Elizabeth Thomas

A: We’re a commuter campus. A UB Green employee estimated approximately 10 years ago that UB faculty, staff and students drive 100 million miles each year on their commutes to and from campus. That’s farther than the distance from Earth to Sun. UB therefore faces a huge, exciting and important challenge to reduce our collective fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions related to transportation.

We’re a research campus, and research is energy intensive. Here’s one example: In my lab alone, we have three fume hoods, which we love because they keep us safe. These fume hoods are pumping conditioned air, which takes a lot of energy to make. A single 6 foot fume hood with the sash open 12 inches consumes as much energy per year as three average American homes. How many fume hoods are on campus? How much energy do they consume?

In my lab, we make it a habit to shut the fume hood sashes when we’re not working in them, which, according to “Shut the Sash” campaigns at campuses throughout the US, saves UB $3,000 per fume hood each year. Changing habits is difficult but imagine how much money and energy we’d save if all researchers on campus made it a habit to shut their fume hood sashes.

A: One of the major barriers to reducing fossil fuel consumption is convenience. It’s convenient to hop in our cars to drive to campus. It’s convenient to use a paper cup instead of a reusable mug. But everything we consume has a cost in greenhouse gas emissions.

UB can dramatically improve sustainability efforts by making it convenient for UB students, faculty and staff to choose carbon-free options. We will choose to bike to campus if that’s the faster, safer, easier option. We will choose to use a reusable mug if it’s easier and less expensive than using a paper one — or if paper mugs just aren’t provided. UB can reduce our collective greenhouse gas emissions by making carbon-neutral options convenient compared to carbon-emitting options. We’ll meet this challenge best if it becomes a priority for all levels of UB from students to faculty and staff to administration.

One important issue that UB can address is access to campus. UB is generally a bike and pedestrian-friendly campus. Yet, it’s difficult to get to campus safely and efficiently by foot or by bike from sites off campus. UB could make it much easier and safer to get to campus by bike or by foot, by working with surrounding communities to improve bike paths and bike lanes, install safe crossings at roads and over highways and install bike-activated traffic lights.

Two big barriers that keep people from commuting by foot or by bike are convenience and perceived risk. By making the pedestrian or cycle commute easier and safer, UB will invite many more people to use their commutes as an efficient, inexpensive and healthy way to get to campus.

A: I’m a geologist and my research focuses on past climate, mainly in the Arctic and East Asia. The goal of my research is to better understand how the climate system works so that we can understand and more accurately predict future changes. We get to do field work in some beautiful places.

I’m working on a project with UB Geology Professors Jason Briner and Bea Csatho and several other colleagues to reconstruct snowfall on Greenland during the past 10,000 years which will help understand the past behavior of the Greenland Ice Sheet.

I’m also really excited to study climate here in our backyard and have started a project to study the ancient history of lake effect snowfall events in Western New York, which will help us know whether we might expect more or fewer “snowpocalypse” storms in the future.

A: We bike everywhere we can, rain or shine, including to campus. We use our big orange Burley trailer to haul kids, groceries and even sometimes paint from the hardware store.

A: Climate change is hands down the biggest scientific experiment that humans have ever conducted and the biggest challenge that humans face today. The climate science community has unequivocally stated that, the longer we wait to act, the more severe the consequences become.