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 Middlebury Receives 2005 Climate Champion Award
Contact:
Bill Burtis, bburtis@cleanair-coolplanet.org, 603-502-8164
Sarah Ray, sray@middlebury.edu, 802-443-5794
NEW YORK, NY— Middlebury College received today the 2005 Climate Champion Award for “advancing campus solutions to global warming” from Clean Air - Cool Planet, the Northeast’s leading nonprofit dedicated to finding and implementing solutions to global warming, at its two-day Global Warming Solutions 2005 conference here.
Middlebury, a four-year, private liberal arts college in Vermont, received the award, which is presented every two years, for taking a systematic, mission-wide approach to action on global warming. CA-CP works with businesses, communities, and colleges in New England, New York, and New Jersey to help develop cost-effective solutions to fight climate change and promote environmental protection.
“Middlebury College exemplifies the institutional commitment to reducing heat-trapping gases and solving the climate change problem that we would like all colleges and universities to emulate,” said CA-CP Executive Director Adam Markham. “They have worked to reduce greenhouse gases and educate people in every aspect of their mission, from the trustees to faculty and staff to students and alumni.”
The award was accepted by Linda Whitton, Middlebury College trustee; Jon Isham, Middlebury College assistant professor of economics; Middlebury College senior Jacob Whitcomb; and 2005 Middlebury graduates Andrew Rossmeissl, John Hanley, Lindsey Corbin, and Michael DiRaimondo.
“This is the way we’ve found most effective at achieving meaningful reductions in greenhouse gases – involve the whole community,” said Whitton. Isham noted the institution’s long-standing efforts, citing the global-warming action resolution by the trustees in May of 2004, and Middlebury’s early agreement to meet the GHG reductions called for by the climate change plan of the New England Governors and Eastern Canadian Premiers.
Markham said Middlebury had taken several meaningful steps. Middlebury:
- Completed a campus-wide emissions inventory, being among the first colleges to adapt and use the Clean Air-Cool Planet Campus Campus Carbon Calculator®;
- Offered “Path to Carbon Neutrality” winter term course in 2003 in which 15 students led the development of potential carbon-reducing measures on campus;
- Appointed a Carbon Reduction Initiative Working Group to analyze and react to the students’ recommendations and create a portfolio of options as a plan of action
- Offered “Social Movements and Climate Change” winter term course in 2005 involving 20 students that culminated in a two-day public conference “What Works? New Strategies for a Melting Planet” bringing together national climate change leaders and students to build, share, and test strategies for a new climate movement.
- Offered “Environmental Economics,” a spring 2005 course that resulted in the development, by several 2005 Middlebury College graduates, of a credit card that enables its users to become carbon neutral. One percent of the money charged to the card is devoted to the purchase of carbon offsets, canceling out the pollution an average individual causes every day.
“We are proud to present this award to an institution that has made not just a commitment to reducing greenhouse gases,” Markham said, “but which has served as an example to others of how to succeed in taking truly meaningful steps toward curbing the threat of global warming.”
Clean Air - Cool Planet also presented five other awards at Global Warming Solutions 2005. Other awardees are Governors John Baldacci of Maine and George Pataki of New York; Bank of America; The Timberland Company; and the City of Stamford, Connecticut.
The last Climate Champion Awards were presented, at CA-CP’s 2003 conference, to Shaw’s Supermarkets, the University of New Hampshire and Tufts University, and the City of Hull, Massachusetts.
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