coe032_johnson.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:24] Welcome back, fine, listeners, we're thrilled to have you with us here today. We've got a really lovely conversation with our director of Sustainability Green Composing at Rice University. It's Richard Johnson and he is the director of Axiom, which stands for the Administrative Center for Sustainability and Energy Management. And again, that's the sustainability office here at Rice. So we have a great conversation with Richard, and we also want to do a shout out to the center that is supporting and innovating and producing this podcast on a weekly basis, and that is the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences, also known as Sens. S No NHS. That's right, Sentence C and H.

Speaker2: [00:01:14] S Cultures of energy.

Speaker1: [00:01:15] And you can find that, yeah, you can find that at cultures of energy. Talk easy to remember, flows off the tongue and sinks into the mind and such a kind of miraculously green and energetic way.

Speaker2: [00:01:29] I think you're overselling that.

Speaker1: [00:01:30] Oh, sorry. Well, I was told to do props, so I did.

Speaker2: [00:01:34] Anyway, props done. Props often. So this is yeah, this is an episode. We're calling it our back to school episode because we thought with all the college campuses coming back together, reuniting all of us, reuniting after a long summer of fun or work in our

Speaker1: [00:01:51] Case, blogging into class, as the case might be.

Speaker2: [00:01:54] Yeah. However, it is

Speaker1: [00:01:55] Sweating into class, you

Speaker2: [00:01:56] Scraped yourself across the finish line. We wanted to to, you know, make note of the fact that our cultures of energy are often to be found on university campuses or college campuses of one type or another. And there actually is a lot going on in the field of sustainability and and campus life now that often kind of occurs in the background. These are not things that often faculty are very aware of or where students are very aware of. But there are these legions of of very important actors among the staff who do a lot of the, you know, may be working in facilities departments who may be working in sustainability offices who are actually kind of have their finger on the pulse of how a university uses energy and what a university's environmental footprint is and doing all sorts of interesting and important things to improve those footprints, right?

Speaker1: [00:02:47] And you know, and I think it's also important to to recognize the work that they're doing and also recognize that we want to keep attention and support to and on those offices, right? Because they can be like I heard recently that the University of Chicago shame, shame, shame. My alma mater got rid of their sustainability. I mean, it's like, you know, budget cuts, whatever. You have to cut something, I get it. But you know, you have to see where these, you know, where they're whacking off things that might actually serve the campus community. It's very disappointing for the students, too. So anyway, so I think it's important that we support those offices and and keep attention on the practice of of greening campuses.

Speaker2: [00:03:29] Yes, dear listener. And if your college or university that you're an alum of or an employee of does not have a sustainability office, maybe that's something you could talk to someone about. Maybe you could become an advocate for that.

Speaker1: [00:03:39] I think the other important thing is these offices have staff people who, you know, work regular hours. They're there and you have continuity because students are wonderful and they have a lot of energy and they have a lot of ideas and they're sort of endlessly full of of of goodwill and wanting to do the right thing for the campus and for the world, right? But they turn over every four years or so like you have this constant stream of students coming through. And so that continuity that we get in the sustainability offices and with these staff folks is really important because they can sort of keep the work going when the students have gone off and to do their thing.

Speaker2: [00:04:20] And in places where you know, the students don't have a huge number of clubs or there isn't a kind of organized environmental society or environmental club on campus sustainability office really become the go-to places for students who are interested in getting involved in meaningful projects can actually turn to to find things to do and ways to get involved. So they do. Yeah, just like you said, continuity and and support and then actually really improving our life behind the scenes in ways that you know, we want to recognize here. I do also want to say, though, I used the last maybe 15 minutes of this podcast and somebody had to step out, so she didn't hear this. So she's hearing this for the first time now.

Speaker1: [00:04:59] I think I hear it's it's going to be a surprise that I'll be riveted

Speaker2: [00:05:03] By, well, I don't know, maybe not. But we got going. And one of my pet peeves is the fact that campuses continue to sprawl and that the way in which philanthropy and development is handled on most college campuses involves recruiting major donors to give money to build buildings, because I guess that's what they want to do. Or university presidents and trustees and provost and so forth feel like it's part of their legacy to build impressive buildings. But the problem is even as we green our buildings and make them more sustainable, the fact that we continue to build more buildings means that overall the carbon footprint goes up and that's exactly what's happening at rice, despite all of our efforts. We see the footprint going up because we just insist on building new buildings, right? And do we need to do that? So, you know, one one thing I would love to say stop building more buildings, you know, and that's what I talked about. And then we got into a really interesting conversation where Richard said, Well, let me, you know, let's actually, you know, think about this. And what if we made you know your office space part of your compensation negotiations when you take a new job? Like, what if I was to say we can give you an office or I could give you an extra $5000 in your research account, knowing that that space you're occupying actually cost something, it cost something to heat and to cool, and it costs something to have a service staff take care of it and et cetera, et cetera. Or, you know, write it up and delighted, right? Yeah. I mean, all of those things. So this is, you know, so we were talking about that and I said, you know, I'll go you one better. I will give up my office right now in exchange for a unlimited coffee card at at the pavilion, which is a place on Rice's campus where really probably 90 percent.

Speaker1: [00:06:43] So you could you could meet people at the pavilion and that would be your your your stomach. I was called that beer mushroom dish.

Speaker2: [00:06:49] Yeah. Yeah, that's good. Good German. That means your tribal table. Yes, but it's correct. Yes, you'd meet students there. You could get your work done. Actually, he was talking about something different, he said. You know, we could have a kind of space that was open to people to have meetings and places that could store books and other things you want to store.

Speaker1: [00:07:11] But it would be collective. Would it be

Speaker2: [00:07:12] Collective rather than individual?

Speaker1: [00:07:13] So you had schedule in your time, you know, so you have it on Monday afternoons or whatever, and you could meet students then and there? Well, you know, that's what a lot of graduate programs do. Right? For graduate programs, you have one office and the students share them right. You have office hour meetings and you schedule them right. So Joe is in there from one to three and Jane is in there from three to five and whatever. So that's totally doable. But I do. I like the unlimited coffee card. I think it should also include unlimited bagels and then those really yummy. Have you ever had those little sugary things that look like a butterfly? I think you should be able to have those, too. So, you know, in my pitch, I'm going to yes, it's going to be coffee and not just brew coffee, but the fancy coffee and some snacks limited snacks.

Speaker2: [00:08:00] Now the other thing here that that folks at home won't know is that some of these offices actually are really nice. She's done a really good job of putting together this really pleasant space to be in.

Speaker1: [00:08:08] Well, I had to do that because if it's not pleasant, then I don't want to spend any time there and I'll just end up working at cafes or at home. So I kind of do that to make myself get into the office. Yeah, which says something to about our kind of orientation towards offices, actually.

Speaker2: [00:08:24] Yeah. But my office, as I point out to Richard as well, is kind of like a junkyard. It's just like a junkyard of memories and old books and things I don't want to deal with. And so, you know, and toys and toys, toys and toys and little things I've been given over the years. And, you know, it's just like of these weird, dusty like attic, basically that. And I don't really like being in there anyway. And I know that's not everyone's work practice, but the thinking was really like as faculty, that's something we could actually have conversations with with our administration to is, you know, what kind of what makes us work better. And the fact is, we don't, you know, a lot of us telecommute. A lot of us do. Our work from home are more important work. Why don't we take that into account when we're thinking about how much office space we really need? And this is all apropos of like yet another new building that Rice is proposing the new social sciences

Speaker1: [00:09:12] Building, new social sciences building. But I also have to. I can't resist pointing out the irony of this conversation when, as we speak, I do believe groundbreaking is happening for a building that will be named after your father and mother. Or is it a wing of a building anyway? It's a it's a it's a construct, right?

Speaker2: [00:09:32] So there's a number of things we've discovered. We can't defend, defend him anyway. So those involved with that whole trigger warning debacle thing in Chicago, too. But that may be a topic for another podcast.

Speaker1: [00:09:46] That's another. Well, OK, we'll quit picking on the University of Chicago. Anyway, I agree with the less buildings and of course, that rise. They're building this opera house and I'm just like, what? Airport? Okay, like, I just, I don't know, but I I will zip my lip on that too. I don't understand why we need an opera house on Rice's campus when we have a perfectly good one in downtown Houston, which apparently people love and go to. And it works. So why make another one?

Speaker2: [00:10:13] But so anyway, speaking of white elephants, we should probably leave it there and move on. But anyway, you see, this has gotten us animated and I hope it gets you animated to and. And let us know what you think, and next week, we're hoping very much to be back with an episode about the Dakota Access Pipeline, so stay tuned. Go, Richard. Welcome everyone to the Cultures of Energy podcast, welcome Richard Johnson, who even though you don't actually hold this title officially, we think of you unofficially as Rice University's chief sustainability officer. Are you OK with that moniker?

Speaker3: [00:10:54] I'm totally fine with that. My my title is otherwise fairly confusing, so I'll go with that.

Speaker2: [00:11:00] We're so happy to have you here. We're thinking of this as kind of a back to school special in a sort of a certain type and attempt to think about how do we green our our life in higher education. Given that I think a lot of people who listen to this podcast are connected to universities and colleges one way or another. Actually, our cultures of energy are principally the cultures of energy we have on our campuses. And as it turns out, your unit, which was founded at Rice in 2012, unless I'm mistaken, really, it's called Axiom, and you can maybe talk a bit through the history if you want, but it is a unit that is in described. I think at one point is a think and do tank. It's both understanding our energy and environmental footprint here at Rice, doing short term planning, long term planning and engaging in all matters sustainability related on campus and off campus too. So thank you so much for the work you're doing. First of all, because I think one of the things you discover if you begin to look around your campus is that often times some of the most proactive people on climate and environment issues are not faculty and they're not students. But there are people who are positions like yours one foot in the faculty, one foot in the administrative life, also closely connected to the student body. So you really have a kind of holistic, synoptic view of things.

Speaker3: [00:12:16] In fact, I call it Starfleet staff.

Speaker1: [00:12:19] That's nice. That's good. And you could trademark that, actually.

Speaker2: [00:12:22] So tell us your story, right?

Speaker1: [00:12:24] And tell us about Axiom what you know, how come it came to be and how did it come to be?

Speaker3: [00:12:29] Sure. First, just a little bit of of background. I attended Rice as an undergraduate and I was an engineer, civil engineering and met my wife, future wife here on campus underneath a live oak tree next to Hansen College. And in fact, Rice has a tradition where if you retire from rice after working here for at least 20 years, there is a plaque put underneath the tree, you know, dedicating it to you. And it turns out my wife's father recently retired from campus. He was on the space physics faculty and his retirement tree is the tree where we met. Wow. I was. I was. They normally randomly assigned those, but

Speaker1: [00:13:15] That's magic because you don't get to pick your tree. I know a guy, you know, a guy, you know, you know a guy.

Speaker3: [00:13:21] I'm a I'm in the facilities department. I know a guy. So the axiom stands for the Administrative Center for Sustainability and Energy Management, and I became interested in sustainability. It started off in in bits and pieces. You know, we all remember growing up incidents like Love Canal, Bhopal, Exxon Valdez, and then I had a roommate who was taking environmental sociology class at Rice, and that got me even more interested. But it was really when I went off to graduate school at the University of Virginia, and I had rebelled against being a civil engineer. I started off in highway engineering and by noon on the first day, I'd realized I made a horrible career decision. And so I decided to rebel against what I was doing. I started reading a lot of Jane Jacobs and a lot of urban planning theorists. And so I thought, Well, I'm going to be a, you know, a transportation planner. But but fate had a different, different idea in mind for me. I I had a project where I needed to interview the dean of our school of Architecture. The planning program is part of architecture at UVA, and his name was William McDonough, and he's a well-known green architect. And if you've heard the term, the term, cradle to cradle, he was the one who coined that, and he co-authored a book called Cradle to Cradle. And that's where I learned about sustainable design. And I still remember that that hour where I interviewed him, it was the hour that changed my life. It's like, you know, there was everything before then, then everything after. Then, you know, I knew I just couldn't go back to the way I saw the world before. And so that's where it became interested in sustainability. That was the mid-90s.

Speaker3: [00:14:58] And then I started working in the sustainable business arena for a number of years, then worked for a bit as a planner. Then I saw this job posting for this profession that I'd never heard of before sustainability officers at universities. But I thought, Well, that sounds like something I'd like to do. So I applied for the position. I started rice in December of 2004. Now, around 2011, my boss at the time it was a brilliant woman named Barbara Bryson had this idea. She had observed that on the academic side of campus, centers are created to pull people together with common interests but who are otherwise scattered about on the organizational. She said, why don't we do that on the administrative side of campus as well? What if we created an administrative center and that it would bring together people who are working on sustainability and energy related issues? And so we thought, well, we need to come up with an acronym for that. And at first we had ACS and that lasted for only a few days because everyone would crack up when when they'd say, ACS, you know, here come the five aces and we felt like clowns. And so one of my colleagues, an energy technician who is a who's in a walking dictionary, said, Well, why don't we call ourselves Axiom, the Administrative Center for Sustainability Energy Management? Because an axiom is a self-evident truth. And that really appealed to me, and it also appealed to me because, you know, when I was in college, I used to go to this punk rock club called the Axiom in Houston. Oh, nice. And so it was like a it was like a private joke to, Oh yeah, now I run the axiom.

Speaker1: [00:16:38] And and weren't you saying that as far as we know, the first sustainability officer, at least officer type position in a university was actually here in Houston, not at Rice.

Speaker3: [00:16:49] Yeah, that's that's the that's the big surprise. I have a moment in my classes where I share with them first. What I believe to be the beginning of the campus sustainability movement was which was this fantastic speech by David or at Arkansas College back in 1990. And he throws it's entitled What is education for really provocative, right? And and he lays out a number of myths about education and then issues a challenge to universities, which is essentially to study the farms, the feedlots, the forests everywhere where the materials that come to campus originate from. Identify where the environmental impacts are occurring on campus. Where are we sending our waste, our emissions and so on and so forth, and then integrate students and faculty and classes in an interdisciplinary way into creating real solutions for real problems, and that no students should be able to graduate from these universities without understanding how to take on and solve these challenges. Because if we just take a stage on the stage approach to environmental education, we're not giving our students the tools that they need to understand how to enact genuine solutions. And so that was that was sort of the moment that created the campus sustainability movement. It was literally the assignment for the university. And and then in the mid, the UT Health Science Center here in Houston created what I believe was the first position to actually hold the title of Campus Sustainability Officer, a guy named George Bandy.

Speaker3: [00:18:26] And the position, which was created by Brian Yeoman, who those here in Houston may recognize that name. He works for the Clinton Foundation and their C40 group to reduce climate emissions in major cities works out of City Hall. Reeves Taylor, who is a well-known green architect here in Houston, was involved in in creating that position as as well. And he also teaches here at in the School of Architecture. And I I actually I pretty much co teach with him every spring. So it's nice to have that connection. So by the time I came around 2004, I would say that there were roughly 50 people with the title of campus sustainability officer. And the last time I asked the question of folks who would know which was about three or four years ago, at that time, there were maybe 600 people who had the title, but a total of about 2000 people who were in in positions in sustainability offices. So it's not no longer just one sustainability officer, but there's usually now a staff that goes along with it. So it's an amazing growth in the profession. And this same sort of growth has happened not just in universities, as has happened in cities as happened in companies. So it's really exciting to see the sustainability officer profession super duper.

Speaker1: [00:19:41] And as you, as you noted, it's really growing very quickly. I wanted to ask you a question about, I guess, the itinerant nature of undergraduate students. So I was talking to a student at University of Chicago who is very motivated and very passionate to undertake sustainability work there. And she came to me and said, How do I do this? Like, how do I make it happen? And I guess they had just defunded the sustainability program or office there at the university for budget reasons. So she was really upset and frustrated about that. She wants to do a lot of things. And so she was asking me, You know, how do you sort of get, how do you get action happening? And one of the things I said to her, and I think that this is true, but maybe you felt differently that one of the challenges of working in undergraduate setting is that you have a rotation of people committed, people who are constantly leaving and graduating. I mean, God bless them. It's a great thing that they're getting their degrees, but then they move on and so you lose. Is your charismatic leaders, you lose some of your cohesion? I guess the flip side is you have new blood, you have new excited people coming in all the time. But I was just wondering, how do you how do you kind of work with that, that condition? Because in a normal workplace, you don't have quite that turnover. It's very regularized turnover, but it's turnover.

Speaker3: [00:21:00] It's a real challenge. It's it's you're talking to a parade. And in fact, I was advising the leaders of a club here on campus just this morning, a club called the Rice Urbanists that, you know, the president is a senior. You know, it's here we are first week of class in August. You need to identify who's going to lead this club when you graduate. You always need to think who's going to take the reins after you so that the club can be sustained. I've seen a lot of student environmental organizations come and go because there was an interested group of people who are all roughly the same age, same year. They all leave at the same time and they've not prepared their next generation. And if if they don't look after their following generation, then the thing collapses and then it makes it harder for staff to engage with those organizations if the organization is ephemeral. So for for me, I get a lot of traction out of working with students in the classroom setting where I have staff members bring projects to the class and they know the class has been around for years and that there will be some oversight. So if something goes wrong, there are consequences. But students have skin in the game, they have responsibility because they're getting a grade. And so we structure projects that we hope will fit within the, you know, the very tight 15 weeks of of the of the semester calendar. And so that's that's one way to go about it.

Speaker2: [00:22:30] So Richard, let me ask you a bit about, I mean, some of the big issues that are looming over campus sustainability right now. And obviously one of them is a general concern with carbon carbon footprint, carbon offset. And I know Rice has been doing a lot of interesting things in this and things that I have only come to learn about through you. So thank you for that. But maybe you could talk a little bit about what the the broader challenges are, what Rice is doing, but also, you know, maybe what other universities are doing too are the things that that if you were a faculty member or administrator listening to this podcast, a certain ideas or places you'd be looking for for best practices or models for where your own campus could go.

Speaker3: [00:23:12] Well, that's an excellent question. And there's actually, you know, the answer will have a lot of variation based on where you're located, and it may have to do with what resources are available to you. If you're in the Southwest, you've got more sun than if you're in Maine. It may have to do with whether you are in a regulated or deregulated electricity environment. We can get into some energy conversations so that will play into, you know, how you pay for power and whether, you know, onsite or offsite renewables, they're going to make sense to you. But one thing that is universal is the benefits of using less right. The greenest power is the power you don't consume. Exactly. And so that's an excellent starting point if you want to reduce CO2 emissions is to focus on energy efficiency. And I've not found a campus on the United States that did not have plenty of opportunity in front of them for improving the efficiency of their buildings in an economical matter. Because so much of our building stock was constructed in a time where we just didn't pay attention to the consequences of consuming energy because it was, you know, it was so cheap, free is practically free and we were using, you know, especially during sort of the modernist era where, you know, my old mentor, Bill McDonough, used to say, you know, you build the same building and Reykjavik and Rangoon, you heat one, you cool the other, just apply energy, right? Well, it was really that way of thinking amongst a lot of designers for a very long time, and that characterizes a lot of the building stock on campuses around the United States. So those are obvious first targets.

Speaker1: [00:24:48] So what would be the first? What would be the first step that you would take for these buildings? You said it was affordable. So what's the first hit that needs to happen?

Speaker3: [00:24:59] There are a few things. If you if you can afford it, have someone come in and do a full building energy audit and develop a menu of projects along with, you know, here's the project. Here's the estimated payback. And then you carry that forward in whatever process your university has a capital project cycle or something like that. And universities, if they have money and you present a project, that's OK. We're going this will also take care of some deferred maintenance, but, you know, this is an energy project that will pay back in three years. Oftentimes, though, they'll fund it. And if they can't fund it, if the university is really strapped, there are other ways to go about it where you can have an external company actually implement the projects and then you pay them back over time through the savings. So some universities have have gone that route as as well. So that's, you know, that's that's that's one way to, you know, to go about solving that, that issue, another one that's depending on the quality of the HVAC and control equipment is simply taking a look at the building schedules and the temperature set points we're in in Houston, where we typically over air conditioned everything for a good part of the year. You know, how often have you seen people carrying, especially women carrying sweaters into buildings during the summertime in Houston because they're just those buildings are absolutely frigid? I'm reminded of the Mark Twain quote if we sort of bended to Houston, the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer indoors in Houston, right? Right.

Speaker3: [00:26:29] Yeah, that's true. Yeah. So those are some those are some obvious opportunities. I have a guy on my staff named John Wyndham, and I refer to him as the HVAC whisperer. And one of the things I've tasked him with is going through the building schedules of all of our buildings on campus and finding those buildings where either they've not been programmed. So they're just running, you know, 24 hours a day, seven days a week at, you know, at the type of temperatures that you would have in the mid-afternoon. And you know, they're doing that all year, year round, and I'm having him put those back into more reasonable schedules and we reach out to the key stakeholders in the building and say, OK, is it OK for offices and classrooms? You know, say, offices at eight o'clock, we're going to set those back to 76, 78 or something like that and weekends, you know? Is that going to work? And you know, most of the time they'll they'll say yes, and we do have a building temperature policy that we have in our back pockets that helps to helps us along as well.

Speaker2: [00:27:29] So so we were talking about efficiency and savings, and we could probably add to that list, you know, LED light bulbs. Sure. You know, things which I do make, you know, everyone says, well, you can't save it by changing a light. Well, we can actually do quite a lot. But if you change all the light bulbs on a university campus? Absolutely. That's a big impact. What else, though, would you say and thinking about, you know, materials issues and what? We build our buildings out of offset possibilities? What else is out there that people should be thinking about?

Speaker3: [00:27:55] Well, so I'll get into the material issues in a moment. You know, I think of it as a as a hierarchy. The first is used less, the second is by green. So once you are buying, buy from as much as as you can economically do from a renewable source, start shifting away from the dirtiest power of the coal power and try to find cleaner alternatives. Some people don't have the opportunity to specify what fuel mix they do, but but others do. And we can get into that conversation in a moment about renewable energy on campus. But the third element is the sequester carbon opportunity and you raised offsets. I think what you know, I'm a listener of the Sense podcast, and we've been very influenced by the work of Albert Pope here on the rice campus, who is really rethinking the approach to to design and saying, Well, let's design for the carbon cycle. So instead of having our common building materials be just brick and steel and concrete, which is what we've been doing for, you know, here on campus for a century. Well, what if we start looking at cross laminated timber panels, timber construction, timber as a carbon reservoir? You know, if you're if you're going about it in the right way and you all discuss this and I believe it was episode 20 of the Sentence podcast for those on the website.

Speaker3: [00:29:18] Good. Thank you. But we're we've been very influenced by him and we're looking quite seriously at a project on campus where the building material would be timber. And that's driven in part by environmental considerations, reducing the carbon footprint that would come from construction. I was over in London in February looking at what what was the world's largest cross laminated timber panel project in the Hackney area and. We had all sorts of questions, and one was, you know, are these things going to go up in smoke easily? Then we learned that the fire departments, I guess they call and fire brigade in London, they're so convinced of that this material is not going to go up in flames that there's something like seven different fire stations that are being built with these cross laminated timber panels. Hmm. And, you know, having been in some of these projects, I mean, they're just insane pictures of others. They're they're beautiful, they have excellent acoustic properties. You know, it was it was bitter cold when we were in London on that day and we go into the building and, you know, the building was still wide open to the outside. That wasn't even sealed in yet. And it was, you know, it was very pleasant inside the inside the building. So really good thermal envelope, thermal mass.

Speaker1: [00:30:43] And so but does it smell like wood inside? Hopefully, that would be great.

Speaker2: [00:30:49] And a little cedar. A little

Speaker1: [00:30:50] Cedar. Yes. Well, I mean, that's better than laminate.

Speaker3: [00:30:53] Oh, I miss cedar closets. I used to have a cedar closet and I loved it.

Speaker1: [00:30:56] Yeah. I wanted to ask, too, because of course, one of the other materials that gets utilized a lot on college campuses is biotic material that goes into students and faculty and staff stomachs. And I know that Rice is one of the few universities may be one of two or a few. I guess Harvard is another one that actually has gotten this green certification for the surgeries. Yes. Or the places where mostly students eat food. So I'm wondering if you can talk about that as a component, maybe how much of a quotient of the total green profile or sustainable profile of a university is tied up in food practices? And then also, if you could talk a little bit about what it means to have this certification. You know what that means in terms of where we're getting our food, how we're repurposing the waste questions along those lines?

Speaker3: [00:31:55] Well, any time that you share an honor with Harvard where it's just you and Harvard, that's usually a pretty, pretty good deal. So the Green Restaurant Association has a certification for four restaurants. That's not just about the food, but they really get into the details of the facility as well. And there's it's a checklist driven, point driven system much, much like LEED in the green building world. And so this is actually so you're the you're the first ones to to hear this because we have

Speaker2: [00:32:30] Been breaking news on the culture. Doo doo doo doo doo.

Speaker3: [00:32:34] We we haven't even issued the press releases yet. But yes, there are. I believe in the state of Texas. There are 15 restaurants that have been certified by the Green Restaurant Association. I'm pleased to say that six of them are within the three minute walk of where we are right now because they're in on the rice campus. And so it's all of our undergraduate dining halls for those who don't understand what a surgery is because it's an unusual term, to my knowledge, the only other university where all of their undergraduate dining facilities have the certification is Harvard. There are a few others where they have some that have been certified. University of Connecticut has, I think, five. So I'd like to give a shout out to to them and to my colleague Rich Miller. But I, you know, students are they love doing food related sustainability projects. And in my course, when we when I asked them, what do we do well and what do we not do? Well, they always want to talk about what they see in the dining halls and what they see in their in their residential colleges. And so it always comes back to food and they're concerned about food waste. They're concerned about meat in the in the kitchens. Are there enough vegan options? And so the Green Restaurant Association certification actually gives us then a baseline to say, OK, you know, we're not we're not perfect, but in in their very thorough across the board view, you know, they weren't just looking at what we're putting out to eat.

Speaker3: [00:34:03] They're looking at where where do we get it? What are we doing with packaging? What kinds of equipment are we using to cook the food? And you know what sort of light bulbs are in the in the dining halls, all those sorts of things. So in that broad view, they think we're doing well enough to achieve a certification. There's still plenty of room to go, but nevertheless students love doing food related projects. I had a class project last year where they did a food waste reduction campaign between the different different colleges and the. The winners received a SIM and roll party from Chef Roger, who is well-known on the rice campus for the quality of his sim and rolls. One of the most successful projects ever from. My class actually was an interesting experiment where the head of the housing and dining group, Mark Dickman, came to me and said, Richard, I have a suspicion that if we take trays out of the dining halls that people will throw away less food, do you know a way that we can test that? I said, Well, let's let's use the class. And the students conducted a pilot project in one of the dining halls. They took away the trays at lunchtime, so this was back in 2008 or so.

Speaker3: [00:35:19] They took away the trays and the food waste went down by a third. And and they also found that the amount of energy and water and cleaning chemicals that they needed to use afterwards were down by about 10 percent. But the big thing was they said, You know what, if we're treeless all the time, we don't need to cook as much food, which means we don't need to buy as much food, which means, you know, not only do we save money, we can also roll some of the savings into better quality food. So then it became an easy conversation with the with the heads of the residential colleges and the student association. So OK, if we go trailer across the board, here are some of the benefits that we can provide and the, you know, the students readily agreed to that. So we went completely treeless as a campus as a result of that one little experiment. And that had, you know, and that had a big reduction on reducing food waste. And, you know, people who are listening should understand rice is and all you can eat system and so you can take whatever you want. And students are welcome to go back in for seconds thirds, however much they want. But now, you know, they can't pile it all onto one tray. They can only take what they can carry.

Speaker1: [00:36:26] Yeah, unfortunately. I mean, as primates, we tend to overload.

Speaker3: [00:36:31] We eat with our eyes first.

Speaker1: [00:36:33] And so, you know, that's interesting because it is intuitive that if you took the trays away that people would put less food upon them, obviously. But it takes it takes someone recognizing that and then doing the the experiment as it were to to find out the results. So I don't know how much you know about the details of the green restaurant certification, but do they? It sounds like they really look at the building itself, but do they also look at the local provenance of food and how or how far it's been transported, whether it needs to be refrigerated during its entire shelf life as it were? Questions like did they get into that much detail?

Speaker3: [00:37:13] Yeah. So they want to find out where you're purchasing your food from. And you know, there's only so much that that we and a number of other institutions can procure locally. And as as my colleagues in our housing and dining group often say, you know, so what's your definition of local? Now I used to be president of the Houston Farmer's Market, and so we had a definition which was a 200 mile radius. Well, OK, that takes us a fair distance into the Gulf of Mexico. But you know, to be honest with you, you know, maybe, you know, would Rio Grande Valley in that citrus where we consider that local? Maybe. So if we were in California, someone might call that local if they're getting, you know, strawberries from, I don't know, Monterey or something like that. And they live a little further down south in Los Angeles, like, well, it's California. It's local. Well, you know, how do you how do you define that? So there are some things that we can get local and we have an active on campus farmer's market and actually an interesting change over the last few years is our our chefs on campus now are required to buy some of their ingredients from the farmer's market, which then has the nice feedback of being able to support a sustainable, a more sustainable agricultural economy in Houston. But the big picture is that even if we bought from all of the farms that were within, let's say, 100 mile radius of Houston, we wouldn't be able to meet all of our campus needs. All of the time where we are. We can't go 100 percent local. And then you've probably have have have dived into some of the data as well and recognize that, you know, the mode of transportation is important as well.

Speaker1: [00:38:54] It's critical, it's critical. And I think refrigeration is a big question, too.

Speaker3: [00:38:58] And so there are going to be instances where it's better to have something shipped to you by rail, even if it's a thousand miles than having someone put it in the back of their, you know, inefficient Ford truck, right? And have them drive it, you know, 100 miles to and from your campus and in small batches. And so I enjoy having students doing those, those food carbon footprint studies, and I've been involved in a number of them. And they're actually it's pretty difficult sometimes to even find where the food's coming from, especially, you know, if it's meat, forget about it. Right?

Speaker1: [00:39:33] You know, that's one of the real challenges is is finding out, you know, where, where it's originating

Speaker3: [00:39:39] And you've you've probably, you know, have, you know, with a, you know, a single package of ground beef, you know, it can come from many different cows from, you know, many different locations. It's it's actually kind of horrifying.

Speaker1: [00:39:53] Yeah, it is, especially when Mad Cow gets involved,

Speaker2: [00:39:56] Yeah, well, not since the 1980s, hopefully well. But in the era of Brexit, there's still matter. Apparently that is a sidebar, Richard. Another thing which I mean, you've been talking about some things that I'm sure people haven't been thinking about when they think about all the different sustainability operations at a university. But you mentioned renewable energy a little while ago. And I want to talk a bit about power purchasing and power generation on campuses because, as you said, depending on resources and availability, some campuses have power plants as we do. Some of them are investing in rooftop solar for dorms. There's a lot of things going on that are really exciting. But in particular, I wanted to make sure you told us something about this power purchase agreement that Rice entered into that was fairly unusual for campuses to do. And it seemed to me exactly the sort of thing in terms of thinking about how we finance our energy consumption. That could be quite helpful for for folks at other universities to know about, too.

Speaker3: [00:40:54] Well, some universities have done quite well with with on site renewables and especially universities that are in Southern California. Arizona State has been a leader in that regard as well. And Texas, for those who don't know who are our listeners, is the leading producer of wind power. So we have an amazing amount of wind resources and there are some universities that have onsite wind turbines as well. University of Minnesota Morris is a good example. You know, we don't have enough wind resources where we are in rice, so we can't do an on campus turbine. Even if we if we wanted to, we'd either have to be a little bit off the coast or we'd have to be out in West Texas. West Texas also has excellent solar resources better than we have here in Houston. Houston's weather is such that we tend to go into a pattern during several times a year where in the mid to late afternoon we get a lot of cloud cover, and that cloud cover occurs oftentimes when the cost of electricity is at its highest. And so if we were relying solely on on campus renewables, you know those panels would be producing less at the moment where we'd actually want them to be producing the most. And so we wanted to find a location where we could get reliable solar power. And so we chose Fort Stockton, Texas, which is basically a full day's drive west out of Houston on I-10 and through our energy provider MeCP2.

Speaker3: [00:42:34] They actually came to us with this opportunity. They well, I should probably provide a little more background here. So if you're paying a flat price for electricity, it takes away the incentive for solar and there are some around the country who they pay a flat rate, you know, eight cents, 10 cents or something like that. Well, it under incentivizes you to save during the day, and it over incentivizes you to save during during the night and solar panels. Of course they produce during the day. And so we had to break free from from those sorts of restraints on a true market signal. And so we had been in a power contract where we had a daytime price, a nighttime price, a weekend price. It was a little more complicated than that. But I'll just kind of oversimplify it in that way, and we changed our approach to where we are basically buying hourly slices for each month. So let's say the month of April, well, we know what we're going to pay for the two o'clock hour or the three o'clock hour, the 23rd hour, the 22nd hour, and we've projected how much we're going to going to need at that particular time. So we set a different price that is more in tune with the actual market price at that time. And so and then some of it, we actually just flowed out on the market.

Speaker3: [00:43:57] So in the middle of any given afternoon, we pre-purchased a certain amount and the rest of it, it's it's out to the market. So that clear market signal then starts to tell us, Hey, late afternoon electricity in Houston is really expensive. Wouldn't solar power work well in this instance? Well, if you go out far enough west to Fort Stockton, you know that solar array is is still producing a lot of power at that moment in time and empty to help to put together a deal where they say, OK, your rice, you've got a power profile shape that somewhat closely matches this. This solar panel out in West Texas, we can fit the two of you together. And the the headline was it didn't cost us anything else. There was no premium for that solar power. And so we did that agreement for 2015 as well as for 2016. So not only were we. We believe the first commercial entity in Texas to not pay a premium for solar. We were also it was very unique in doing a one year deal, usually for solar. People are locking into, you know, a 10 year power purchasing agreement or something like that. Ours was a one year and it was, you know, swapping out. You know, what was the the dirtier power for this clean power? So we get a daily peak of three megawatts, which factored across a period of a year, means it's about seven or eight percent of our annual consumption, and that includes the nighttime.

Speaker3: [00:45:26] So when you look at Rice's electricity mix and you compare it to Germany, we're actually a lot cleaner than Germany, which is well regarded for clean energy. That's because, you know, the dirty secret about Germany is they still got a lot of coal. We don't have we don't have nearly as large of a share of coal in Texas. But then, you know, now we've got the solar component and plus we've got, you know, the Texas grid has, you know, 10, 12, 13 percent wind. There are some days now where that's spiking up a lot higher. You know, amazing things are happening in the solar space. The cost of solar panels has come down 80 percent since 2009 and and actually 99 percent since the beginning of the Carter administration. And so they're really becoming competitive these days. And I read in Bloomberg that every time the amount of installed solar doubles, the price of the panels comes down by roughly another 25 percent well in 2015. In the United States, roughly two thirds of all new electricity generation added to the grid was renewables. And then the rest was fossil fuels, and almost all that was natural gas. There's there's like three megawatts worth of coal. It was nothing. It was basically the size of an On-Campus turbine that we have here at rice.

Speaker1: [00:46:43] And do you think that has to do with the Obama policies? Is that well, that these policies at work or

Speaker3: [00:46:51] I, that's that's probably part of it, but it's just, you know, it's just not really economical to, you know, the the value proposition for coal in the United States is is really thin at the moment. And so you'll remember eight years ago, roughly eight years ago, there was a big battle in Texas trying to block new coal power plants from going online. And I forget how many were proposed maybe was nine or 11 or something like that, and only maybe only two got built. Well, you know, nowadays nobody is building new coal power plants in Texas, and it's really a question of who's going to close first, right? So but if you if you look at the renewables that were installed in the United States, especially in December of 2015, all new electricity generation ad in the United States was renewables. It was the first time I've ever seen that happen. It was amazing. And solar is an increasingly large share of that, though wind is still the dominant. But the prices of solar keep going down. And so we're going to, I think, see a radical transformation within the next few years in the electricity sector. It's already going on towards renewables. And you know, another trend which which actually surprises me, I thought it was if you had asked me 10 years ago, I didn't think this was possible.

Speaker3: [00:48:13] The electricity is actually getting cheaper as well, which is the odd thing. So imagine what's going to happen, how this could potentially disrupt other sectors of the economy, like automobiles, for example, whether we're whether this will help electric vehicles to disrupt the, you know, the the fossil fuel engine space. And I'm actually beginning to entertain the thought that we may not be too far away from the future where we have self-driving autonomous electric powered vehicles and we don't necessarily need to own our own vehicles anymore. But we'll just, you know, bring one up on our our cell phone, tell it to come pick us up and will be powered by renewable energy and will take us where we need to go. And then, you know, because a typical car is used, what, five percent of the day or something like that. So this will be a more efficient utilization of the of the vehicle fleet. My wife, Joe, just this morning, you know, aren't some cars self-driving now because everyone's looking down at their cell phones, so something's making them go, but it's not the driver.

Speaker2: [00:49:22] But I could. I could totally. And you know, rice, for those who don't know, the campus rice has this loop that these buses and cars circle endlessly around. And it's also peppered with these little kind of golf carts that go everywhere. And I can imagine a whole autonomous fleet of buses, golf carts, you know, minibuses that just go around campus, right?

Speaker1: [00:49:39] It wouldn't be that hard. It could be electric and could be autonomous, and that would be covered. And nanotechnology, which absorbs solar radiation and transforms it into energy on site. On the vehicle itself. Right. I mean, that would be

Speaker3: [00:49:54] That would be quite a vision,

Speaker1: [00:49:55] Right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, Richard, I'm glad you're talking about the price of power because it is really important and that is an equation that comes into administrators minds. In fact, it comes into the minds of homeowners, right, who are thinking about whether they want to put solar panels, how could they do that or are they going to get an electric car? So whenever we talk about energy choices, we always end up around this question. I think of cost and that kind of value ratio that you were talking about. But I wanted to bring up the question of the cost of power in a kind of more metaphorical sense. And that is to look at this kind of ongoing but very controversial movement, largely within universities, although not exclusively so that is the divestment movement. And what that involves is divesting, you know, basically stock portfolios and the entire financial apparatus of an institution divesting it from oil and gas funds

Speaker2: [00:50:52] And coal

Speaker1: [00:50:52] And coal. Yeah, I should say fossil, let's call them fossil funds. So I wanted to ask you, I mean, maybe your personal opinion, but also just, you know what you see as you're working with colleagues in the sustainability world, as you're working with students. What is the word on divestment now and how might it be really generative? And how might it be risky in some ways? Where do you where do you kind of find the balance there?

Speaker3: [00:51:19] Yeah, well, this is a topic that's worth an entire episode in itself. Maybe we'll try to treat it in a condensed manner. So going back to David Awes, what is education for? One of the things that he challenged universities to do was to look at how they were investing and the consequences that that was having on communities. And he was from the Youngstown area and pointed out that it was the removal of investments that decimated that town in that part of the country. And it was performed by, you know, the most educated people, MBAs and so on and so forth. And they ruined it in a way that, you know, that would be sort of equivalent to if we had lost a war. Right? So, you know, Bill McKibben has been a real leader in the most in the last few years on encouraging universities to to divest of fossil stocks. And I'm actually of a mixed mind about it. Yeah, as I mentioned earlier, there are so much opportunity to simply use less. And I keep trying to bring the conversation back to that starting point and, you know, use less by green and then sequester carbon. And I worry that in the limited bandwidth of conversation that you can have about a variety of topics in the university setting. I think that the most, the most benefit is if you can maybe develop a revolving loan fund or something like that around, you know, basically taking yourself off of fossil fuels first through energy efficiency and then as the price of renewables keeps going down, then either purchasing renewables from off site or developing on site renewables, you know, greening yourself as opposed to just saying, Well, I'm not going to put money into shell.

Speaker3: [00:53:22] Well, you know, Shell is a, you know, Shell's mostly Fossil, but not not entirely fossil. One of the things that I worry about in the conversation and I've talked to people in who are in endowment offices, is that they put money into funds where they don't they don't know everything that goes into their funds. So they're there. Could be fossil stocks there could there may not be fossil stocks, but you know that information is not disclosed to them. And so what I've heard is what some you know, your public universities that are subject to having to, you know, be completely transparent with what with what they've got. Well, the investments that they can fully disclose, you know, they they keep those in the public side, but they spin off into foundations, you know, that are private and have the, you know, the gates of secrecy around them, the stuff that they don't want to disclose or that they they can't disclose because they don't know actually what's what's in it. But you know, the the mission that's been given to a typical endowment office is that we want you to maximize return. And the reason why they they say that is because we want to that to achieve the lowest cost of tuition possible.

Speaker3: [00:54:36] And and so endowment offices have been doing that very well. And so it provides resources for the university. So it's a delicate conversation. Do we want to decrease our return and therefore maybe. Take away some resources, does it mean tuition goes up, does it mean we don't have as enough as much money for teaching and research? But yet at the same time, we're not invested in coal anymore. So, you know, how do we decide which one, which one is better? You know, I I personally would would say that I don't see much of a future in coal to begin with unless we really figure out, you know, how to how to deal with the sequestration side. And also, frankly, you know, you know, you can't continue mountaintop removal removal. You know, sooner or later, West Virginia is going to be just one giant golf course that has been replanted over what used to be a beautiful landscape. So complicated question, and I'm of a mixed mind. So I personally try to focus on on pushing towards, you know, things that have an immediate positive. And I think that's one way actually to have the conversation with the investment office. If you don't go in saying, here's what you can't do, but rather say, Hey, let's expand the positive things that we're investing in, right? And let's let's find various green tech opportunities or other investments that will provide the return that that you need, but that have maybe have some better attributes with them.

Speaker1: [00:56:15] Hmm. I think those kind of optimistic outlooks are, you know, better for boards of trustees to and would be donors are kind of inspired by those things.

Speaker3: [00:56:25] I don't mean to sound like a shill.

Speaker1: [00:56:26] No, there's no. But you've pointed out some some good points about the balance that needs to be struck there because one can also imagine, you know, if the returns or the income were to go down the first place that the university might cut would be sustainability programs. I mean, it could it could come out that way and that would have a really negative impact.

Speaker3: [00:56:43] Or you wouldn't have the money to invest in your buildings to make them more efficient. And then, right, you know, the net outcome from a planetary perspective could be worse, right?

Speaker1: [00:56:52] Right. So we had one final question for you, and that is about the concept of sustainability in general. So this is a term

Speaker2: [00:57:01] It's not our final question because it's not, you know, I have more

Speaker3: [00:57:03] Questions to fire away.

Speaker1: [00:57:04] Ok, well, this is OK. It may be your final. This is my final question. So you get the nod

Speaker3: [00:57:11] And I know they

Speaker2: [00:57:12] Have a complicated set of hands.

Speaker1: [00:57:14] My response? Right?

Speaker2: [00:57:15] Worthy of any pitcher and catcher and baseball game.

Speaker3: [00:57:19] Please go ahead. Yes. Oh, the the complicated concept of sustainability.

Speaker1: [00:57:25] Yeah. So it's been controversial. Sure. I guess in the short form, because one wonders what is being sustained like, is this the is this a kind of, you know, static state condition of endless growth or at least keeping to the level of growth that we have now? And so one of the questions that I think has been important about sustainability is, you know, how much work can the concept do and and and what are its implications really, because is, is it about sort of sustaining human life on the planet as it is and the present? Is it about sustaining a future that looks very much like the present? Is it about sort of scaling back our resource use? You know, what does sustainability, you know, really mean at its core or what can it mean? So I was wondering if you if there's conversations around that happening in your professional life and whether people are kind of talking about either where, whether they stand behind the term sustainability or whether there's a place for critique involved there,

Speaker3: [00:58:32] Plenty of room for critique. And I'll start with a critique. Well, I'll start by sharing. You know, we're all familiar with the Brundtland Commission definition about needing to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. And the late Albert Bartlett from University of Colorado Boulder used to point out that there was a flaw in that definition, and that is that we discount the needs of the future and therefore we'll always put ourselves as as the winner. And so he defined sustainability as meeting the needs of the future generation period. He took the present out of it. And I think that opens up questions that allow you to more safely look at what you're what you're doing. You know, I, you know, perpetuating what we have today is is not something that I think is really it's not sustainable. Right, exactly. And so and what we really need to be talking about is is more than just, you know, sustainability is a moment in time. It's it's like this, you know, this knife edge between destruction and restoration. And so we're we're in the destructive mode right now, and we need to go past that knife edge and go into a restorative mode, you know, you know, full extensive ecological restoration, natural systems, living systems, you know, fisheries, forests and so on and so forth, bringing down the level of carbon in the atmosphere.

Speaker3: [01:00:14] We don't want to sustain our level of CO2 in the atmosphere right now. That sounds sounds terrifying because, you know, we know that that will have dire consequences. You know, we want to, you know, you know, experts have said, you know, we've got to at least bring it down to 350 parts per million and perhaps perhaps even below that. So sustaining what we have. Today is actually will lead us to a terrifying tomorrow, so, you know, we need to go beyond that. It's actually it's a really frustrating term. It's difficult to to communicate. It's it's clunky, but it's really powerful at the at the same time. But it's what I find frustrating as a sustainability officer is that people will then often think, OK, you're the sustainability officer. That means you oversee recycling, right? You're the recycling guy. And so it all kind of goes down to the first thing that most people learned about improving their environmental behavior. You know, have a hoot. Don't pollute.

Speaker2: [01:01:18] Notice this is the first time we've mentioned recycling this whole episode.

Speaker3: [01:01:22] Yes. Yes, that's right. And you know, yes, of course. You know, I'm a fanatical recycler. And that's in fact I used to be prior to coming to rice, I worked in a in an office setting and there were about 25 employees and typical of an office building in Houston, there was no recycling. And so I brought all of the paper that that office generated home and set it out by our curb. And we didn't have at that time those big roll off containers from the city of Houston, those 96 gallon roll off bins. And so I'd I'd put all the paper. I'd have people bring in paper bags and it would be basically set out all the way across our front yard and the recycling truck would come by. And so it was probably about a 40 or 50 foot stretch of bags, you know, stacked too deep. So maybe 80 or 100 linear feet of paper waste. So yeah, I get where

Speaker1: [01:02:13] You don't even have to waste water watering your lawn because that's all covered cycle.

Speaker3: [01:02:19] You know, I was I was never much on sending out a sprinkler to begin with. We kind of, you know, we let it go into dormancy. If it's if that's what the natural conditions are and the neighbors probably hate it. But, you know, we're not we're not really interested in, you know, in harvesting a lot of biomass at our at our house. Jim Blackburn here at Rice, who's on the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has a lecture that he gives about the American lawn. And he performed a calculation where he asked the question how much of our energy or how much of our nation's fuel usage goes to lawn equipment? And he equated that to the number of refineries. And he arrived at the figure. There are three refineries that would be completely dedicated to providing everything we need just for the maintenance of the traditional American lawn. And that's, you know, that's actually pretty, you know, pretty terrifying. You know, I grew up in Houston and, you know, in a far from the refineries, but we used to be able to smell them, you know, 40 or 50 miles away and people would say, Oh, that's the smell of money. You know, if maybe if you're a cancer doctor, but but in 1974, or that was, you know, that was what was thought of as progress, right? Fortunately, we have a different view of progress these days, but progress know that view of progress needs to continue to evolve and quickly so that it is really an environmental in a direction of environmental restoration.

Speaker3: [01:03:52] And our, you know, our national conversations still aren't really going in that direction. But, you know, there's been tremendous progress at the level of of universities, some corporations, cities especially, you know, thank goodness that a lot of cities don't really follow partisan politics in the same sort of way in their mayoral elections. And mayors are more about results. And so, you know, even here in Houston, you know, Bill White had has a really positive environmental legacy in his in the six years that he was the mayor here. He really cared about energy efficiency and and renewable energy. And when he was mayor, Houston was either the first or the second largest municipal purchaser of renewable energy in the United States. You know, here in the Petro Petro Metro, right? Right. So that's, you know, but that's that's the kind of of vision towards, you know, restoration that that we need.

Speaker2: [01:04:56] All right. So I've got I want to bring this back to campuses and kind of local politics of energy and and maybe put forth a provocative idea. I'm very interested to hear what you as an expert would have to say about this. Let me first as a question, should universities stop building new buildings?

Speaker3: [01:05:15] For the most part, yes,

Speaker2: [01:05:16] Because I've noticed that despite all of our efforts to green our campuses and reduce our footprint and all of the other good things we're doing, it has really been the case that I think overall the footprint of universities continues to grow and grow for no other reason than that. We continue to build new buildings and. Probably more efficient buildings, to be sure, but that it seems to be the entire culture of growth and philanthropy at a university and development, this is called development is about, you know, getting new donors to give money. So I kind of have my kind of a message on the one hand, one, if you're the person, probably not listening to this podcast. But if you know somebody who is about to give a $400 million bequest to university, please tell them not to to do something other than build a new building with that money, because there are a lot of other good things that could be put toward that would not increase the carbon footprint. But the other thing is just, I think administrators as a whole need to begin to rethink what a campus is. And I also say this in the digital era, especially when it's never been easier for us to be more flexible about how we work and to work in different places to work off campus. I actually think we need less space than ever to do our work as a university, but yet we continued like the juggernaut of new building buildings. So anyway, talk to me about that, Richard, am I wrong in this?

Speaker3: [01:06:39] We are. We are definitely on the same page. I think. I think you are. You're posing one of the one of the great questions that universities need to be thinking about right now. And you know, we, you know, here at Rice in a very short period of time, we expanded campus square footage by about 50 percent. And and we saw a tremendous growth period across higher ed going on up till about 2007 2008. Lots of new buildings. And you know, I worry that let's say I had $100 million and I was willing to give 52 university. I could find a university who would be willing to build a building and dedication. The shoelace science, right? Sure. If I want to start a program and shoelace science, I mean, that's that's a nonsense example. But I think it's it's illustrative of the fact that that, you know, I as a donor could step forward and and start to influence the the types of teaching and research that are going to happen by offering to build a building for it. And in that gift, I will not be giving you the cost of maintaining that building the cost of the personnel to operate that building. You know, the custodians that go along with it, I will not be giving you the cost to to heat cool and power that building. You're going to have to bear that yourself. And I think what a lot of universities are finding now as especially as those buildings have gotten a little bit older, is that they have taken on a financial burden that maybe they themselves are having trouble sustaining because we're now in an environment where there's increasing pressure on the funding sources for higher education, and we can't continue to raise tuition in the way that we have in the past.

Speaker3: [01:08:26] Federal money is, is is is drying, drying up. So there's a crunch and a lot of universities are have been in in budget reduction mode for quite some time now. And so we really do need to ask ourselves in a deep sort of way, can we afford to have this mindset of expansion? That's almost like the way that, you know, cities continue to to sprawl. Universities have been in the sprawling mindset, and I think it's time for us to adopt this more sort of infill and urban strategy, if you will, in our mindsets of a campus and to embrace the way the technology is changing the way that we work. And so I, you know, my office is actually it's about 70 square feet or something like that. And if someone offered me an incentive, maybe, maybe I wouldn't even need it. I would need a little bit of storage room for a few books that I consider to be essential for my courses. But otherwise, I'd be happy to. I use a tablet computer and I carry it around almost everywhere. Now I'd be happy to work out of our campus coffeehouse, you know, at the Broxton

Speaker2: [01:09:36] Pavilion, which half of us do anyway, which half of us do anyway. Let's be honest, and

Speaker3: [01:09:40] That's actually I have so many important unplanned meetings there that that's that's where I really get a lot of work done. It's we're facing a potential train wreck if we think we can keep adding buildings, but yet become carbon neutral as as a campus now. The proposition that Albert Pope has put forward about timber construction could be a potential remedy, or at least soften the blow of of future growth. But, you know, but we still have. That would have to be tied also with a strategy of of renewable energy purchase, and that's not even getting into all the other, you know, bigger questions about staffing that I, you know that I raised and maintenance of the buildings and all that we we actually have a a very skilled person on campus who oversees our space management. And you know, and he has has helped to develop policy here on campus, setting new space standards. And you know, we you know, we're we have built for an era where, you know, these large oversized offices designed so everyone can have private meetings with seemingly a large group of people. And and they are essentially these offices are like silos. I work in a building on campus called Abercrombie, and I hardly ever see anyone else who works in that building because we're all sort of hidden away from each other, right? But that's actually not how it's not how millennials work. And I believe that sort of, you know, separating everyone out and isolating them is not conducive to the exchange of ideas. And so whereas the the mode that we were just discussing, being at the coffeehouse with our with our tablets, that's that's where we get a lot of free exchange of ideas. Now being someone who's highly introverted, I do need some time that that is peace and quiet. But I can, you know, I can I can still go do that somewhere on on campus. I don't, you know,

Speaker2: [01:12:00] I I'd be willing to, you know, want to take anyone's cubicles away from them. Let's be honest.

Speaker3: [01:12:06] I think I think we're actually entering entering an era where we can start to have the conversation of, you know, when we bring on an employer, we can say to employee, Do you want an office? Right, we can. We can maybe give we can sense the office space has a cost to it. And so maybe, maybe we'll pay you a little bit more or maybe we'll increase your research funds or, you know, if you don't have if you don't have an office, we put you in a hoteling environment so that when you do need a space, you have access to it. But otherwise, hey, well, we'll pay for a research assistant for you or something like that, or we'll allow you to go to that extra conference.

Speaker2: [01:12:42] I love this idea, by the way. I think that's exactly how people should be thinking now is is working space and carbon footprint into our understanding of our compensation package and also our responsibilities to the institution.

Speaker3: [01:12:54] So can I ask a question of you? So you're in the School of Social Sciences and we have had plans on the book for some time for a social sciences building. If if I were to say, you know, Dr. Boyer, if we just had you keep your existing office, if we didn't construct a new building or would you rather have the building or would you rather we supplement your research and enable you to, you know, either go to additional conferences or, you know, to have more research funds for travel or something like that? I mean, how would you strike that balance? Would?

Speaker2: [01:13:33] I will go you one better, Richard, if you said to me, not only we won't build a new building, but we'll take away your existing office, but we'll give you, you know, an unlimited coffee card at the coffee place and we'll make sure that you have a room to meet students in when you are in campus and you have meetings. I would take that in a heartbeat because basically my office has become just a book mausoleum. It's like a cemetery. That's exactly right. It just it's just it's like a storage unit at this point. I don't do a lot of productive work in there, and I don't think I'm the only I mean different people of different work practices. But the point is we could be more flexible in accommodating. And I think really, you know, I think that and you know what I would hope to see is that as universities go through their infrastructural cycle of decommissioning old buildings and decommissioning new ones, that they would take some of these ideas you just laid out seriously and begin to design more flexible kinds of spaces. But with the objective actually overall of shrinking the footprint, you know, over time rather than growing it. And I just think there's like a kind of willy nilly if we can get a donor to pony up all this money to create, you know, well, in our case, an opera house, you know, at Rice, if we can get somebody to do that by God will do it because it's prestigious to have these, these monuments, these monumental buildings. And I know this is above our pay grade and we don't make these kind of decisions. But I really think that this culture of philanthropy has to really be rethought because no one is really thinking very carefully about the carbon footprint other than folks who who have access to the kinds of information you do, which is part of why we wanted to get that information out.

Speaker3: [01:15:07] Well, it's an amazing thought that we could actually, if we offer those sorts of incentives and if folks like you were willing to embrace them and folks like me as well, that, you know, not only. Could he actually add a lot more program to campus in the same amount of buildings, if not even even less? We could decommission some of the least productive ones, but the spaces that we have, we can turn them into spaces that we would actually find to be more desirable. Exactly. You know, the the coffee house is one of the most desirable spaces on campus, and I think everyone can say, Yeah, we would love to have more spaces like that and less spaces like the one that I work in. Yeah, presently. So you know that that points us to a future that is not only environmentally preferable, but socially preferable as as well.

Speaker2: [01:15:56] So I think, Richard, we should probably get out of here and go get a coffee. What do you think?

Speaker3: [01:16:00] Absolutely. Bottoms up.

Speaker2: [01:16:02] Thank you so much for coming in. So many had to step out, so I will say goodbye for her too. I also want to acknowledge that you've been doing a lot of the staff side of the staff multi job, but also to acknowledge that as on the faculty side of your staff position, you've been doing this great work in leadership role in terms of starting our new environmental studies minor helping to reform the environmental sciences major. You have been a very, very active member of the Faculty Steering Committee at sents which we are incredibly appreciative of. And so thank you for all of these things you're doing. You are a man of many talents and many traits.

Speaker3: [01:16:38] I greatly appreciate that. And if I can throw in a shameless plug at the end here, please do. We do have a campus sustainability newsletter and so our listeners can go to Sustainability Rice Dot Edu Forward Slash newsletter and subscribe to the monthly newsletter. We're on social media, Facebook, Twitter,

Speaker2: [01:16:58] Instagram, Twitter. What's your Twitter? That's sustainable rice. That's sustainable rice. And so follow us.

Speaker3: [01:17:04] So thank you so much for having me. Like I said, I'm a regular listener of the podcast, and in fact, you all influenced me to read the book The Water Knife, which is great tastic. So thanks for listening.

Speaker2: [01:17:14] Ok, great. Take Karen. We'll have you back on again soon, OK?