Local GHG emissions vary tremendously from place to place, depending on each area’s biophysical, socioeconomic, and cultural contexts. For example, a college town in central Pennsylvania (hey, I know one of those!) will have a significantly different emissions profile than an agricultural area in southwestern Kansas or an industrial city in northwestern Ohio. Indeed, each place’s GHG emissions profile is unique, but a few important sources appear in most locales. Those sources are energy use, transportation, waste disposal, and land use.

Local energy use is complex and varies with the specific type of user: residential, industrial, or commercial.

Residential: The graph below shows how we're using energy in our homes here in the United States. More than half of it is to heat and cool our spaces (which means this also represents our biggest opportunities to reduce energy demand through gains in efficiency or moderated use). Understanding our energy consumption at home empowers us to make decisions that lower our utility bills and reduce our demand.

Residential GHG emissions are extremely important in both their quantities and their symbolism. Symbolically, residential emissions are vital because almost every person has a primary residence and has (some) control over his or her energy use and resulting GHG emissions. Large opportunities exist in reducing household energy consumption. Local emissions obviously vary with climate, socioeconomic status, energy systems, and more.

Our energy use at home is determined by a variety of factors. EIA points them out on their Energy Use In Homes page:

• Location - hey look, geography matters! (spoiler alert - geography always matters!) Your climate will dictate your heating and cooling needs, and we already determined those are the biggest piece of our energy use pie.
• Type of housing - Maybe your apartment is snuggled in among others and stays pretty cozy in the winter without needing to crank the heat too much. Or, maybe you rent a house where you can see the blinds and curtains move when the wind blows because it's so drafty.
• Devices - we're adding devices to our daily lives all the time. These all require energy.
• Household size - this is an interesting one because there are some efficiency gains to be made by more people living in one spot than occupying separate individual spaces that need to be heated/cooled separately, but that is then offset by the increased demand on laundry, hot water for showers, running the dishwasher more frequently, etc. 

Do you know what kind of energy sources are used to power your home? Check out this visualization from Carbon Brief illustrating electricity sources across the US.

Energy Use in US Homes (2015)

Credit: US EIA Residential Energy Consumption Survey (2015). U.S. Energy Information Adminstration (EIA). (Public Domain)

Industrial uses of energy reflect their GHG emissions. Utilities emit the most GHGs; manufacturing emits the next greatest proportion; mining and related extractive industries emit a smaller yet still significant proportion; and all other industrial activities emit a small quantity of GHGs. Manufacturing involves hundreds of products and processes including such diverse activities as dog food manufacturing, yarn spinning, house slipper manufacturing, ethyl alcohol manufacturing, and lime manufacturing. Local manufacturing can be specific and unique, meaning that local GHG emissions from manufacturing can also be specific and unique. For instance, because Seattle is home to Boeing’s main production facilities, emissions from aircraft manufacturing is unusually dominant in that city.

Millions of commercial enterprises consume energy daily. Keeping the commercial space comfortable for employees and customers through lighting, space heating, and ventilation consumes much of the energy, though these percentages are fluctuating as energy efficiency in various areas improves. For example, a decade ago, lighting was 25% of the total consumption. Commercial food preparation also uses a large amount of energy. While local commercial energy use and GHG emissions are unique, there is a remarkable uniformity in commercial enterprises across modern society. For local scale inventorying work, commercial energy consumption typically generates a 'low-hanging fruit' opportunity to reduce emissions and save building owners/occupants money by doing so. The data in the table below represent the most recent finalized data published by EIA. A more recent Commercial Energy Survey was conducted in 2018 (see Preliminary Results), but the space heating demand shown below has not yet been released (c'mon, EIA!).

US EIA 2012 Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey Click Here for a text description.

Primary Energy Use

Type of Energy Use	Percentage
Lighting	10%
Cooking	7%
Water Heating	7%
Space Heating	25%
Ventilation	10%
Space cooling	9%
Refrigeration	10%
Electronics	3%
Computers	6%
Other	13%

Credit: EIA 2012 Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey. U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). (Public Domain)

Institutions, which include such diverse entities as government buildings, prisons, military facilities, and schools, colleges, and universities, are important consumers of energy and emitters of GHGs (and are considered commercial buildings). Each local institution has a unique energy use pattern and GHG emissions profile, but, until recently, construction of most institutional buildings focused on building costs and not on energy efficiency. The net result is that the institutional sector tends to waste energy; large opportunities for energy savings and GHG reductions exist.

Local land use varies dramatically over space and time. Different places use their land for agriculture, commerce, industry, transportation, mining, forestry, or conservation. Some places have mixed land use, whereas other places have only one or two primary land uses. Each land use is associated with a particular GHG emissions pattern. Cropland emits relatively large amounts of nitrous oxide from the surface, while pastureland emits relatively large amounts of methane from cattle and other ruminants; feedlots emit much greater concentrations of methane than pastures. Forests tend to be sinks for carbon dioxide, but clear-cutting and then burning of the wood releases significant amounts of this GHG. Urbanized and suburbanized areas are hotbeds for GHG emissions: they emit large quantities of GHGs through residential, commercial, institutional, and possibly industrial activities; urban transportation activities similarly emit huge amounts of GHGs; even suburban fertilized lawns emit nitrous oxide. Thus, localities must account for their land-use emissions when addressing climate change.

Many different actors are promoting local mitigation. Four important –– or potentially important –– actors are local government, universities, business, and environmental, social, and faith-based organizations.

Local government and politicians have taken leadership for local mitigation at thousands of locations around the world. Perhaps the best case of local government leadership is the U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement. More than 1,000 mayors have signed the Agreement, committing to the following three actions (Mayors Climate Protection Center, 2011) (Note that since this was signed, the Kyoto Protocols have expired been superseded by the Paris Agreement):

• strive to meet the Kyoto Protocol targets in their own communities, through a variety of context-relevant actions;
• urge their state governments and the Federal government to enact policies and programs to meet the United States GHG emission reduction target suggested by the Kyoto Protocol;
• urge the U.S. Congress to pass bipartisan GHG reduction legislation establishing a national emissions trading system.

Mayors participating in the U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement. This U.S. map depicts points clustering around the Northeast, Chicago, Minneapolis, and the West Coast, with sporadic points elsewhere. See list of participating Mayors for details.

Credit: United States Conference of Mayors

Universities have proven to be key agents in local mitigation efforts (Knuth et al., 2007). As large institutions, universities emit significant amounts of GHGs and have the expertise to quantify those emissions. They provide moral leadership by developing their own mitigation plans. University researchers develop new GHG inventory and mitigation techniques. Universities educate students about climate change and GHG emissions, often facilitating community outreach involving students. They also often provide scientific expertise to local governments and other local actors to help these entities develop climate mitigation plans. In the U.S. alone, hundreds of universities are engaged in climate change mitigation.

Numerous non-profit, non-governmental environmental organizations are involved in local mitigation efforts, including the following three notable examples.

1. ICLEI Local Governments for Sustainability started with 14 international cities in the mid-1990s. Today, this program provides climate mitigation guidance to hundreds of cities around the world, including a couple hundred in America. The State College Borough, Ferguson Township, and the Centre Region are all ICLEI members. There are many others throughout the state, too! Many of them have joined in the past three years as part of DEP's Local Climate Action Program. Almost a dozen ESP students have partnered with communities in this program to complete their first greenhouse gas emissions inventories and start writing local climate action plans (check out this Penn State News story from April 2020). 
    
2. Cool Air-Clean Planet is a U.S.-based organization that partners with companies, campuses, communities, and science centers to help reduce their GHG emissions.
    
3. The Center for Climate Strategies has helped at least 40 state governments, their officials, and their stakeholders build consensus and take action on climate change. Their work extends beyond the US, and they're doing low emissions development planning around the world.

We are!  Reducing Emissions!

As we think about the unique opportunities that local scale climate action affords, it's worth exploring the unusual localities that are our university and college campuses.  Well-delineated and largely autonomous, university campuses offer a different perspective on emissions accounting and reduction efforts.  Beyond that, universities and colleges are home to the front lines of education and research related to climate change, and so it makes sense that their campuses could serve as living laboratories for addressing these important contemporary climate challenges.

Penn State has been tracking its greenhouse gas emissions annually since 2002.  Fun fact: some of the initial work on this effort as well as their early mitigation planning was born out of the Department of Geography! As you can see in this graph below, not only is your university tracking its emissions, it has adopted relatively aggressive reduction targets and is working toward meeting them. It takes a lot of different efforts and initiatives, each working together, to pull that emissions trend downward. There is no magic carbon bullet here to save us - we must take aggressive incremental action to achieve our reduction goals. The recent Solar Power Purchase Agreement was the biggest piece of that puzzle in a while, and it will continue to pull that curve down by supplying 25% of the university's electricity needs, but even that is just a portion of the story.

Caption: Annual GHG emissions by sector for Penn State through 2019 and projected through 2050  

Credit: Penn State Sustainability

You can learn more about the GHG Emissions Inventories (they track them for all 24 Commonwealth campuses, too!) and other sustainability-related initiatives here at Penn State by visiting Penn State Sustainability.  

In April 2020, the University Faculty Senate* passed a climate action resolution calling for the administration to take the following actions:

1. develop a university-wide climate action and adaptation plan
2. reduce purchased electricity emissions by 100% by 2030
3. reduce net GHG emissions by 100% by 2035
4. increase investment in initiatives focused on climate science, solutions, and management
5. engage peer institutions to raise awareness and reduce impacts of a changing climate

It's important to understand that Faculty Senate resolutions are non-binding. So even though this passed quite handily (the vote was 104-14), it didn't have any teeth in that it didn't then REQUIRE that the university do anything with it). It's more of a visible and tangible expression of the collective will of the faculty. And while they didn't have to do anything with it, I can tell you that (1) the administration knew it was coming and was supportive of it being taken up by the Senate and (2) have since started taking action! The administration has convened a carbon emissions reductions task force that is meeting regularly and working to develop an action plan. The prior instructor of this class, Brandi Robinson, was the author of this climate action resolution! While it was a collective effort with colleagues at the Sustainability Institute, she was able to bring it to her Senate colleagues for a vote!

One of the things about Penn State is that because it is so big, it can be very difficult to keep track of everything that's going on. The Sustainability Institute website has this nice summary of ongoing initiatives related to climate and sustainability, which may be of interest to you.

What about other colleges and universities?

Penn State is certainly not unique in its pursuit of ambitious environmental initiatives and greenhouse gas reduction efforts. However, Penn State was one of the early pioneers in this space. It's exciting to see the breadth and depth of work happening in this space now in a variety of formats:

• AASHE (Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education)
• PERC (Pennsylvania Environmental Resource Consortium)
• Second Nature's University Climate Change Coalition
• Harvard - fossil fuel-free by 2050 and more recently the Harvard faculty votes to divest from fossil fuels
• Top Universities for Climate Action
• We Are Still In -University Climate Change Coalition

But, that's not to say we couldn't be doing more.

In this lesson, you learned about local GHG emissions and mitigation. Specifically, you found that each place has a different energy profile, but that nearly every place has important contributions from energy use, transportation, waste disposal, and land use. You saw that local energy use varies greatly among industrial, residential, commercial, institutional, agricultural, and other users. You explored ways that industrial, residential, commercial, institutional, waste disposal, and land-use practices contribute to local GHG emissions. You discovered that local governments, universities, businesses, and environmental, social, and faith-based organizations are leading local efforts to mitigate GHG emissions. You thought about the fact that a place’s emissions are a function of local physical properties and the drivers of GHG emissions (technology, economics, politics, and culture, and you observed that a place's mitigation plans are a function of local economics, politics, and culture.

Despite all of these incredibly important reasons to address climate change causes at the local scale, it's also really important to understand that it's limited. We have, after all, one atmosphere--action or inaction anywhere in the world will contribute to the global climate picture. That is why it is so important to engage as many as possible. This is also a great example of “think globally, act locally” in that it will be the sum total of many actions that will have notable impact.

Even if Pennsylvania, one of the most energy-intensive states in the country, suddenly went carbon neutral, we alone can't halt climate impact. Even if the entire US became carbon neutral, it would not halt climate impacts. As you think about the role of local governments in reducing emissions, think too about the role that those actions play in spurring action at wider scales of governance as well. We need bottom-up and top-down approaches to truly address the challenges of transitioning to a low carbon economy.

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