Profitable Sustainability

If you notice sometime this year the air is a little cleaner and the globe a little cooler look no further than the top of the athletics’ building. Solar energy is coming to Lewis and Clark College, however I am surprising even myself when I say this solar energy is not sustainable. It is an economically sweet deal in which the school will have to pay nothing but will receive solar energy at a lower cost than we are currently paying for electricity. These panels will supply .67% of our school's energy needs and there are even plans to expand the program. It is such a great deal that the only thing preventing us from putting solar panels up everywhere is a lack of roofs which can support the weight of the panels.

Under the power purchase agreement Lewis and Clark is technically leasing the space to Honeywell who is then going to pay all the costs for building and maintaining the panels. This arrangement works out well since we, as a non-profit institution, cannot receive all the government incentives which make putting up solar panels economically feasible (around $900,000 for this system). So everyone wins, we get clean green energy from a source which costs less than through the grid, and Honeywell gets a committed buyer of their energy and a profitable return on their investment. However the story is much more complex than it seems.

Like many things "sustainable" the closer you look the harder it gets to see how an action is sustainable. Honeywell is a huge international corporation. Their one goal is to increase the wealth of their stockholders. To do this they have engaged in some pretty unsustainable practices. Remember feeling bad after seeing the picture of the naked Vietnamese girl running down the street after her village got bombed by Napalm? Well the same company which supplied the bomb that destroyed that girl's village is the one which will soon to be supplying us with clean green energy. But the story gets even more complex. Kent Anson, the vice president of Global Energy for Honeywell Building Solutions said about our solar panel plan, “by developing projects that have environmental and financial drivers, we will see the type of widespread adoption that will have a lasting impact on greenhouse gas emissions”. It seems ironic that a company which is seemingly so concerned about greenhouse gas emissions ranks 44th on a list of US corporations most responsible for air pollution and who is linked to more super fund clean up sites (128) than any other company. Not to mention a long and costly track record of waiting until court orders are handed out before spending money to actually begin cleaning up their messes. While Honeywell generously gives money to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, between 1998 and 2005 they spent over 30 million dollars in lobbying efforts, according to The Center for Public Integrity. Money which I doubt was spent solely on trying to improve our missing and exploited children's center.

So later this year when Honeywell's trucks and cranes arrive on our campus to provide us with the sustainable energy our community demands, I will be torn. Can it be that the company which is partly responsible for our current environmental crisis also provide us with salvation, or is it all just another ploy to line the pockets of their shareholders? For me those panels will not represent the shift into an alternative world that can defeat and begin to come to terms with the environmental impact we have caused. I will look at it with the same sadness I felt after seeing the picture of the Vietnamese girl. The quest for profitability only leads to more problems than solutions. This is not to say that all things profitable are bad, just that profitability by its very nature is based in greed and we are going to need a lot more than greed to save ourselves.