In 2007, Carleton took on an ambitious challenge. It signed on to the American College and Universities Presidents’ Climate Commitment (now the Second Nature Climate Commitment), setting a goal to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050—that is, to balance its greenhouse emissions by the amount such gases are removed or absorbed.
Since then, campus has blossomed with green initiatives that have brought a 56 percent reduction in emissions: the addition of a second wind turbine in 2011 (following the arrival of the first one in 2004), installation of a $42 million geothermal system in 2021, construction of efficient facilities built using LEED and Passive House standards, and other measures impacting all corners of campus, from dining hall offerings and electric vehicles to academic civic engagement projects. The effort has been so successful that in spring of 2024, the College announced in Carleton 2033, its strategic direction, that it would achieve carbon neutrality in 2025—a quarter century earlier than initially planned.
So why, just months later, with this long-sought goal within reach, has Carleton announced that it’s shifting away from its focus on carbon neutrality?
In October 2024, the College’s Board of Trustees unanimously approved Sustainable Futures, the new framework for sustainability, climate action, and environmental justice, which noted: “While we still aim to pursue the elimination of natural gas and greening our electricity, we find that a focus on neutrality narrows the conversation to only reducing historically measured campus emissions, rather than investing in work to measure and address new emissions … or support broader transformation of sustainability.”
The decision, led by the ad hoc Sustainability Working Group, arises from Carleton’s increasing awareness that addressing climate change can’t be limited to one benchmark, and that the ongoing work of sustainability requires a holistic, long-view approach—one that starts here and emanates out to our neighbors and far beyond.
Concerns about Carbon Offsets
To achieve carbon neutrality, the top goal should be decarbonization: working to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions. Three types of emissions are at play here. Scope-1 emissions are those that we directly control—fuel used on site for heating or in maintenance vehicles, for instance. Scope-2 emissions are created from the generation of energy purchased from utilities. And Scope-3 includes a range of other indirect emissions, like those associated with travel, the manufacture of purchased goods, or waste sent to landfills.
Scope-3 emissions are the hardest to cut. To be carbon neutral, you’d need to either eliminate activities causing these emissions—in Carleton’s case, ceasing activities like off-campus studies, employee commuting, or participation in out-of-town academic conferences, for example—or purchase carbon credits to offset these emissions. This is the strategy employed by all colleges and universities that have achieved or are seeking carbon neutrality, and it was part of Carleton’s original plan.
But questions about the true impact of carbon offset sales raised red flags for members of Carleton’s working group. A January 2023 Guardian investigation, for instance, estimated that more than 90 percent of rainforest offset credits—one of the most common types of offsets—are “phantom credits.” Ninety-four percent of these offsets, sold by the world’s largest seller of these types of credits, were found to have “no benefit to the climate,” with only a “handful” showing any evidence of deforestation reductions. And a July 2024 report by the Washington Post found that “more than half of all carbon credit forest preservation projects in the Brazilian Amazon overlapped with public territories”—that is, credits were purchased under the premise that new carbon-removing forests would be planted, but organizations selling credits were counting existing publicly owned forests instead. Of the 35 certified projects there, the Post found that 29 overlapped with public lands.
“We’re not convinced that the offsets market is doing the robust kind of work we need it to do to make a confident purchase,” says Sarah Fortner, Carleton’s director of sustainability. “There are scams and ethical issues. Sometimes carbon sequestration is overcounted or the project isn’t engaging with the community in the right way, displacing livelihoods or disrupting other social or cultural interests. If we keep our opportunities to decide which offsets to buy or develop, we constrain the potential types and impacts of projects we could take on to support students, climate action, and environmental justice.”
Carbon credits can provide an important source of climate finance to developing countries, says Washington, D.C.–based climate finance expert Darius Nassiry ’88, but they can also raise questions of equity and fairness, particularly when projects involve marginalized communities or are located in developing countries. “Addressing these issues means that the project design process should be inclusive, compensation should be fair, and projects need careful management and oversight,” he says.
President Alison Byerly applauds the intention behind higher-ed carbon neutrality goals. “At the beginning of this movement, it was very helpful for colleges and universities to be able to put a concrete plan together, to say to their community and to their board, ‘This is why we want this goal. Here’s what it’s going to take to get there,’” she says. “But if what it ends up doing is outsourcing the real work to someplace else, then you’re not really changing behavior. This has to be not just about the institution spending money. It has to be the community changing behavior.”
A “We” Problem, not an “I” Problem
In his research, Alex Barron ’00 has been zooming in on carbon neutrality within the higher education sphere. He says institutions like Carleton are well positioned to lead in responding to climate change: we’re long-lived with potential for longer-term thinking; we foster research and innovation; and we have a social mission.
But when it comes to carbon neutrality, he’s been calling for better solutions from colleges and universities. An associate professor of environmental science and policy at Smith College, he and colleagues Aaron Strong and Lucy Metz wrote a piece in 2021 sharing their peer-reviewed research on the 11 schools that had at that time achieved carbon neutrality. In a talk last summer, he updated his findings to include three more schools that had reached this benchmark.
Of those 14 institutions, the vast majority of emission reductions came from paying someone else to reduce emissions, mostly through offsets. Only eight percent of total reductions in Scope-1 emission were due to direct reductions in on-site fossil fuel use.
“Our research suggests that most schools haven’t reduced their direct emissions that much,” Barron tells the Voice. “In fact, one carbon-neutral school has actually increased its direct emissions by more than 50 percent—about as much as Carleton reduced theirs.”
What Barron’s research shows: “A school can achieve carbon neutrality without making any progress on decarbonizing their campus.”
He puts his alma mater in the top 10 or 15 schools in the country in terms of decarbonization.
“Carleton is leading in two ways: first, recognizing the limitations of carbon neutrality as a concept and focusing on getting fossil fuels out of their energy system, which is what we need to be doing to hit our climate goals,” he says. “The second is recognizing that climate change is a systems problem, and that we need to work collaboratively to address it, not just alter our own behavior.”
He offers an analogy: “If someone said, ‘I’m going to solve structural racism by not personally being a racist,’ we can see that’s an inadequate way to think about it. In the same way, in order to solve our climate problem, we need institutions taking responsibility, both for their own actions and also working hard to move these larger systems at the scale and the speed that we need.”
“The climate problem,” he adds, “is a ‘we’ problem, not an ‘I’ problem, and we can’t get the solutions we need only through a lens of individual action.”
“It’s about making change, starting with the nucleus of who we are, but also expanding outward and including the local community and Indigenous communities, recognizing that we’re part of an ecosystem, that we’re not just a little plot of land that is Carleton College.”
Ecosystems of Action
In light of concerns about the carbon offsets industry, Eli Watt ’25, a student member of the Sustainability Working Group, was among those pushing to de-emphasize neutrality in sustainability planning. “Because it was going to be such an expensive investment, we figured why are we going to invest in these things that don’t really do anything, and instead use that incredible sum of money to invest in projects in our community, or invest in projects on campus that will actually create a tangible impact on our carbon emissions and sequestration.”
“I’m really proud of Carleton for doing that,” Watt adds. “It was a risk to say, ‘We’re not following peer institutions; we’re going to take this novel approach.’”
The approach will make an investment proportional to our emissions—that is, the amount it would cost to buy enough credits to offset the College’s Scope-3 emissions and become carbon neutral—into local sustainability initiatives, where it’ll have greater impact. That amount, nearly $250,000 annually, will seed a new Sustainable Futures Fund. Its goal is to amplify “living laboratory” education, engage students and faculty in climate solutions, and catalyze “support for climate and environmental justice solutions through the development of a knowledge repository,” the framework states.
“Whether students realize it or not, confronting climate change is going to be their life’s work,” says Barron. And the Sustainable Futures Fund is a tool to invest in ways to ensure that Carleton students receive a rich education so they can bring knowledge and skills wherever they land after leaving Northfield.
Aaron Swoboda ’01, a member of the Sustainability Working Group and associate professor of environmental studies and economics, agrees. “Engaging students in class with real-world problems exposes them to industries and jobs they didn’t even know about. That creates opportunities.”
Fortner frames the work ahead as developing “ecosystems of action”—creating alliances and sharing resources across campus and with other thinkers and educational institutions, with community partners, municipalities, states, and tribal governments.
“It’s about making change, starting with the nucleus of who we are, but also expanding outward and including the local community and Indigenous communities, recognizing that we’re part of an ecosystem, that we’re not just a little plot of land that is Carleton College,” says Byerly. “This approach reflects what I think of as the very Carleton value of authenticity. Carleton is a place that is ready to really do the work.”
These ripple effects, much more than changes in on-site operations, are where Carls can have deep impact, Swoboda adds.
“We could become the Carleton College Solar Power Plant and produce a lot of renewable electricity—but that’s not what we’re best at. What we have comparative advantage in is high-quality liberal arts education. What Carleton is really good at is training students to think critically about complex issues. And I think interdisciplinary critical thinking is going to be key to making change.”