Where do you draw the line?
Macalester has historically counted some Scope 3 emissions such as how our campus commutes, our waste operations, and most noticeably (and most infamously to Sustainability Office workers) our study-away airline flights. This data is collected via survey at the end of the semester once all study-away students come back:
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| Sample of spreadsheet with flight information for arrival, return, and intermediary travel of study-away students |
Then the 133 study-away programs worth of data must go through the hours-long, mindless process of cleaning (Just the flights though! No bus rides…) to input into our system called Figbytes, which calculates our emissions based on some unlinked sources. This is no joke; and, as a former office worker put it, “Recording the airline data has haunted—and will continue to haunt—generations of student workers in the Sustainability Office.”
It takes us back to a question I asked earlier: “What does that really mean?” Is it really worth nit-picking the boundaries in our squishy Scope 3 emissions? Is it worth a painstaking process with an annual $4,000 Figbytes price tag? We’ve decided that time and money could be much better spent than on invisible sand-counting projects; instead, around campus on more visible acts of sustainability, such as hiring more student workers to advocate for more student programs and campus involvement, and to advocate for more purposeful justifications for why sustainability is important to Macalester (environmental justice!), and so on, and so on, and so on. It’s not to say that we shouldn’t be wary of our airline emissions, but more so that we get a stronger utility purchasing offsets than getting lost in the sometimes arbitrary nature of numbers.
Written by Sustainability Office student worker Aaron Backs
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