Steph Gill's action
Goal: Encourage college campuses to find and hire an efficiency specialists in their area to bring to their school for an inspection and audit on their campus. By doing this college campuses will improve efficiency and lower electrical bills.
This action will help to advance the goals of the national Teach-In because if a majority of college campuses, out of the hundreds in the United States, were to participate in this action, America’s carbon footprint will be greatly reduced. Also, by requiring college campuses to participate in this action, we could encourage more campuses, who are not concerned or do not have interest in global warming, to become more involved and take action. Not only should we be hiring these specialists to help us professionally change our campuses, we should be educating the college students about these efforts, and about the global warming issue in general. By educating these students about the changes being preformed on campus to become more energy efficient, it may excite and interest students who have never been climate activists before. This action will help to reduce campuses carbon footprint as well as get more college students involved in this important issue of global warming.
An important allie in this action is an organization called Building Performance Institute. (BPI.org) This organization “works with building performance industry to ensure that the professional bar for excellence in building performance contracting is established and maintained by creating and regularly updating technical requirements through an open, transparent, consensus-based development process.” "Building Performance Institute INC.". Building Performance Institute. 11/23/2008 <http://www.bpi.org/content/about/info.php>. On this website college campuses can simply type in their zip code and find a “BPI Resource” to contact that has a business close to their campus. Next, the school would call this resource and ask if they would do “energy consulting” at their college. The consultant will then go through the school doing both visual observations and also performing tests. By doing these observations and tests, consultants will recommend and direct the school to make certain changes and updates in order to improve their efficiency and lower their electrical bills. Many consultants will then periodically check-in on the improvements to oversee that everything gets done and the school has reached it’s goal.
Imagine if every college in the nation was to participate in this simple action. Together, we could reduce our carbon footprint significantly and help stop global warming.
