UM has decided to go carbon neutral, and the President’s Commission on Carbon Neutrality (the PCCN) is charged with recommending a plan to accomplish that for all three UM campuses (Ann Arbor, Dearborn, & Flint). The PCCN was announced in Fall 2018, and December 2, 2019 marked the arrival of its second Interim Progress Report. This week, hosts Isabelle Brogna and Prachiti Dhamankar figure out what’s in the report and what the PCCN has accomplished so far by speaking with Kristen Hayden and Larson Lovdal, students from the University of Michigan who serve on the PCCN. Kristen is on the Student Advisory Panel as well as a member of Climate Action Movement, a coalition group pushing UM to set an ambitious deadline for carbon neutrality and holding it accountable. Larson is on the “Energy Consumption Policies” Internal Analysis Team, one of eight such teams on the PCCN determining where carbon emissions are emitted on campus, how the school can offset or eliminate them, and under what deadline. The conversation ranges from the surprising effect of natural gas leaks on campus emissions, to the impact of DTE’s decision to go carbon neutral by 2050, transparency and accountability concerns, and a detour to talk about composting toilets.
