Princeton Alumni for Climate Excellence - Campaign Begins Today!
Today, SET is publicly launching its first campaign. Entitled PACE (Princeton Alumni for Climate Excellence), the effort aims to help mobilize latent alumni support for Princeton University to be a leader in greenhouse gas emissions reduction.
Princeton is a source of top-notch climate scholarship, with leading professors such as Michael Oppenheimer, Denise Mauzerall, Robert Socolow, and Stephen Pacala. As climate modelers, state-of-the-art engineers, and policy experts, professors and staff at Princeton have led progress in the understanding of our Earth’s climate and the range of policies necessary to effectively mitigate this crucial challenge of the 21st century.
Recently, Princeton’s campus has begun to address the need for academic institutions to become laboratories that test emissions reduction strategies on their own buildings, transportation systems, and energy infrastructure. In early 2008, Princeton’s Board of Trustees launched a campus sustainability plan that called for 20% cuts in emissions by 2020 to achieve the 1990 level. While this plan showed significant progress from the business-as-usual trajectory, it does not yet equal the initiatives of peer institutions — evident in the lower sustainability rankings Princeton has received in many recent surveys including the Princeton Review and SEI’s Green Report Card.
We propose the year 2030 as the zero pollution goal date, similar to the recently released Google.org national clean energy plan. Such an achievement aims to be a followup to the effort of our partner, Princeton SURGE, to cut the current 2020 target a further 25% to the post-Kyoto goal urged by many international negotiators of 25% below 1990 levels by 2020.
If you are an alumnus/a who would like to be involved, please sign the endorsement statement here. We are excited to add further momentum to the climate responsibility movement sweeping our nation’s campuses and beyond.