Rogers: Climate policy not realistic for UAF
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Chancellor Brian Rogers said he’s been asked by students and faculty to sign the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment, but he doesn’t think it’s a realistic goal for a campus in an extreme cold-weather environment.
His reason for resisting is simple — it’s impossible to keep UAF running in the winter without using large amounts of coal to fuel the campus power plant.
“I can’t figure out how we can heat this campus without any carbon,” Rogers said during a student open forum last week.
A nonprofit environmental organization, Second Nature, has had great success lobbying university leaders to sign the Climate Commitment pledge since it was unveiled in 2007. It asks universities to cut and offset their carbon dioxide emissions in an effort to neutralize their effect on global warming.
Signatories agree to inventory their greenhouse gas emissions, set a target date for “climate neutrality” and take actions that will lead to that goal. Other actions, such as purchasing energy from renewable sources and offsetting emissions generated by air travel, are recommended.
More than 650 chancellors and presidents have signed the commitment in the past two years, said Second Nature spokeswoman Gina Coplon-Newfield. Alaska Pacific University President Douglas North and former University of Alaska Anchorage Chancellor Elaine Maimon are among the administrators who have signed up, according to the organization’s Web site.
Rogers said he’s sympathetic to the goal and has made a more sustainable campus one of his top goals as UAF chancellor. But he said the reality of life in Fairbanks makes it difficult to honestly make such a pledge.
Fuel sources beyond coal and oil are hard to implement here, he said. Fueling a new campus power plant with wood would require 50 square miles of forest per year, Rogers said. A steady supply of natural gas would help, but the prospects for a gas pipeline to Fairbanks are hazy.
“As of today, we don’t have an alternative,” Rogers said.
Contact staff writer Jeff Richardson at 459-7518.
The university employ's people that do know what can be done about the emissions problem so you do not have to find the solution yourself. Instead you should lead the effort by creating an energy think tank that will generate real solutions. More green energy development money can flow into the region and create jobs.
Burke, I for one wouldn't be interested in paying a king's ransom to Bernie Karl to enjoy geothermal rights, an aside from the impracticality.
There was also recent news of a grant to study a geothermal area over in western Alaska this past month, so there is at least a step in the right direction to explore an energy source that might be beneficial out in that area.
Thank you Mr. Rogers, for having some sense.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5576670191369613647&ei=ndgAS6i5GIP0qAO5s_nnCQ&q=global warming swindle&hl=en#
Besides... didn't you read the story in today's paper? The Arctic is getting colder... in spite of all that CO2. Global warming due to CO2 is a myth perpetuated by people with political and economic agendas... Al Gore being right at the top of both of those lists. Perhaps you should talk to the climatologists up at the Geophysical Institute... you may learn something.
Your comment is a great example of the impracticality of liberal minds. You're not Luke Hopkins are you?
First at all, this climate commitment is based on physically inadequate statements. Currently, there is no scientific evidence that the so-called anthropogenic-global-warming (AGW) "theory" is true. Instead, the opposite is true:
(a) The Revelle-Suess equation widely considered as the opening shot in the global warming debate is physically inadequate.
(b) From a physical point of view the planetary radiative balance equation for an Earth in the absence of an atmosphere that serves to quantify the so-called "atmospheric" greenhouse effect is clearly wrong.
(c) From a physical point of view the so-called climate feedback equation is wrong (see http://arxiv.org/abs/0911.2286). However, as documented by the Chapter 2 of the 4th report of the Working Group I to the IPCC (2007) this equation serves to calculate the increase of the surface temperature due to the net global anthropogenic radiative forcing.
(d) As shown by me co-author Dr. Dr. habil. Ralph Dlugi and me (see http://arxiv.org/abs/0911.2286), the uncertainty inherent in so-called climate models prevents that climate is predictable with a sufficient degree of accuracy.
Some colleagues who denoted the AGW "theory" as a hoax are wrong. After someone hacked in to the files of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) based at the University of East Anglia , and a very large file (61 mb) was downloaded and posted to the web, we have to recognize that scientific fraudulence plaid an important role in climate science. Since the trumpeter of the hot-Earth men, The Associated Press, did not report on it, please feel free to read the article of climatologist Dr. Tim Ball entitled "The Death Blow to Climate Science" (see http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/17102).
Now if we could get Obama and congress to be forced to consider the practical implications of the cap and tax boondoggle.
From on-campus adjustments to legislative action, the Chancellor and all of UAF can take steps in the direction of emissions cuts whether or not they can transition right now to clean energy sources. I encourage the institution to explore such options and to support the clean energy bill in the Senate.
I am sympathetic to Rogers' comments about the unreality of eliminating coal as the energy source for heating the campus but he might try signing on with ANGDA as an anchor consumer for ANGDA's propane distribution plan. Propane is far more "green" than coal and is available in very large quantities on the North Slope.