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Clean Air-Cool Planet is the Northeast's leading nonprofit organization dedicated to finding and promoting solutions to global warming.
 Read about our current partners’ leadership efforts: Profiles in progress: College of the Atlantic Eastern CT State University Massachusetts Institute of Technology Roger Williams University Saint Joseph College
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Middlebury College Profile Established in 1800, Middlebury College has a long-standing tradition in liberal arts education with an international focus. Middlebury serves 2,270 students and is comprises a 350 acre main campus and a 1,800 acre mountain campus, both situated, with Vermont’s Green Mountains to the east and New York’s Adirondack Mountains to the west, in the town of Middlebury, Vermont. Middlebury College practices an environmental ethic in all of its undertakings. The Environmental Council (EC), a committee of students, staff, and faculty, advises the president on campus environmental policy and provides incentives through grants to keep environmental policy at the forefront of Middlebury experience and planning. Perhaps the most expansive effort of the committee has been to address concerns over climate change through comprehensive analysis and action on energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.
Past Initiatives For two academic years, the EC focused on documenting greenhouse gas emissions and developing a process for reducing campus carbon emissions. Doug Dagan ‘03 was hired to complete an extensive emissions inventory, adapting a toolkit distributed by Clean Air-Cool Planet (CA-CP). The emissions inventory process was used to compile campus data from 1990-2000. The Environmental Council brought a Carbon Reduction Initiative (CRI) proposal before the College’s Community Council in October 2002, requesting the establishment of a working group of faculty, staff, students and key members of the administration, including the treasurer of the College and the Director of Environmental Affairs. The group’s task would be to set a specific carbon reduction goal and a carbon reduction plan to outline the steps necessary to achieve that goal. The proposal received unanimous approval and key committees of the College including the Community Council, Student Government Association, Faculty Council and Staff Council made appointments to the group. In January of 2003, students from an environmental studies class, “Scientific and Institutional Challenges of Becoming Carbon Neutral,” presented a 200-page report prepared for the Carbon Reduction Initiative Committee (CRIC). The report is entitled "Carbon Neutrality at Middlebury College: A Compilation of Potential Objectives and Strategies to Minimize Campus Climate Impact." This report, coupled with the emissions inventory completed by Doug Dagan ‘03, was used extensively by the CRI Working Group to begin to develop Middlebury College’s Climate Change Action Plan.
Current Initiatives The CRIC provided a summary of their progress report to the Executive Council as well as the Environmental and Community Councils in May 2003. The report recommends a preliminary goal of reducing carbon emissions by 8% below 1990 levels by 2012. In addition to a quantitative goal, the report defined numerous sub goals including the desire to make the process used at Middlebury transferable to other institutions; to invest in local projects, particularly when considering offsets and carbon sequestration measures; to avoid strategies that transfer the impact to another environmental realm; and to maximize the employment of strategies that effectively reduce emissions on campus before resorting to the purchase of offsets or carbon sequestration endeavors external to campus operations. Research on several carbon reducing strategies are underway.
Future Initiatives
Contact Nan Jenks Jay |