USC aims for carbon neutrality

In a new stride for a sustainable campus, USC looks to introduce new environmental initiatives, including achieving carbon neutrality by 2025, implementing LED lighting and energy efficiency retrofits and converting energy systems to run on electricity in place of gas. 

Other goals, outlined by Chief Sustainability Officer Mick Dalrymple in an interview with the Daily Trojan about the neutrality initiative, include converting to electric systems and the installation of on- and off-campus solar panels. 

USC’s final long-term step for achieving carbon neutrality is a carbon reduction removal project, Dalrymple said. The sustainability office is planning to create a task force to define the University’s approach towards offsetting carbon.

“The ideal solution would be something that takes carbon out of the atmosphere, like trees, or what’s called ‘direct air capture,’” Darymple said. “There’s some researchers at USC that have developed methods to remove carbon from the atmosphere.”

Depending on the stage of these University-developed carbon capture technologies, Dalrymple said the University hopes to utilize them both on campus and in the community to reach further carbon reduction goals. 

“The interesting thing is that the carbon emissions are made up of individual contributions, but the impacts are spread out over the globe,” Dalrymple said. “So it’s the cumulative addition and that’s what makes it so hard to tackle.” 

Joshua Goldstein, a professor of history at the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, has taught classes on climate change and researched sustainability since 2000. Goldstein said the University’s urgency for sustainability reform is encouraging, but he is concerned about their ability to concretely measure carbon neutrality.

“Carbon neutrality is used by corporations throughout the world, and how you define it is really important to [know] whether it’s truly going to be meaningful … As much as carbon neutrality is a mushy concept, offsets are even mushier and undefined,” Goldstein said. 

Senior Kathleen Verendia, who serves as co-director of the Environmental Student Assembly, said they are curious to see the University’s continued steps for carbon reduction if the school manages to reach carbon neutrality by 2025.

“Reducing carbon emissions in any way possible is always a positive … and I would be interested to know if they will continue if they do become carbon neutral by 2025,” Verendia said. “lf that is the case, it would still be interesting to see them continuously trying to reduce carbon emissions, even if they do technically reach carbon neutrality.” 

If carbon emissions are not immediately addressed, the world may see lasting environmental impacts such as increased wildfires, addressed extreme weather, rising sea levels, species migration and species and human harm, according to Dalrymple. Some environmental changes have even further implications, such as some species’ migration to higher elevations that may disrupt supply chains and cause new diseases. 

Motivated by these climate change threats, the University looks to achieve their goals by 2025. 

“We know from the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] that major global action needs to take place within this decade, before 2030, in order to minimize the negative impacts of climate change by 2050,” Dalrymple said. “To communicate the urgency and how important this is, USC felt like it needed to be a leader and accelerate to get there by 2025.” 

Each year, the University will participate in an annual greenhouse gas inventory where the Office of Sustainability will gather utility bills from around campus. A consultant will use the data to determine annual emissions. 

With a plan to achieve carbon neutrality and become a leader in sustainability, Dalrymple said USC hopes to create a better world for its students and the greater Los Angeles community.

“It’s about USC taking its role as a community leader seriously and showing people what the solutions are,” Dalrymple said. “We realize this is a very important issue and we want other people to also take it very seriously, and the way to do that is to practice it, educate on it, research the solutions and practice the solutions.”