news-record.com

Skip to the site menu
Skip to search

BLOGS

Advertisement | Advertise with Us

Off the Record

« Return to blog

Big goal for UNC

Morgan reports a huge policy initiative adopted by the UNC Board of Governors Friday.

(Although apparently not huge enough for the UNC system to include in its "latest university news" on its Web site.)

I hope there will be much more explanation forthcoming from Chapel Hill.

The goal of achieving "carbon neutrality" within four decades sounds farsighted, but who really knows what it means?

The public needs to have some idea of

1) how much that will cost

2) what impact it will have on the university system's constitutional mandate to provide higher education free of charge (to the extent "practicable") to the people of the state, and

3) what achieving such a goal would accomplish.

Something like a cost-benefit analysis.

According to the story, this will require the system to either generate no carbon dioxide emissions or "offset emissions with carbon storage projects."

The first option is impossible.

The second is promising -- it's strongly endorsed by U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu -- but a long way from reality on the scale needed.

Normally, the claim of carbon neutrality is based on the purchase of carbon offsets -- planting trees in sufficient numbers to suck up an equivalent quantity of CO2, for example -- but that's of questionable reliability. Planting a million trees is one thing; assuring they all grow to maturity and realize their full CO2-absorbing potential is another matter.

The last thing the UNC system should want to do is spend of lot of students' and taxpayers' money -- when the cost of higher education already stretches state and personal budgets -- for questionable results.

Of course, all public and private institutions should seek to reduce waste and pursue sustainability through prudent energy use, conservation, better technology and so on. But, if the utopian goal of carbon neutrality is reached by 2050, will doing so even have an impact on climate?

Well, at least we've got our best minds on it. Right?

Permalink

Posted by Doug Clark on Wednesday, October 14, 2009 at 8:23 am

What do you think?

3 comment(s)

Read other visitors' comments.

Other Recent Entries

Democrats' troubles take the heat off Burr (Nov. 25)
Get rid of the problem, then worry about the next step (Nov. 25)
The California story (Nov. 25)
Check in, don't check out (Nov. 24)
Any day now (Nov. 24)

RSS: Subscribe to this blog

Comments

This article has been closed to new comments. Comments are generally closed after 14 days. However, comments may be closed earlier at the discretion of the News & Record.

Inappropriate content? Please notify us.

tonymo

October 14, 2009 - 10:30 am EDT

Last year CO2 emissions fell about 2.5 percent. It only took almost complet destruciton of our economy to do it! CO2 is a by product of life. No one has been able to PROVE there is any connection between CO2 and warming.The IPCC, finally figured out what some have been telling us for a couple of years, that the warming trend stopped about 10-12 years ago. THERE HAS BEEN NO WARMING OF THE PLANET FOR TEN YEARS WHILE CO2 EMISSIONS HAVE CONTINUED TO RISE (except for the one year of a broken economy).

Have you ever noticed that whenever the planet cools it is because of "natural" forces such a sunspot activity, warming or cooling of the oceans, El Nino, La Nina, etc.but everytime we experience a warming trend it'secause of we evil humans, and that evil CO2 that we exhale!

These people have a similar mindset, and apparently come fom the same gene pool as the lunatics that wanted to put a 6 year old Cub Scout in a reformatory for bringing his new scout knife to school to use to eat his lunch! Yeah, I sure put a lot of faith in those clowns!

brian444

October 14, 2009 - 12:21 pm EDT

Cost = lots of money
Benefit = self-approval

On the other hand, worldwide temperatures have declined substantially since we adopted the "Cool Cities" plan. I credit Keith Holliday with ending global warming.

brian444

October 14, 2009 - 1:41 pm EDT

Here's Irving Kristol on point in "Symbolic Politics and Liberal Reform":

"The amateur [poet]’s feelings are sincere enough — why else should he be writing poetry? — but he takes the writing of poetry to be more important than the poem itself. For him, writing poetry is a kind of symbolic action, in which he liberates his most earnest sentiments, and it is in this impatient action and in this instant liberation that he seeks fulfillment.” The successful poet, meanwhile, "understands that a plea of sincerity is of no account in the ultimate court of literary judgment, which will look at the poem itself and simply ask: Does it work?”

“It seems to me that the politics of liberal reform, in recent years, shows many of the same characteristics as amateur poetry. It has been more concerned with the kind of symbolic action that gratifies the passions of the reformer than with the efficacy of the reforms themselves.”