Students Prep for National Day of Action Calling for End to Campus Coal

Colleges and universities have been leading American society on progressive issues for years, and they now must be the vanguard of a movement away from dependence on coal-generated power.

That’s the message university students will spread across campuses coast to coast on Tuesday during a national day of action organized by the Sierra Club Student Coalition's Campuses Beyond Coal campaign. Student organizers plan rallies and demonstrations at schools that run on coal.

Campuses Beyond Coal kicked off this month as a grassroots student movement urging university leaders to eliminate coal power in favor of alternative energy sources.

Ryan Doyle, lead campus organizer at University of Missouri, said students want concrete actions to clean up university power sources — and they want them soon. So far, college activists have held protests, launched media campaigns, and circulated petitions demanding a switch to clean power.

“Ideally, [our actions] would lead to a commitment and plan being made by the University to get off of coal quickly. Then, we would see these universities held accountable for these plans and follow through on them,” Doyle said.

But students are fighting a well-entrenched foe.

Even today, coal is still king on university campuses. A recent Sierra Club paper reports that over 60 universities nationwide operate coal-burning power plants right on campus, while thousands of others rely on coal-generated electricity they buy from the grid.

Students must draw attention to this “dirty secret” in order to drive a rapid switch to clean power sources, said Sierra Club youth coal campaign coordinator Kim Teplitzky.

“Most students on campuses that have coal plants have no idea they have coal plants. They might even see the smokestacks and think it’s something else. But as soon as you tell them it’s burning coal, they’re shocked,” she said. “We’re trying to get students to understand that when you’re sitting there in the classroom and the lights are on, that’s burning coal.”

It’s not just electricity use that’s a problem. Colleges also put significant energy toward heating and cooling the buildings on their often-massive campuses.

Some universities are beginning to move toward more sustainable methods of power production, and they are setting an example for their competitors:

* Cornell and the University of Wisconsin-Madison are both transitioning to biomass. The University of Iowa began an experiment in biomass six years ago, switching 20 percent of coal to waste oat husks from a nearby Quaker Oats plants — a move that has saved the school more than $4 million and cut nearly 300,000 tons of CO2 emissions.

* The University of New Hampshire this year began receiving up to 85% of its energy
from a landfill methane gas-to-energy project. It expects to cash in with renewable energy credits and, with additional efficiency measures, start the campus on a path to zero emissions.

* Indiana’s Ball State University is developing the nation’s largest closed-loop geothermal system to cut its coal use to zero, a move the school says will eliminate 80,000 tons of emissions per year and reduce its carbon footprint by half.

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