美国国家公共电台 NPR How Penn State Is Cutting Greenhouse Emissions In Half — And Saving Money

 

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

How could a community grow in population while cutting carbon emissions¹? That is the challenge facing the whole planet in the fight against climate change. NPR's Dan Charles reports on how Penn State University is doing that.

DAN CHARLES, BYLINE²: From the top of Beaver³ Stadium, one of the very biggest stadiums in the entire world, you can see just part of Penn State's vast and beautiful campus.

ROB COOPER: You've picked a spectacular day to come visit, didn't you?

CHARLES: Rob Cooper is the university's director of engineering and energy.

COOPER: We've got 600 major buildings here over 22 million square feet.

CHARLES: Parking lots with thousands of cars, a couple of gas burning steam plants for heating.

COOPER: We have our own water system, wells. We have our own wastewater plant.

CHARLES: Basically, it's a city, with 60,000 people when students are on campus, a lot more when there's a football game. And like most American cities, it runs largely on fossil fuels, releasing hundreds of thousands of tons of greenhouse gases every year from those steam plants, from power stations far away that supply electricity, from the cars that people drive to campus, from aircraft that faculty⁴ take to conferences.

Penn State has added up all those emissions over the past 20 years, and it makes kind of an amazing graph. Twenty years ago, the line was going up, up, up. The university was growing, more people, more buildings, burning more coal and gas, just like the rest of America. And then you get to 2004, and the line suddenly changes direction. It starts falling like it's rolling down a mountain. And it's been falling ever since, even though the university is still growing.

COOPER: Yeah. We've been pretty successful over the last 15 years.

CHARLES: I wanted to know how it happened, so I went to see Professor Chris Uhl.

CHRIS UHL: I'm in the department of biology and my, I guess, passion is with ecology.

CHARLES: In the mid-1990s, Uhl helped organize a small environmental movement on campus. There were students calculating greenhouse emissions from specific buildings, looking at technical alternatives.

UHL: When we unveiled these different reports, we would meet on the steps of Old Main, which is, you know, it's, like, this big center of the university. And lots of people showed up. You know, the press was there.

CHARLES: They put the university under pressure. And as it happened, these activists⁵ had some allies deep inside the university administration - building engineers, maintenance guys - led by a former Navy officer named Ford⁶ Stryker, who was in charge of buildings and construction.

FORD STRYKER: We've seen a lot of evidence that global warming was a real thing, and, you know, we were concerned about it.

CHARLES: Stryker pulled off a classic bureaucratic⁷ move. He convinced the university president to declare environmental stewardship⁸ an official priority - and the pressure from students probably helped. This gave him leverage⁹ inside the administration. He got the university to set up a fund to pay for upgrades that cut greenhouse emissions.

STRYKER: It took a while (laughter) to get the budget guys and, you know, the finance guys to agree. But, you know, we're like...

CHARLES: They had to be convinced that it was money that could be paid back.

STRYKER: Oh, yeah, heck, yeah. I mean, we had to demonstrate that we were actually saving money.

CHARLES: And this is what turned around that graph of greenhouse emissions - a whole bunch of projects that cut the university's demand for energy. And they typically paid for themselves within 10 years through lower energy bills. Rob Cooper, who worked for Stryker, says some of what they did was really basic, like fine-tuning heating and air conditioning systems.

COOPER: And you'd be surprised what you find when you try to tune¹⁰ up a building's HVAC system. It's one of the shortest paybacks. It's consistently three to five years on every building that we go into.

CHARLES: In the central heating plant, they switched the fuel from coal to natural gas. They installed new energy-saving motors and windows. This year, the university signed a deal to buy electricity from a new 500-acre solar farm. Here's Andrew Gutberlet, Penn State's manager of engineering services.

ANDREW GUTBERLET: Every time we looked at it before, the economics weren't there. We could not get solar power or any renewable energy for less than we were buying it off of the grid¹¹ until now.

CHARLES: Penn State's greenhouse emissions now are down by a third compared to the peak in 2004. In a few years with solar power rolling in, they should be down almost 50%, which seems really hopeful because, in principle, any city could do this. The country could.

GUTBERLET: In essence, we are demonstrating that this can be done.

CHARLES: Two notes of caution, though. First, Penn State's not a regular city with thousands of homeowners making their own decisions. It owns all the buildings and the heating plants. It can make decisions that take 10 years to pay off. And the second caution is cutting emissions in half is good, but it's not enough, not if you're really trying to stop global warming. So Penn State has a much more ambitious goal - an 80% reduction by 2050. Some people on campus are pushing for 100%. So I ask Shelley McKeague, the person at Penn State who's in charge of measuring those emissions, are you going to make that goal?

SHELLEY MCKEAGUE: You're asking me?

CHARLES: (Laughter).

MCKEAGUE: We need to. I mean, do we have a concrete plan to get there? We do not. And the reality is the country doesn't either.

CHARLES: But they are studying lots of possibilities, figuring out how much each one would cost, what it would accomplish. So far, they are on track to reach their goal. Dan Charles, NPR News.

1 emissions   

排放物( emission的名词复数 )； 散发物（尤指气体）

参考例句：

• Most scientists accept that climate change is linked to carbon emissions. 大多数科学家都相信气候变化与排放的含碳气体有关。
• Dangerous emissions radiate from plutonium. 危险的辐射物从钚放散出来。

2 byline   

n.署名；v.署名

参考例句：

• His byline was absent as well.他的署名也不见了。
• We wish to thank the author of this article which carries no byline.我们要感谢这篇文章的那位没有署名的作者。

3 beaver   

n.海狸，河狸

参考例句：

• The hat is made of beaver.这顶帽子是海狸毛皮制的。
• A beaver is an animals with big front teeth.海狸是一种长着大门牙的动物。

4 faculty   

n.才能；学院，系；(学院或系的)全体教学人员

参考例句：

• He has a great faculty for learning foreign languages.他有学习外语的天赋。
• He has the faculty of saying the right thing at the right time.他有在恰当的时候说恰当的话的才智。

5 activists   

n.（政治活动的）积极分子，活动家( activist的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• His research work was attacked by animal rights activists . 他的研究受到了动物权益维护者的抨击。
• Party activists with lower middle class pedigrees are numerous. 党的激进分子中有很多出身于中产阶级下层。 来自《简明英汉词典》

6 Ford   

n.浅滩，水浅可涉处；v.涉水，涉过

参考例句：

• They were guarding the bridge,so we forded the river.他们驻守在那座桥上，所以我们只能涉水过河。
• If you decide to ford a stream,be extremely careful.如果已决定要涉过小溪，必须极度小心。

7 bureaucratic   

adj.官僚的，繁文缛节的

参考例句：

• The sweat of labour washed away his bureaucratic airs.劳动的汗水冲掉了他身上的官气。
• In this company you have to go through complex bureaucratic procedures just to get a new pencil.在这个公司里即使是领一支新铅笔，也必须通过繁琐的手续。

8 stewardship   

n. n. 管理工作；管事人的职位及职责

参考例句：

• The organization certainly prospered under his stewardship. 不可否认，这个组织在他的管理下兴旺了起来。
• Last, but certainly not least, are the issues of stewardship and ethics. 最后，但当然不是微不足道的，是工作和道德规范的问题。

9 leverage   

n.力量，影响；杠杆作用，杠杆的力量

参考例句：

• We'll have to use leverage to move this huge rock.我们不得不借助杠杆之力来移动这块巨石。
• He failed in the project because he could gain no leverage. 因为他没有影响力，他的计划失败了。

10 tune   

n.调子；和谐，协调；v.调音，调节，调整

参考例句：

• He'd written a tune,and played it to us on the piano.他写了一段曲子，并在钢琴上弹给我们听。
• The boy beat out a tune on a tin can.那男孩在易拉罐上敲出一首曲子。

11 grid   

n.高压输电线路网；地图坐标方格；格栅

参考例句：

• In this application,the carrier is used to encapsulate the grid.在这种情况下，要用载体把格栅密封起来。
• Modern gauges consist of metal foil in the form of a grid.现代应变仪则由网格形式的金属片组成。