When fall tourists descend on Atkins Farms Country Market in South Amherst to stock up on apples, they’ll see a bumper crop of another sort in a nearby field.
Neighboring Hampshire College is plowing forward with solar energy generation, devoting 19 acres, including land near Route 116 and West Bay Road, for use in supplying all of its electricity needs. When the project wraps up by year’s end, Hampshire believes it will be the first residential college in the U.S. to rely entirely on solar sources for electrical power. The college’s earlier commitment to becoming a carbon-neutral campus is a noteworthy example of thinking globally and acting locally.
At Hampshire, at least, global-warming numbers will be heading in the right direction.
When 15,000 solar panels are in place, adding to three smaller arrays in use now, the college will reduce its carbon dioxide output by 3,000 metric tons, or 3,306 U.S. tons.
Either way, that sounds like a lot of the greenhouse gas known to contribute to planetary warming – and it is. Since it’s hard to picture what constitutes tons of a gas, a concrete illustration devised by blogger Bill Chameides helps. A big balloon laid with one edge on the goal line of a football field would stretch out as far as the 10-yard line if filled with a ton of carbon dioxide gas.
That’s just one ton. If you laid the number of balloons needed to hold 3,306 U.S. tons of the gas end to end, they’d stretch for 18.8 miles. That’s enough to reach from the Hampshire campus to the Springfield bus station – or over the river and up into the hills past the town of Goshen. In terms of carbon dioxide reductions, it will be the equivalent of taking 650 vehicles off the road for a year.
Under the terms of their partnership with SolarCity, Hampshire’s leaders get to advance the common interest in combating global warming even as they save about $400,000 a year, or $8 million, in the next two decades.
Acting locally like this puts money back in the college budget, but also teaches Hampshire students important lessons about what can be done to reduce carbon releases.
As many of these students are probably well aware, the big picture isn’t encouraging.
The climate accord signed in Paris last December does not yet include adequate national pledges to reduce the rate of global heating enough to ward off the dire consequences forecast by accepted science. The rate of carbon dioxide release globally has been rising about 3 percent a year and stands at around 40 gigatons annually.
A gigaton is a billion metric tons. Experts working with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change predict that to contain runaway planetary heating, the world’s carbon dioxide output needs to be kept to 40 gigatons by the year 2030 – a threshold we’ve already hit.
Since that’s also a big number, one more illustration: A gigaton is the weight of a cubic kilometer of water. Picture a cube measuring a bit more than six-tenths of a mile on all sides filled with water. Then picture 40 of them.
Yes, that’s much bigger than those 10-yard-wide balloons lined up along the road to Springfield.
Under the Paris agreement, 195 participating nations are expected to hit increasingly ambitious targets for carbon reduction. The goals identified by individual nations in Paris would, if honored, still produce 55 gigatons of carbon dioxide by 2030.
The U.S. is responsible for nearly 18 percent of the globe’s carbon output, with China ahead at 20 percent and all other nations in single digits or fractions of a percent.
The amount of carbon Hampshire stands to reduce in a given year is roughly .00000749 percent of the world’s current output. Yes, five zeroes sit to the right of the decimal point. But in the wake of the Paris talks, when success at heading off climate disaster seems so far out of reach, it’s a mistake to be laid low by big numbers.
Climate survival depends on millions and millions of people, and hundreds of nations, taking meaningful steps, even if they seem small.
That’s just what Hampshire has done.