by Members of the Sustainability Working Group

As hundreds of students, faculty, and staff at Hamilton joined millions of people around the world recently to demand climate action in the face of the ever-worsening climate crisis, we the members of the Sustainability Working Group (SWG), write to reaffirm our commitment to advancing climate action and sustainability. We invite you to join us in developing Hamilton’s path forward.

Hamilton College is committed to achieving carbon neutrality by 2050.

What does carbon neutrality mean? It means we must either eliminate all of the carbon pollution coming from our buildings, our vehicles, our electricity, and our travel, or we must remove an equivalent amount of carbon from the atmosphere by purchasing carbon offsets. Our commitment is aligned with the latest science from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which calls for 45% reductions by 2030 and 100% reductions by 2050 to avoid dangerous climate change.

So, how are we doing? In 2007, we emitted 17,360 tons of CO 2 -equivalent. In 2018, we emitted 10,700 tons, a 38% reduction (6,661 tons reduced). The vast majority of this reduction (5,100 tons reduced) has occurred largely because the mix of power plants supplying the state’s electrical grid has become greener around us, so each kilowatt-hour of electricity we use on campus today creates far less carbon pollution than a decade ago. But we also have reduced our actual on-site emissions by 4% due to multiple energy efficiency initiatives in our buildings, all while our campus itself has grown. From 2007–2018, our employee commuting emissions declined by 70%, and to continue this trend, we recently installed 10 electric vehicle charging stations. Collectively, these are the first steps toward climate action.

So, what’s next? Over the summer the College formed our working group composed of students, faculty, and staff to serve as the coordinating body for our campus-wide efforts. The group is charged with developing a sustainability plan and updating our existing

Climate Action Plan

to chart our climate action path forward. We want to ask big questions and advocate for solutions — both big and small — that make sense to advance the College’s progress. How should we heat our buildings in the future? What is the pathway to reducing our vehicle fleet emissions? Does the 2050 target date still make sense? Should we purchase offsets or not? How do we prepare for climate impacts on campus? And, importantly, how can we align our educational and sustainability goals in ways that make sense for the Hamilton community?

Answering all the complex questions about how to achieve neutrality will take a

sustained campus-wide conversation, lots of hard work, foresight, and time. To engage the campus community in the conversation, we will host several campus-wide forums to generate climate action ideas. We also invite you to submit your ideas directly via this form:


http://tinyurl.com/HamiltonClimate

We stand behind the argument that decarbonization in the next 30 years is urgent for

our campus, for our state, for our country, and for our planet. Doing it right involves the whole campus community.

Authored by: Aaron Strong, Brian Hansen, Carol Gable, Karen Leach and Roger Wakeman, organizing members of the Sustainability Working Group. Additional members of the Sustainability Working Group include: Naomi Guttman, Andrea Townsend, Andrew Jillings, Ashley Place, Reuben Haag, Don Croft, Claire Curran ’20, and Juliet Davidson ’23.