Greenwashing

A “GREEN” CAMPUS?

Middlebury College promotes itself as one of the “greenest” and “most environmentally responsible” college campuses in the country. In 2016, Middlebury claimed to achieve carbon neutrality, meaning that Middlebury’s carbon emissions are equal to or less than the amount of carbon it removes from the environment. Middlebury explained that these efforts were rooted in the college’s commitment to fighting climate change and promoting greater environmental justice at the institutional level. 

But what counts as “carbon neutrality”? We argue that Middlebury’s sustainability efforts have been highly performative, with the college making many superficial changes in order to achieve prestigious accreditations. Middlebury’s carbon neutrality claim has attracted many prospective students interested in environmental studies under false pretenses and understandings. The student body needs more widespread awareness about Middlebury’s greenwashing efforts in order to ensure the college is held accountable and is actually following up on the environmental commitments they claim they have already made.

Middlebury’s next big step in their alleged efforts to reduce emissions is their Energy 2028 plan, which outlines “a complete shift to renewable energy to power and heat its central campus” by 2028. Middlebury’s plans to eliminate the use of fossil fuels by transitioning to renewable natural gas (RNG) has been widely identified by environmental justice organizations to come with negative health and climate impacts, thereby working against a movement for a just transition to cleaner sources of energy. 

Middlebury College is at a crossroads, but we can play a role in making sure that it chooses the right path. There is still time to encourage Middlebury’s Office of Sustainability to end the use of biofuels and transition to truly net-zero sources of energy to power the campus and pursue a truly just transition that our community can be proud of. 

WHAT ARE CARBON CREDITS?

Carbon credits essentially provide a system of accounting to track, manage, and trade carbon emissions, their costs, and the rights to emit them. To meet government mandates (cap and trade policies) or climate/sustainability goals, corporations and other institutions can gain legal recognition that they offset their active carbon emissions. Offsets can take a number of forms, such as renewable energy credits (RECs), which are granted to clean producers of energy and can be sold apart from the actual energy produced. Purchasing an unbundled REC can offset enormous emissions with the justification that elsewhere, clean energy is being produced instead of dirty energy. Other forms of offsets include carbon sequestration projects, such as reforestation projects. Carbon credits can also be granted when a carbon sink in threat of being demolished—such as a forest at risk of being cut down for raising cattle—is protected. A key aspect of carbon offsets is the idea of “additionality”. In theory, a legitimate carbon offset prevents the leakage of carbon that otherwise would have entered the atmosphere. Offsets in practice reveal a very different reality. The lack of transparency behind many offset projects and surveys—in addition to the malleability of certain regulations and guidelines around what counts—makes carbon offsetting a less-than-trustworthy metric for assessing the balance between emissions and sequestration. Determining if a plot of forest which brings in carbon credits actually would have been cut down if not for the carbon offset deal can be difficult, and emitters can get away with earning credits by just assuming the worst-case scenario around a carbon sink resource.  

Offsets are meant to incentivize and finance decarbonization and carbon sequestration efforts, but too frequently they are marketed as a reliable fix to the emissions issue. Many offsetters do not raise enough money to actually counter the enormous polluting projects they promised to counter when selling offsets. The disconnect and lack of transparency between the purchaser and the actual decarbonization/carbon sequestration projects make carbon offsets a poor choice in climate action on an individual or institutional level. On a large scale, carbon offsets simply enable wealthy and powerful polluters to continue with business as usual under the illusion that they are tackling the climate crisis. The rules of what counts as a carbon credit can be incredibly loose and dubious as to if carbon that would have otherwise entered the atmosphere is actually being captured or stored. Many climate and environmental justice leaders condemn carbon offsets as a license to pollute with little proof of actually making a difference. “Carbon neutral” is not the same thing as “zero emissions”, and while institutions such as Middlebury claim carbon neutrality, they continue to pollute. Lastly, carbon emissions do not function in the way that carbon offset models suggest. Emissions are emissions. The restoration of a mangrove forest in Malaysia will not remove the adverse effects of a power plant’s pollution in Texas. The fact is that Middlebury College is, by the books, carbon neutral. This being said, we should hold ourselves to a higher standard, and must reckon with the actual climate impact our activities have. 

Sources on carbon neutrality explanations 

ENERGY LANDSCAPE

Where does Middlebury’s energy come from? 

Middlebury has a number of initiatives at play in an attempt to meet their Energy 2028 goals. Here we are strictly focusing on the college’s energy breakdown in terms of electricity and heat fuel sourcing.  When referring to energy, we are strictly referring to the electrical and thermal energy demands of the college, not including transportation or fuel sources such as propane used in the dining halls. 

Middlebury College generates 20% of its energy demand on campus through the Central Heating Plant (CHP) located across from Parton Student Health Center. The remaining 80% of the energy demand is purchased through Green Mountain Power (GMP) which includes Middlebury College-owned solar generation and other GMP renewable sources such as hydropower, nuclear energy, and “new renewables” such as solar and wind. 

CHP 

The CHP is the operational center for Middlebury’s Biomass generation. The CHP burns woodchips, producing steam that is then used to heat the buildings on campus. Before this steam is circulated for heating, it travels through a turbine which generates electricity, thus, according to the Dean of Environmental Affairs and Sustainability, notably maximizing the efficiency of the biomass operation as it utilizes the steam for both heating and electricity as opposed to just one or the other.

When Middlebury’s biomass generation does not meet the 20% demand, Middlebury fills that gap through Renewable Natural Gas (RNG) generated by the Middlebury-funded bio-digester at Goodrich Farm in Salisbury, VT. For more information on the controversy surrounding Goodrich Farm and Middlebury’s involvement through the operation of the bio-digester read here. 

 Green Mountain Power Purchases

The remaining 80% of Middlebury’s energy demand is met through the purchase of energy through Green Mountain Power (GMP). This includes the energy generated by the 8 solar fields on Middlebury-owned land which generate about 10% of Middleburys current energy demand, and will soon include the solar field being built on South Street Extension. The South Street project will eventually generate an additional 35% of Middlebury’s energy demand once online. 

However, this energy is not directly connected to Middlebury’s electrical system: when an institution like Middlebury “makes” electricity they have to sell it to a utility company. By selling this electricity to the utility, Middlebury is allotted Renewable Energy Credits. The college can then “buy back” electricity from that utility and “claim” the renewable energy they contributed to the grid toward their energy profile. 

Green Mountain Power has also committed to carbon neutrality by 2030 though, relies heavily on Hydro Quebec hydropower to reach its renewable energy goals; this is controversial as the subsequent flooding caused by Hydro Quebec’s dam systems has caused ecological and social justice issues such as resulting in habitat loss, biological matter fermentation and release of potent greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, and Indigenous land displacement. More resources on the consequences of hydropower. 

For a more comprehensive breakdown of Middlebury’s emissions: 

PDF of Middlebury Greenhouse Gas In Progress as of FY2022

BIOFUEL 

Middlebury has committed to transitioning to 100 percent renewable energy sources to power the core Vermont campus by 2028. 

But what counts as “renewable energy”? 

Middlebury’s current carbon neutrality claim and their future carbon reduction plan include the use of a combination of biofuels, hydropower, and solar. Middlebury is dependent on two types of biofuels to cut Middlebury’s carbon footprint—renewable natural gas, produced from cow manure and other biological material, and biomass, produced from wood chips. 

Critical to the Energy2028 plan is Middlebury’s transition to renewable natural gas to replace fossil fuels. In the summer of 2021, Middlebury began producing renewable natural gas (RNG) using cow manure and food waste from the Goodrich Family Farm, located in Salisbury, VT. 

Through the college’s investment in a biodigester, which captures methane released by the manure and food waste stored in holding ponds at Goodrich farm, the highly potent methane is captured and transferred through a pipeline to Middlebury’s CHP to be burned. The process of burning methane (more on the methane cycle) breaks the compound down, releasing less potent greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, and water vapor. The process of converting methane from the holding ponds to RNG can be framed as an improvement to past emissions as methane is about 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere; therefore, the use of RNG is being framed by the college as avoided emissions compared to the release of methane from the holding ponds and therefore RNG has a “net-negative” effect on greenhouse gas intensity. 

While Middlebury is the primary consumer of the Renewable Natural Gas produced at Goodrich, the farm will also provide additional RNG for Vermont Gas Systems customers. Renewable Natural Gas, sourced from Goodrich Family Farm, acts as a supplementary energy source for Middlebury’s energy needs (mostly heating and cooling) when the on-campus biomass plant does not meet generation demands. 

The majority of Middlebury’s heating and cooling needs are generated from the college’s biomass plant. In 2009, Middlebury launched its biomass gasification plant, which reduced the college’s carbon footprint by approximately “12,500 tons, which represent an estimated 40 percent of the College’s 2006 carbon emissions.” The biomass plant works by superheating wood chips to make steam that is generated throughout the campus for heating and cooling. Wood chips are harvested from forests in Vermont and New York, within a 75-mile radius of campus. The biomass gasification plant is designed to also be able to process fuel oil as a backup fuel source when demand for heating and cooling on campus is high. 

Biofuels, however, do not effectively reduce carbon emissions. 

Environmental justice organizations across Vermont, including 350Vermont, have committed to phasing out biofuels and only supporting legislation that ends the use of biofuels at the state level. Despite claims that biomass is a net-zero source of energy, many biofuels have the same or worse greenhouse gas emissions as fossil fuels over their full life cycle (when considering production through consumption). 

ISSUES WITH THE BIOMASS GENERATOR:

Colleges, including Middlebury, have used biomass as part of their carbon neutrality strategy, making the assumption that biomass is carbon neutral because the “regrowth of forests offsets carbon emitted to the atmosphere through biomass combustion.” According to a 2012 EPA report, however, considering all biomass to be carbon neutral “is not supported by the best available science.” Current carbon accounting treats bioenergy as carbon neutral, even when that is not the case. In reality, scaled-up biomass can increase deforestation and biodiversity loss, causing increased carbon emissions and harming forest health. 

According to research by a 2010 ES401 Senior Seminar, Middlbeury’s assumption that “biomass is inherently carbon neutral is potentially misleading because it does not take into account the ultimate fate of the carbon released by the facility or how that carbon will contribute to future stores of carbon in the atmosphere. Instead, this assumption focuses on the source of carbon in the past and its release in the present. By this same logic, coal and other fossil fuels are also carbon neutral because they contain carbon molecules that, like as for biomass, were derived from atmospheric CO2 and photosynthesis, albeit hundreds of millions of years ago.” It is rare that as much carbon released by burning biomass will be sequestered by the same forest from which the wood pellets were harvested. 

To ensure true carbon neutrality, forests from which wood has been harvested must be managed to ensure that an equal amount of carbon that has been released is being sequestered by the land. Proper management of college-owned land could also ensure further carbon sequestration. This sort of oversight is critical to ensuring that Middlebury College is not making false carbon counting claims. 

ISSUES WITH BIOFUELS 

Renewable natural gas is the latest scheme to keep the fracked gas industry afloat, both locally and nationwide. Middlebury’s partnership with Goodrich farms has allowed VT Gas to build another pipeline to connect the VT Gas network, locking the college into having the pipeline for decades, thereby slowing Vermont’s transition from fossil fuels and working against the alleged principles of the Energy 2028 initiative. Another major concern surrounding RNG is that leaking methane from RNG pipelines can result in high levels of greenhouse gas emissions. 

There have also been findings of wage theft and farmworker abuses at the Goodrich farm, where the methane digester is located: according to Migrant Justice, farmworkers endured repeated physical abuses when they tried to obtain their wages. Middlebury College has chosen to look the other way, refusing to address these abuses and “capitalizing on the structural vulnerabilities faced by our farmworker neighbors.” Learn more about the Migrant Justice organization here. 

NEXT STEPS

The harmful effects associated with biofuels disproportionately impact lower-income, immigrant, and BIPOC communities. Ending the use of biofuels is necessary for facilitating a truly just transition that prioritizes the needs of historically marginalized groups. 

Middlebury College’s sustained commitment to and investment in biofuels works against these statewide environmental justice efforts that seek to facilitate a just transition in Vermont. Middlebury’s extensive land ownership and financial resources give the school an opportunity to take a stance and set a precedent. Alternatives to biofuels include using Middlebury’s land to develop community solar projects that benefit both the Middlebury campus and the larger community. It is critical that Middlebury students continue to push for a transition away from both fossil fuel and biofuel use and instead, encourage the development of wind and solar infrastructure. 

SOLAR 

As another step in Middlebury’s Energy 2028 initiative, a 5-megawatt solar project has been approved and construction has begun on South Street Extension, about a mile and a half south of campus. The 30-acre, 29,000-panel solar field being built in conjunction with Encore and Green Mountain Power, will provide 40% of the college’s total electricity usage when up and running. The college claims the project will produce enough energy to “offset or avoid 7 million pounds of burned coal per year.” Prior to the South Street solar field, Middlebury’s solar portfolio consisted of just 1-megawatt of power across 8 separate solar installations. 

Plans for the field include transforming the surrounding property into a trail for recreational and educational engagement from both the college and town communities. Those working on the project hope to incorporate a pollinator garden to promote pollinator populations as well as plaques and signs explaining the history of the land in relation to the native Abenaki history associated with it. 

Though the addition of such a robust solar project to Middlebury’s energy profile is a positive step toward a true renewable energy transition, this project has lacked the necessary due diligence on the part of the college and town in terms of community and ecological consideration. 

Social Implications

The original location for the solar project was on an elevated ledge near the south street extension site. When this location was announced there was immediate pushback from surrounding property owners who would be able to see the site from their homes. Distaste in the lack of communication, transparency, and community-based decision-making on the part of the town left those impacted community members frustrated; however, their frustrations were quickly appeased with the moving of the site to South Street Extension. 

The NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) sentiments from homeowners whose distant views would be abstracted is a classic case of certain voices taking priority over other, less powerful voices. The new location is next to a retirement home and there has been little acknowledgment of how this change may be prioritizing more socially powerful communities over those with less social capital. 

Ecological Implications

Critical to Middlebury’s mission is its dedication to action for the betterment of the climate and environment. The site itself and the process by which this site was chosen set Middlebury’s goals surrounding sustainable energy and land and habitat restoration at odds. 

The South Street Extension site is on land that was historically cleared for agricultural use though has not been used for such in decades. The new site is marked under the state of Vermont’s plan for biodiversity conservation as a high-priority landscape for restoration to improve the connectivity of Otter Creek wetland and riparian habitats. The continued development of this land indicates Middlebury’s decision-making process has completely lacked consideration of habitat restoration potential and the ecological benefits this restoration would have in the Otter Creek wetlands area. 

The decision to move the site from the bluff to South Street Extension put Middlebury’s energy and ecological goals at odds, and in the words of Professor Jeff Howarth, creating “conflicting goals of climate change action.” 

Further reading on the South Street Extensions Solar Project:

Solar Project Brings Middlebury College Closer to 100 Percent Renewable Energy Goal

After delays, college breaks ground on solar project 

College breaks ground on new solar panel project, following controversial site selection 

So, is Middlebury truly carbon neutral? 

Middlebury is currently claiming carbon neutrality due to their transition to biofuels, RNG, solar projects, and the college-owned Bread Loaf forest’s accredited carbon offsets. 

This graph shows the college’s transition to “carbon neutrality” in 2016 as the Bread Loaf Forest conservation credits were newly counted toward Middlebury’s carbon accounting “neutralizing” the college’s emissions. While this claim is great for the optical motives of the college, the logic is extremely flawed: in June of 2015, the then college President alongside the Vermont Land Trust attorney signed a conservation easement conserving Bread Loaf in perpetuity, thus preventing any future development on the 2,100 acres of college-owned, forested land. This easement in 2015 means the land – credited with carbon sequestration, catapulting the college to “net zero” carbon emissions in 2016 – was not and would never in the future be under threat of development. This is the concept of additionality: the understanding that if the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions associated with the land credited for offsets are not “additional” then purchasing offsets rather than reducing real emissions is more harmful to the climate.   

While setting aside land for protection is important in reducing carbon from the atmosphere and ensuring the protection of vital carbon sinks, using the ownership of forested land as an excuse to continue to use fossil fuels and pollutive energy sources is a gross misuse of the Middlebuy’s resources and influence on the climate conversation. 

In addition to their flawed logic, carbon offsets pose environmental justice concerns. Offsetting carbon through land/forest purchase and conservation is a way to allow large emitters to get away with failing to reduce real carbon emissions. Credits allow emitters to buy offsets in distant parts of the world and claim they are accounting for the carbon the institution is emitting. While Middlebury’s offsets may be located close by, the principal is dangerous and perpetuates the issue of sacrifice zones as emitters can continue to release the same amount of carbon into the atmosphere in concentrated areas, impacting surrounding communities and ecosystems while claiming reduced carbon emissions or carbon neutrality. 

The Dean of Environmental Affairs and Sustainability claims, “There are good carbon offsets and there are bad carbon offsets, and it’s the bad ones that give the good ones a bad rap.” However, it doesn’t seem as though Middlebury’s example of carbon offsets is all that “good” of an example. 

Unfortunately, Middlebury can claim carbon neutrality as they are “by the books” carbon neutral; however, as an institution that prides itself on its environmental ethos, and has the resources – both economic and intellectual – to truly lead the way in the green transition, we should hold ourselves to a higher standard than the flawed metrics that allow carbon neutrality to be claimed when institutions continue to emit harmful pollutants. Ultimately, these carbon credits associated with the conservation of forests and land are a performative tactic for institutions like Middlebury to get away with carbon emissions, dodging accountability and hindering a true renewable transition.  

STUDENT PERCEPTION 

This leads us to ask a couple of essential questions:

  • Have Middlebury’s commitments to carbon neutrality affected meaningful environmental change?
  • Is the college truly carbon neutral?
  • Are the college’s claims to be en route to achieving carbon neutrality, but only through commodifying local forests, truly something to brag about? 

With all of these examples in mind, it is regrettably clear that Middlebury’s actions are a classic example of “greenwashing.” Greenwashing happens when a company or organization spends more time and money marketing itself as sustainable than actually minimizing its environmental impact. 

Middlebury’s green efforts are heavily advertised, both on campus and online. The college promotes its many sustainable living opportunities, including the Sustainable Food Studies House (Weybridge House) and the Self-Reliance and InSite houses, as well as its LEED-certified buildings.  It actively touts the college’s organic farm (the Knoll), internships with the Sustainability Solutions Lab on topics like sustainable design and environmental consulting, and the fact that it retains Bill McKibben as a scholar-in-residence. It brags about having divested from fossil fuels in 2019 (after a concededly rocky seven-year path). But while the complexities of Middlebury’s green efforts may be debated in some of the more probing Environmental Studies courses or in an occasional op-ed in the Campus, the majority of students are not well-versed on the intricacies of Middlebury’s sustainability initiatives, including Energy2028.

Middlebury also attracts many students who are interested in pursuing Environmental Studies, and is proud of the fact that the college has the oldest undergraduate Environmental Studies program in the United States. The promise of a green campus is what draws so many students to attend Middlebury, but those promises don’t always come true. See, for example, this student perspective on what drew her to Middlebury in the first place versus what she encountered once arriving:

As a junior in high school who knew she wanted to study Environmental Studies in college, it didn’t take long for Middlebury to become my dream school. Once I got in, I imagined that I would take inspiring seminars with Bill McKibben and make incredible friends during Mountain Club outings in the Adirondacks. I now cringe at my level of naivete and unfounded optimism, and my experience at Middlebury as an Environmental Studies student has been quite different than I initially imagined. While I have had wonderful professors and it has been a privilege to be a part of a community where concern for climate change is commonly shared, the sense of clarity I had as an applicant that Middlebury is the place to be for environmentalists is gone. The degree of frustration at the lack of transparency of the administration when it comes to their sustainability initiatives is something that I was completely not expecting during my Middlebury experience. Additionally, I have come to see how environmentalism at Middlebury is rooted in exclusivity. 

The hazards of greenwashing do not end with jaded students. Many Middlebury students have an activist spirit, but the college’s greenwashing efforts often blind students to the critical environmental advocacy work that still remains to be done on our campus. When students see plans like Energy2028, which confidently promise a “commitment to . . . 100 percent renewable energy,” it is easy to persuade oneself that Middlebury does not have to do much more to improve upon its sustainability record. When the college is advertised as one of the most sustainable and environmentally conscious campuses in the United States, the community internalizes this message, and there is a tendency to become complacent. For these reasons, greater transparency about Middlebury’s claims of carbon neutrality is needed, as is the need to broaden community awareness that the college is not doing enough to fulfill a just transition to clean energy. 

CALLS TO ACTION 

This is an area in which our advocacy efforts can clearly make a difference, and all of our voices need to be heard in order to ensure that Middlebury makes a just energy transition.  Complex advocacy around Middlebury’s environmental commitments is not new – indeed, just a few years ago, Middlebury students, faculty, and community members had to band together and fight to persuade Middlebury to divest from fossil fuels. 

It is time to advocate for alternate practices for getting clean energy to Middlebury’s campus, in addition to rethinking the energy-intensive practices that are normalized on our campus and beyond. While there is not a clear consensus on which energy alternatives would be best, our campus has no shortage of experts, professors, and students who are passionate about joining this discussion. In addition, we must demand transparency from the administration when it comes to information about where our energy is truly coming from and the accuracy of the language they use to promote their sustainability plans. Since the Energy2028 webpage has taken center stage in Middlebury’s greenwashing campaign, a great place to start would be demanding a shift in language on this homepage. 

Finally, it is important to spread information about greenwashing in general and greenwashing on our own campus. Through teach-ins and other means, we must learn to be more critical and skeptical of facile claims of sustainability.  We must continue to question the institutions and groups that we are a part of. 

Here are some resources to further investigate environmental justice movements that challenge Middlebury’s greenwashing efforts:

  • Sunday Night Environmental Group Club (they specifically work on projects related to Migrant Justice and Energy2028 critiques)
  • Milk with Dignity
  • Migrant Justice
  • Extinction Rebellion
  • Sunrise Movement
  • 350.org

Here are some professors who are great resources to talk to about these topics:

  • Mez Baker-Medard 
  • Dan Suarez
  • Bill McKibben
  • Jeff Howarth
  • Carolyn Finney
  • Megan Mayhew-Bergman
  • Spring Ulmer

RESOURCES