Why CU’s Environmental Center Director Hates Renewable Energy Credits
Posted by: Dave Burdick in CU, Choices & actions, Follow the money, Utilities, renewable energyDave Newport, director of the Environmental Center at CU, isn’t into renewable energy credits.
“One, RECs suck,” he said. “Two, RECs suck, and three, RECs suck. Anything I do is better than a REC. It was the tool of choice when that was the only tool in the toolbox.”
University of Colorado-Boulder students have set aside $50,000 to ultimately go to the Carbon Fund, an initiative coming from the Governor’s Energy Office.
“At this point we’re just pledging to work with them,” Newport said. “They don’t have a product yet, but they will.”
He said that the local carbon offsets that the Carbon Fund will offer are a step beyond the RECs that CU had been buying from Community Energy. Newport said that it’s hard to explain RECs, because they don’t go directly to new projects, but pay — in a way — for projects that have already started.
“No real behavioral change comes with a REC,” he said. “[A] turbine’s gonna turn when the wind hits it, not when money hits it.” But with the Colorado Carbon Fund, which plans to sell carbon offsets generated by local projects, he said, “You’ll be able to touch and feel your specific project.”
Kind of like adopting a highway, a carbon offset purchaser could know which Colorado-based project they were helping to fund.
Another benefit for CU getting involved early with the Colorado Carbon Fund is that Newport sees growth not only for the CCF, but also for the university. “We may get to the point where our students can develop local projects and [we] could be a seller of local offsets to the Colorado Carbon Fund.”
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February 13th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
[...] over at BoulderCarbonTax.com again, this time about CU’s Environmental Center director and why he says CU is graduating from renewable energy credits. Check it if you’re into that sort of [...]
February 14th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
The demand for carbon offsets and RECs signify a great step towards lowering carbon emissions.
To learn more about Carbonfund.org and what we do, please visit our projects page: http://www.carbonfund.org/site/pages/our_projects
Thank you,
Carbonfund.org
February 14th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
Dear Mr Burdick
While I stand by the spirit and intent of my comments to you above, in the future you might consider the courtesy of informing people that a conversation with you is on the record and intended for publication. This courtesy is the mark of a professional. You failed to mention your intent to transcribe and print the conversation we briefly had by phone that was presented as a casual discussion. Had you told me your intent, you would have gotten the same comments from me perhaps without the slightly indelicate hyperbole. However, in the future, you will not get your calls returned as I, like most people, don’t appreciate misrepresentation of intent.
An unfettered exchange of perspectives on climate issues is a good idea and I support and appreciate you seeking to engage the community on this important topic. But unprofessional conduct serves no ones interest.
Dave Newport
February 15th, 2008 at 7:15 am
Dear Mr. Newport,
As one of the editors of the Boulder Carbon Tax tracker, I’ve contacted our contributor Dave Burdick about your comment above and will be contacting you separately later today so I can learn more details about this unfortunate miscommunication, in order to prevent similar problems in the future. But I do understand your annoyance, and I apologize for anything on our end that contributed to this miscommunication.
One of the challenges of running a community journalism project is that since we are not a traditional news organization, people often don’t understand immediately the role that we are playing — and sometimes we don’t always convey that well ourselves. That’s an unavoidable risk of exploring new territory in the media landscape.
I’m hoping you might be willing to help us figure out how to communicate more effectively with sources and community members about what we’re doing — that our project does involve publishing as well as public conversation.
I look forward to further discussion with you,
- Amy Gahran
February 18th, 2008 at 11:45 am
Just wanted to follow up here — I’ve talked with both our contributor Dave Burdick, and CU’s Dave Newport.
Burdick contends that he did fully ID himself and that he was writing for this site. Newport does not recall that. So we have a case of he said/he said here. And I’m confident that both Daves are fully confident in their respective recollections. So we’re at an impasse on resolving what was said.
What I think we have here is an unfortunate miscommunication. And miscommunications can happen on the hearing end as well as on the speaking end.
I think the lesson of this particular miscommunication is that, since this community journalism project is rather different from a mainstream news organization, it’s especially important when we interview people or otherwise to engage with the community to emphasize that publishing is a big part of the public conversation we’re generating here. It’s obviously easy for people to misunderstand that. All part of staying afloat in today’s shifting media landscape.
That said, I’d like to defend the ethics and professionalism of Dave Burdick here. He is an experienced journalist (who used to work with the Daily Camera in Boulder) and currently is at the Columbia Univ. graduate school of journalism. While we don’t require that people have professional journalism experience to participate in this project, Burdick’s experience is definitely a bonus. I might expect a novice to neglect to ID this project fully and appropriately to a source, but I’m skeptical that Burdick would make such an error.
Of course, I wasn’t on the call, and accidents do happen. Either way, as uncomfortable as this exchange has been, it’s been a useful teachable moment in this project.
- Amy Gahran