By Caroline Preston for The Hechinger Report.
Broadcast version by Edwin J. Viera for New York News Connection reporting for The Hechinger Report-Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

At the end of a semester that presaged one of the hottest summers on record, the students in Associate Professor Michael Sheridan’s business class were pitching proposals to cut waste and emissions on their campus and help turn it into a vehicle for fighting climate change.

Flanking a giant whiteboard at the front of the classroom, members of the team campaigning to build a solar canopy on a SUNY New Paltz parking lot delivered their pitch. The sunbaked lot near the athletic center was an ideal spot for a shaded solar panel structure, they said, a conduit for solar energy that could curb the campus’s reliance on natural gas. 

The project would require $43,613 in startup money. It would be profitable within roughly five years, the students said. And over 50 years, it would save the university $787,130 in energy costs.

“Solar canopies have worked for other universities, including other SUNY schools,” said Ian Lominski, a graduating senior who said he hopes to one day work for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. “It’s well within the realm of possibility for SUNY New Paltz.” 

Sheridan’s course is an example of an approach known as “campus as a living lab,” which seeks to simultaneously educate students and reduce the carbon footprint of college campuses. Over the past decade, a growing number of professors in fields as diverse as business, English and the performing arts have integrated their teaching with efforts to minimize their campuses’ waste and emissions, at a time when human-created climate change is fueling dangerous weather and making life on Earth increasingly unstable.

Engineering students have helped retrofit buildings. Theater students have produced no-waste productions. Ecology students have restored campus wetlands. Architecture students have modeled campus buildings’ airflow and worked to improve their energy efficiency. The efforts are so diverse that it’s difficult to get a complete count of them, but they’ve popped up on hundreds of campuses around the country.

“I think it’s a very, very positive step,” said Bryan Alexander, a senior scholar at Georgetown University and author of the book “Universities on Fire: Higher Education in the Climate Crisis.” “You’ve got the campus materials, you’ve got the integration of teaching and research, which we claim to value, and it’s also really good for students in a few ways,” including by helping them take action on climate in ways that can improve mental health.

That said, the work faces difficulties, among them that courses typically last only a semester, making it hard to maintain projects. But academics and experts see promising results: Students learn practical skills in a real-world context, and their projects provide vivid examples to help educate entire campuses and communities about solutions to alleviate climate change.

From the food waste students and staff produce, to emissions from commuting to campus and flying to conferences, to the energy needed to power campus buildings, higher education has a significant climate footprint. In New York, buildings are among the single largest sources of carbon emissions — and the State University of New York system owns a whopping 40 percent of the state’s public buildings. 

About 15 years ago, college leaders began adding “sustainability officers” to their payrolls and signing commitments to achieve carbon neutrality. But only a dozen of the 400 institutions that signed on have achieved net-zero emissions to date, according to Bridget Flynn, senior manager of climate programs with the nonprofit Second Nature, which runs the network of universities committed to decarbonizing. (The SUNY system has a goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2045, per its chancellor, John B. King Jr.) 

Campus sustainability efforts have faced hurdles including politics and declining enrollment and revenue, say experts. “Higher ed is in crisis and institutions are so concerned about keeping their doors open, and sustainability is seen as nice to have instead of essential,” said Meghan Fay Zahniser, who leads the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.

But there’s change happening on some campuses, she and others noted. At Dickinson College, in Pennsylvania, a net-zero campus since 2020, students in statistics classes have run data analyses to assess why certain buildings are less efficient than others. Psychology students studying behavior change helped the campus dining hall adopt a practice of offering half, full and double portions to cut down on food waste. Physics students designed solar thermal boxes to boost renewable biogas production on an organic farm owned by the college. 

Neil Leary, associate provost and director of the college’s Center for Sustainability Education, teaches classes in sustainability. Last fall’s students analyzed climate risks and resilience strategies for the campus and its surrounding county and then ran a workshop for community members. Among the recommendations emerging from the class: that athletic coaches and facilities staff receive training on heat-related health risks. 

Similarly, at SUNY Binghamton, Pamela Mischen, chief sustainability officer and an environmental studies professor, teaches a course called Planning the Sustainable University. Her students, who come from majors including environmental studies, engineering and pre-law, have helped develop campus green purchasing systems, started a student-run community garden and improved reuse rates for classroom furniture. 

And across the country, at Weber State University in Utah, students have joined the campus’s push toward renewable energy. Engineering students, for example, helped build a solar-powered charging station on a picnic table. A professor in the school’s construction and building sciences program led students in designing and building a net-zero house.

On the leafy SUNY New Paltz campus about 80 miles north of Manhattan, campus sustainability coordinator Lisa Mitten has spent more than a decade working to reduce the university’s environmental toll. Among the projects she runs is a sustainability faculty fellows program that helps professors incorporate climate action into their instruction. 

One day this May, Andrea Varga, an associate professor of theatre design and a sustainability fellow, listened as the students in her honors Ethical Fashion class presented their final projects. Varga’s class covers the environmental harms of the global fashion industry (research suggests it is responsible for at least 4 percent of greenhouse emissions worldwide, or roughly the total emissions of Germany, France and the United Kingdom combined). For their presentations, her students had developed ideas for reducing fashion’s toll, on the campus and beyond, by promoting thrifting, starting “clothes repair cafes” and more.

Jazmyne Daily-Simpson, a student from Long Island scheduled to graduate in 2025, discussed expanding a project started a few years earlier by a former student, Roy Ludwig, to add microplastic filters to more campus washing machines. In a basement laundry room in Daily-Simpson’s dorm, two washers are rigged with the contraptions, which gradually accumulate a goopy film as they trap the microplastic particles and keep them from entering the water supply.

Ludwig, a 2022 graduate who now teaches Earth Science at Arlington High School about 20 miles from New Paltz, took Varga’s class and worked with her on an honors project to research and install the filters. A geology major, he’d been shocked that it took a fashion class to introduce him to the harms of microplastics, which are found in seafood, breast milk, semen and much more. “It’s an invisible problem that not everyone is thinking about,” he said. “You can notice a water bottle floating in a river. You can’t notice microplastics.”

Around campus, there are other signs of the living lab model. Students in an economics class filled the entryway of a library with posters on topics such as the lack of public walking paths and bike lanes in the surrounding county and inadequate waste disposal in New York State. A garden started by sculpture and printmaking professors serves as a space for students to learn about plants used to make natural dyes that don’t pollute the environment. 

In the business school classroom, Sheridan, the associate professor, had kicked off the student presentations by explaining to an audience that included campus facilities managers and local green business leaders how the course, called Introduction to Managing Sustainability, originated when grad students pitched the idea in 2015. The projects are powered by a “green revolving fund,” which accumulates money from cost savings created by past projects, such as reusable to-go containers and LED lightbulbs in campus buildings. Currently the fund has about $30,000. 

“This class has two overarching goals,” said Sheridan, who studied anthropology and sustainable development as an undergraduate before pursuing a doctorate in business. The first is to localize the United Nations global goals for advancing sustainability, he said, and the second is “to prove that sustainability initiatives can be a driver for economic growth.” 

In addition to the solar canopy project, students presented proposals for developing a reusable water bottle program, creating a composter and garden, digitizing dining hall receipts and organizing a bikeshare. They gamely fielded questions from the audience, many of whom had served as mentors on their projects.

Jonathan Garcia, a third-year business management major on the composting team, said later that he’d learned an unexpected skill: how to deal with uncooperative colleagues. “We had an issue with one of our teammates who just never showed up, so I had to manage that, and then people elected me leader of the group,” he said later. “I learned a lot of team-management skills.”

The solar panel team had less drama. Its members interviewed representatives from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, Central Hudson Gas & Electric and a local company, Lighthouse Solar, along with Mitten and other campus officials. Often, they met three times a week to research and discuss their proposal, participants said.

Lominski, the senior, plans to enroll this fall in a graduate program at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, in Syracuse. Before Sheridan’s class, he said, he had little specific knowledge of how solar panels worked. The course also helped him refine his project management and communication skills, he said. 

His solar panel teammate Madeleine Biles, a senior majoring in management, transferred to New Paltz from SUNY Binghamton before her sophomore year because she wanted a school that felt more aligned with her desire to work for a smaller, environmentally minded business. 

An avid rock climber whose parents were outdoor educators, she’d developed some financial skills in past business classes, she said, but the exercises had always felt theoretical. This class made those lessons about return on investment and internal rate of return feel concrete. “Before it was just a bunch of formulas where I didn’t know when or why I would ever use them,” she said. 

This summer, Biles is interning with the Lake George Land Conservancy, and hopes to eventually carve out a career protecting the environment. While she said she feels fortunate that her hometown of Lake George, in New York’s Adirondack region, isn’t as vulnerable as some places to climate change, the crisis weighs on her. 

“I think if I have a career in sustainability, that will be my way of channeling that frustration and sadness and turning it into a positive thing,” she said. 

She recently got a taste of what that might feel like: In an email from Sheridan, she learned that her team’s canopy project was chosen to receive the startup funding. The school’s outgoing campus facilities chief signed off on it, and, pending approval from the department’s new leader, the university will begin the process of constructing it.

“It’s cool to know that something I worked on as a school project is actually going to happen,” said Biles. “A lot of students can’t really say that. A lot of projects are kind of like simulations. This one was real life.”


Caroline Preston wrote this article for The Hechinger Report.

Support for this reporting was provided by Lumina Foundation.


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Across Pennsylvania and other northern U.S. states, climate change -- from burning oil, coal and methane gas -- is increasing the number of winter days with minimum temperatures above freezing.

The phenomenon is known as "lost winter" and a Climate Shift Index analysis of temperatures showed more than 60% of 28 snow belt states are having at least one additional week of days above freezing.

Shel Winkely, a meteorologist and weather and climate engagement specialist for Climate Central, said winter weather will not be as cold for as long as it used to be.

"Temperatures that are below freezing -- so, 32 degrees Fahrenheit, or zero degrees Celsius -- those are important days," Winkely explained. "We found out how many days climate change has taken away overnight lows that are at or below the freezing temperature."

Winkley pointed out when you look at the 30-year average of snowfall for Pennsylvania, cities like Philadelphia now have only a 9% chance of seeing a white Christmas, with Pittsburgh faring a bit better at about 31%.

Winkley emphasized the loss of cold winter days can negatively affect some regions that depend economically on winter sports for recreation and tourism income. He added lost winter days can also contribute to a smaller snowpack, meaning less spring-melt water is available for municipal systems or agricultural operations.

"On the whole, the state, when you take the average over this decade -- again, 2014 to 2023 -- climate change added about 10 days per year above 32 degrees or so above freezing," Winkley reported.

Winkley noted the report does not mean winters are going away but the warming climate is making winters shorter and less intense.

"This doesn't mean that there's not cold, or that we're losing all of the cold," Winkley stressed. "We still have cold that is to be found. It just means that we're losing those classic winters. This isn't the winters that our parents experienced or that our grandparents experienced."


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By Ysabelle Kempe for Smart Cities Dive.
Broadcast version by Freda Ross for Texas News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Lately, the city of Dallas has been hearing from local leaders across the U.S. and as far as London, England, said Rosana Savcic, a division manager in the city's code compliance department. What has caught their attention? A city policy that took effect in 2017 requiring landlords to provide working air conditioning equipment.

More cities are looking into establishing a renter's right to cooling equipment as climate change drives record-breaking temperatures across the world. Such rules codify tenants' right to housing that can be cooled to a specific maximum indoor temperature, a number that varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Tenants may still be on the hook for their energy bills, however.

Right now, cities that require landlords to provide AC systems are the exception, not the rule, says V. Kelly Turner, a heat policy researcher and associate director of the University of California, Los Angeles' Luskin Center for Innovation.

That may be changing. Montgomery County, Maryland, passed a first-in-the-region law in 2020 requiring many landlords to provide AC equipment capable of cooling units to at least 80 degrees Fahrenheit from June through September. A 2022 Chicago law requires some large residential buildings or buildings for older people to provide AC in common spaces when the outdoor heat index exceeds 80 F. A New Orleans rule went into effect this year mandating AC equipment that can cool bedrooms to at least 80 F.

In New York City's sustainability plan, the nation's largest city indicates its intention to develop a summer indoor maximum temperature policy by 2030. In July, a NYC council member introduced legislation that would require landlords to provide AC equipment in the summer. Los Angeles County officials are in the early stages of developing a similar policy.

The case for cooling

The trend toward cooling requirements is part of a broader recognition that climate change necessitates new protections and policies, experts say.

"What we're learning is we have to develop policies specific to the issue of heat," said Ashley Ward, director of Duke University's Heat Policy Innovation Hub. In addition to rental cooling standards, heat-specific policy needs include worker protections and universal cooling for schools and prisons, Ward notes.

The major challenge proponents of rental cooling standards need to overcome, Ward says, is the public perception that air conditioning is a luxury, not a necessity. That perception "is why we can justify not having air conditioning in prisons. Forty percent of our schools in the U.S. have inadequate HVAC," Ward said. But as heat records get broken again and again, and heat-related deaths escalate, proponents see policymaker attitudes shifting.

Limitations of right-to-cooling policies

While rental cooling standards may be a step toward addressing urban heat impacts on residents, these policies aren't perfect solutions, Ward said.

Even if lower-income renters have AC equipment, they might not turn it on for fear of high energy bills. That's why some experts have urged states and cities to complement rental cooling standards with utility bill assistance programs that take cooling needs into account. States typically use much more of the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program to help people with heating rather than cooling bills. And while the need for support is growing, the pot of available LIHEAP funding shrank from $6.1 billion in fiscal year 2023 to $4.1 billion in fiscal year 2024, according to a June report from the National Energy Assistance Directors Association and Center for Energy Poverty and Climate.

Cities need to start monitoring low-income households' ability to pay for cooling, Turner said in an email. That data could build a case for better supporting cooling through subsidy programs like LIHEAP.

Utilities can also help make cooling more affordable, explained Gregory Pierce, research and co-executive director of UCLA's Luskin Center and an associate professor of urban planning. State public utilities commissions can play a big role in imposing or encouraging utility-run energy affordability programs, but cities can pitch in on the effort, too, such as by collaborating with utilities on programs that make baseline amounts of energy more affordable for people, Turner said.

Tiered payment programs, for example, charge those who use a lot of electricity a higher rate than those who use less. Hotter weather, however, might mean those tiers need to be adjusted, so that the most affordable tier accounts for the amount of energy needed to cool the typical home, Pierce said.

"Not a lot of utilities have, I think, adjusted those tiers accordingly yet to account for AC, much less electrification," he said.

Any equity-oriented program must involve listening to community members about their specific struggles, Turner added. "There may be solutions we don't even know to think about because we need to hear from those that would be facing those tough choices," such as between turning on the AC and putting food on the table, she said.

Rental cooling standards also present other challenges. Cash-strapped landlords may struggle to undertake complex, expensive retrofits. Waste heat that AC equipment generates increases the urban heat island effect, and adding cooling equipment to buildings can drive up greenhouse gas emissions - although heat pumps allow building owners to simultaneously offer cooling and potentially replace fossil fuel-powered HVAC equipment.

How low should cities go?

Then there's the question of what cities should set as the maximum temperature in rental housing. Dallas' rule requires AC equipment that can keep rooms at least 15 degrees cooler than the outdoor temperature, with a maximum temperature threshold of 85 F. That means that even if it's 105 degrees outside, rental housing must be equipped to stay at 85 F or cooler.

Ward thinks cities should set the maximum temperature lower. She cites 73 F as the threshold for a good night's sleep and recovery. She recommends cities set a maximum temperature around 76 F, since fans can help bring the temperature down another couple of degrees.

However, over-debating the exact maximum temperature can stifle productive policymaking, Turner warned. She said she'd rather set the maximum temperature at 80 F and start a conversation about what it will take to implement the policy, including developing a complaint-reporting process and finding funding.

"To some degree, the question isn't, 'Can we get exactly [the right] temperature?' The question is, 'Can we get something on the books to at least give people a fighting chance of having a safe thermal environment?'" she said. "Once we do that, we can start to tinker."


Ysabelle Kempe wrote this article for Smart Cities Dive.


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Three environmental nonprofits filed suit Wednesday against the California Air Resources Board to oppose the expansion of a program allowing oil and gas companies to offset their pollution by buying credits from huge farms producing natural gas from animal waste.

Last month, the state amended the low carbon fuel standard to expand credits favoring biogas, arguing it removes methane from the waste stream and creates renewable power.

Tyler Lobdell, staff attorney for the nonprofit co-plaintiff Food and Water Watch, said the program is actually a perverse incentive for factory farms to get bigger.

"The biggest operators, the biggest polluters, are the most rewarded," Lobdell pointed out. "That is the incentive structure here. Go out and be as big and as polluting as possible, and you will see the largest reward from our program."

The low carbon fuel standard is intended to reduce carbon pollution by incentivizing the transition to clean cars. The lawsuit argued the credit program prioritizes pollution-heavy practices over sustainable solutions.

Lobdell noted manure only produces methane when large quantities are liquefied at concentrated animal feeding operations. He suggested the state require factory farms to manage their manure in ways which do not rely on anaerobic environments emitting methane.

"The real solution to addressing pollution is to reduce the pollution, not to monetize it and lock it in for generations," Lobdell contended. "We should be requiring these facilities to more sustainably manage their waste. That would have climate benefits, that would also have benefits to local air quality and to local water quality."

The lawsuit asks the court to require the California Air Resources Board to disclose, analyze and mitigate the environmental impact caused by the change to the low-carbon fuel standard. The other two plaintiffs include the nonprofits Defensores del Valle Central para el Aire y Agua Limpio, and the Animal Legal Defense Fund.


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