This Implementation Guide is the "handbook" of the ACUPCC. The American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment is a high-visibility effort to make campuses more sustainable and address global warming by garnering institutional commitments to reduce and ultimately neutralize greenhouse gas emissions on campus and to accelerate the research and educational efforts of higher education to equip society to re-stabilize the earth’s climate. This guide provides assistance on forming an institutional structure, conducting a greenhouse gas emissions inventory, and developing a climate action plan, among other things. Visit the homepage to see if your school has signed up and find out how your school is doing so far! Then you can get involved with your school's progress, but your school doesn't have to be signed up for you to join or even spearhead programs on your campus!
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ACUPCC Implementations & Resources Guide for Schools
This Implementation Guide is the "handbook" of the ACUPCC. The American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment is a high-visibility effort to make campuses more sustainable and address global warming by garnering institutional commitments to reduce and ultimately neutralize greenhouse gas emissions on campus and to accelerate the research and educational efforts of higher education to equip society to re-stabilize the earth’s climate. This guide provides assistance on forming an institutional structure, conducting a greenhouse gas emissions inventory, and developing a climate action plan, among other things. Visit the homepage to see if your school has signed up and find out how your school is doing so far! Then you can get involved with your school's progress, but your school doesn't have to be signed up for you to join or even spearhead programs on your campus!
NWF's "Higher Education in a Warming World" resource
Check out the National Wildlife Federation's new report, The Business Case for Climate Action on Campus, which provides the ammunition to convince even the most skeptical and conservative decision-makers that clean energy is not only better for the planet, it’s also better for the bottom line. 100+ case studies from 32 states about clean energy. Download the report, press release, and list of schools included here:
http://www.nwf.org/campusecology/BusinessCase/index.cfm
Campus-Community Organizing Guide
The Energy Justice Network's Campus-Community Organizing Guide: Building Power for Lasting Change in the Youth Movement for Clean Energy. Main sections include 4 Great Ways to Help Communities, The Work Ahead, and Overcoming Obstacles. Also includes an Appendix with such resources as Examples of Campus-Community Collaboration, and the Principles of Working Together.
http://www.energyjustice.net/campus/ccog.pdf
A Consumers' Guide to Retail Carbon Offset Providers
This 44 page guide from Clean Air-Cool Planet details the pros and cons of the leading carbon offset providers and tells you what to look for when buying offsets.
The most important question to ask yourself when seeking to offset your emissions is: "Is going carbon neutral the beginning of your global warming mitigation journey, or the end." While supporting sustainable energy projects and energy conservation through offsets can be valuable if done right, it should never be a substite for doing everything we can to reduce our impact and push for strong global warming policy and action.
This guide ranks these 8 companies at the top:
- AgCert / Driving Green
- atmosfair
- Carbon Neutral Co.
- Climate Care
- Climate Trust
- co2balance
- NativeEnergy
- Sustainable Travel/ MyClimate
Building Alliances (RAN)
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A powerful 6-page guide for organizers to build alliances and overcome divisions caused by institutional oppression and fear. Includes great working definitions for terms related to oppression.
Alliances are crucial to creating any kind of sustainable change. History has shown that different groups have been played against each other by those in power to keep us separated and unable to threaten the status quo.
A little story about our divisions
When the United States was beginning to form, there was a hierarchy of oppression that kept everyone subservient to someone above them. The King of England demanded goods from the Jamestown white elite who exploited and controlled the white frontiersman who, in order to appease the elite with money and land, slaughtered Indigenous people and brutalized African slaves. Many whites joined Indigenous and African rebellions. The white elite worked to stop this because they knew such an alliance would become too powerful and would succeed at overthrowing the control that the elite and the King had. So in order to separate the whites from everyone else, they started giving more privileges (land and better treatment) to the white servants. This worked. The working class whites effectively abandoned the movements for change and to this day these groups have problems working together. (Zinn, 1980).
A Consumer's Guide to Retail Carbon Offset Providers
"This report provides a very useful overview of what carbon offsets are (including a discussion of the concept of additionality - how you know whether an offset is really reducing carbon emissions), their uses and limitations, and how to evaluate carbon offset providers. It also ranks providers existing at the time of publication (2006) on the quality of the offsets they offer."
http://www.cleanair-coolplanet.org/ConsumersGuidetoCarbonOffsets.pdf
