Skip the straw. Thrift your clothes. Compost your food scraps.
These sustainable practices are thrown out in rapid fire during conversations about climate crisis remediation. They’re by no means bad suggestions — composting is a great way to prevent food waste and create extra fertilizer to resurrect the basil plant wilting on your windowsill. Though effective practices, these individual-level lifestyle changes aren’t the solution to the sustainability crisis we’re currently hurtling toward. In order to comprehensively mitigate the effects of climate change and ensure public and environmental health, sustainable policies must be implemented on an institutional level to incentivize creating lasting renewable infrastructure. This starts on a local level.
2024 is on track to be the hottest year on record. The decades-long conversation surrounding humanity’s dependence on greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels and their propensity to intensify natural disasters is becoming increasingly tangible. Often, the responsibility of sustainability is placed on individuals, rendering it a commendable personal virtue rather than a necessity for the preservation of public health. Using BP’s carbon footprint calculator to determine that you need to catch the bus more often to save the climate purposely muddles the larger systemic problem of our society’s reliance on fossil fuels.
The journey toward sustainability starts with the transition away from non-renewable energy sources to cleaner, more efficient energy usage. However, due to a variety of conflicting stakeholder interests, institutional-level changes are often sluggish and outright resistant. Essential industries, from healthcare to agriculture to transportation, require a reliable source of energy in order to function.
These energy infrastructures are complex and intertwined into society; to outright end all fossil fuel use would result in worse material conditions and more fatalities for people worldwide. Understanding different stakeholder’s perspectives while simultaneously respecting the urgent nature of climate change is essential to moving toward a feasible plan for energy transition.
A further roadblock to renewable energy transition is the current political landscape surrounding environmental regulation. In a world where federal regulatory agencies are inhibited and even outright removed due to partisan interests, it's difficult to effect top-down sustainability efforts at a federal level. This leaves the onus of sustainable practices on state and local institutions, making collective sustainability efforts more important than ever. While individuals can have limited impact, collective movements can create tangible policy changes to be implemented on local and state institutional levels.
Collective efforts for sustainability are being implemented at UNC. On Oct. 29, the Undergraduate Student Government’s Department of Environmental Affairs, the Renewable Energy Special Projects Committee, UNC’s Climate Crisis Committee and Sustainable Carolina co-hosted the fourth annual Energy Transition Town Hall, during which expert panelists discussed the status of UNC’s energy transition.
One panelist, the sustainability director at Sustainable Carolina, Cindy Shea, detailed the importance of energy conservation and efficiency when creating sustainable infrastructure. UNC designs new buildings, such as the Genome Sciences Building, to require less energy per square foot than older buildings. This economic aspect of sustainability is a key facet of the climate crisis. In addition to phasing out non-renewable energy sources, it’s essential to reduce overall energy consumption on a systemic level through prioritizing efficient infrastructure.
UNC is also incentivizing these developments through the Renewable Energy Special Projects Committee, a student-led committee which creates and implements green energy initiatives across campus. RESPC receives $4 per semester from all UNC students’ tuition in order to implement renewable energy, energy efficiency and management, and energy education projects at UNC.
