The Office of Sustainability has been calculating our greenhouse gas emissions since 2006, following the standards set forth by Second Nature and the global greenhouse gas inventory. According to these calculations, Appalachian State has generated an average of 68,800 metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent per year. Although our per-student emissions have decreased, thanks largely to energy efficiency upgrades, there has been no appreciable decrease in the university’s actual greenhouse gas emissions. 

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Our Emissions Trajectory: Neutrality by 2115

In 2010, Appalachian State University established a goal of carbon neutrality by 2050, though we never established a plan to achieve this, we never dedicated funding to it, and we never created a system of responsibility and accountability for progress. More recently, the UNC System established a legal mandate of carbon neutrality by 2050, though also without resources and follow through. The university regularly says we are on track to achieve the 2050 goal, but this clearly flies in the face of the facts. Unfortunately, as we have learned from U.S. politicians in recent years, repeating a falsehood does not make it true. 

 

The truth is, we are reducing our emissions at a rate of 1% per year. At this rate, we will not become carbon neutral until 2115, 65 years after the least ambitious legally-permissible target set by the UNC System. As shown in the graph below, to achieve the UNC requirement would require an emissions reduction rate of 3% per year. Exhibiting true climate leadership by reaching beyond the legal minimum would require annual emissions reduction rates of 5.9% for neutrality by 2035, 8.5% for neutrality by 2030, and 15.7% for neutrality by 2025.   

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And It’s Actually Worse: Our Hidden Emissions

Unfortunately, we are probably actually much further behind our goals than we realize because Appalachian State’s official numbers vastly undercount our actual contribution to climate change. Our total greenhouse gas estimates depend on two main factors: which activities and gases we choose to count and how we calculate their impact. There are three primary ways our estimates lead us to undercount our actual emissions: 

 

1. We don’t count many of our polluting activities. Like most universities, we ignore most of our “Scope 3” emissions (see Box 1 for a description of the different categories of emissions), including the impacts from our food, most waste and wastewater, the “embodied carbon” in all of our buildings, the carbon footprint of our purchases (everything from paper to desks to computers), the full carbon footprint of the extraction, processing, and delivery of the fuels we use, and the impacts of our university’s investments. The fact that most universities exclude these greenhouse gas emissions from their tallies is hardly comforting given the consequences of under-responding to climate devastation. Perhaps the most glaring omission at Appalachian is the refusal to count the greenhouse gas impact of the university-owned electric utility, New River Light and Power, a Scope 1 emission that we have “disappeared.” Scope 3 emissions are often significantly higher than Scope 1 and 2 emissions. For example, the mining and metal producing corporation BHP--which has an admirable commitment to taking the conservative approach of “over-reporting rather than under-reporting” their emissions--found that Scope 3 emissions accounted for a whopping 97.3% of their overall emissions (BHP 2019, 2020). Apple reportedly has 99% of its emissions in Scope 3 because of significant outsourcing (Farsan et al. 2018). 
   Universities are likely to have lower Scope 3 emissions than most corporations. However, research shows that they are significant and often well above one-half of total institutional emissions (Robinson, et al. 2018). The indirect greenhouse gas impacts of purchased goods and services are the single greatest source of emissions at Yale University (Thurston and Eckelman 2011) and they account for 39% of UC Berkeley’s total carbon footprint (Doyle 2012); at the UK’s De Montfort University, procurement accounted for 38% of greenhouse gas emissions. Scope 3 emissions as a whole accounted 79% of emissions at De Montfort University (Ozawa-Meida, et al. 2011), 72% of emissions at the Autonomous University of Mexico (Mendoza-Flores, et al. 2019), 60% of emissions at the University of Talca in Chile (Yañez, et al. 2020), and well over half of emissions at UC Berkeley, where they were not tabulated in full (Doyle 2012). Unfortunately, accounting for these hidden Scope 3 emissions will likely require overcoming significant resistance from campus environmental professionals and financial administrators, who have concerns about data quality, the reputational impacts of changing accounting methods, and the costs and challenges of addressing universities’ full carbon impact (Robinson et al. 2018; Doyle 2012). 

2. We undercount the impact of some of our emissions. Because greenhouse gases contribute to global warming at different intensities over different time frames, the international community has established a standard for calculating the Global Warming Potential (GWP)--a greenhouse potency factor--for each gas. GWPs allow us to report emissions of each greenhouse gas using the same unit of measure: carbon dioxide equivalents, or the mass of carbon dioxide that would have an equivalent heat-trapping effect. Although each IPCC Assessment Report provides updated guidance on how to calculate the GWP of major greenhouse gases, Appalachian and many other institutions continue to use the global warming potential conversion factors from the IPCC’s Second Assessment, which was published in 1995. In some cases, this leads to significant undercounting of a gas’s contributions to warming. On a 100-year time scale, for example, methane was originally considered to be 21 times more damaging than carbon dioxide, then 25 times more damaging, and now 28-36 times more damaging. In other words, using the updated GWP demonstrates that our methane-based emissions have 33-71% larger warming effects than our current accounting shows. Fortunately, we have discovered that some greenhouse gases are less damaging than we initially thought, so the total effect on Appalachian State emissions remains to be calculated. (Greenhouse Gas Protocol 2016; EPA 2020) 

3. We are using the wrong time horizon for evaluating greenhouse gas impacts. A second component of global warming potentials is the time frame used. GWP is commonly calculated over a 100-year time horizon (GWP100). This time frame was chosen because it made conversions simple and because policy makers in the 1990s believed one hundred years provided a reasonable guidepost for climate change mitigation. We argue, however, that science and policy now suggest that we shift to the 20-year time horizon (GWP20). As noted in IPCC Assessment Report 5, “The choice of emission metric and time horizon depends on type of application and policy context; hence, no single metric is optimal for all policy goals.” Appalachian State’s policy goal should be climate change mitigation to reduce the vulnerability of the institution and the people of North Carolina. This requires that we avoid crossing tipping points that would lead to abrupt, catastrophic, and irreversible changes to the climate system and humanity’s ecological support systems. We know with high degrees of certainty that rapid action over the next two decades is particularly critical for achieving this goal (IPCC 2018). To guide policy on this time frame, we therefore need to use the GWP20 conversion factors as our primary standard for measuring impacts, ideally while also taking account of the ways some gases act over longer time frames as well. How much of a difference would this make? Again, it is difficult to say with certainty because a twenty-year time frame will have different effects on different gases: it will make short-lived gases appear more damaging and long-lived gases appear less damaging. For example, methane has its full global warming impact in only 12 years, so on a 100 year scale it is 28-36 times more damaging than carbon dioxide, but over a 20-year horizon it is approximately 86 times more damaging than carbon dioxide. Conversely, the very long-lived gas sulfur hexaflouride only makes a fraction of its total impact over a twenty-year period, giving it a GWP20 of 17,500, a GWP100 of 23,500, and even higher very-long-term GWPs. Because we are probably relatively low-level emitters of very long-lived greenhouse gases, it is likely that switching to the GWP20 standard will increase our greenhouse gas emissions estimates. In particular, using the GWP20 standard will underscore the true contributions of methane to dangerous, short-term warming, highlighting the urgency of avoiding natural gas and the industry’s significant and growing methane emissions.

 

So how much worse are our actual greenhouse gas emissions? Reaching a definitive answer would require nearly endless dedication to number crunching at the expense of action. However, we can reasonably estimate our actual emissions by: (a) assuming that our full Scope 3 emissions account for 60-80% of total emissions, the range evidenced by other universities, (b) using up-to-date GWP conversion factors for our natural gas purchases (the primary source of methane emissions), and (c) converting our 100-year numbers to 20-year numbers. The graph below shows our “official,” reported greenhouse gas numbers plus corrected values adjusted to account for the full range of Scope 3 emissions. In other words, it takes into account only correction (a) above and ignores corrections (b) and (c). Using the low estimate (assuming that Scope 3 emissions account for 60% of our total emissions) yields a total carbon footprint that is 1.6 times larger than our currently reported footprint. Using the high estimate (assuming that scope 3 emissions account for 80% of our total emissions) yields a carbon footprint 3.2 times greater than what we are currently reporting. 

 

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And Worse Still: Accounting for

Historical Emissions

Finally, if we are being honest we have to acknowledge that no plan to decarbonize the university--whether based on the official numbers that undercount our true impact or more realistic, higher estimates--will make the university truly carbon neutral. This is because no current or future decarbonization will, in itself, address the full historical contribution of the university to global greenhouse gas emissions. To achieve real carbon neutrality, Appalachian State would need to fully decarbonize and sequester carbon equivalent to our historic emissions. We note this not to chastise the university, nor to ask the impossible (after all, Microsoft has already committed to achieving this), but simply to underscore the true implications of the climate crisis. Facing a crisis as massive as climate change, the least we can do is be honest about our contribution to the problem and the degree of responsibility we are actually taking.