By Mary E. O’Leary
NEW HAVEN — It was more of a 'bottom-out ceremony,' than a groundbreaking, as dignitaries gathered Thursday at the future site of Kroon Hall, which Yale University hopes will be the 'greenest' building on Earth....
Scheduled to be complete by late 2008, the building [the new Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies] has been designed to meet a platinum Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standard by combining environmentally friendly materials with high-tech energy savings.
Yale President Richard C. Levin, who speaks often about the importance of environmental leadership, most recently at a gathering of business leaders at Davos, Switzerland, predicted the entire Ivy League will make a collective effort along the lines of what Yale is already doing.
The university has pledged to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 10 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, "at a cost that is well under 1 percent of our operating budget," Levin said.
"That’s a small tax. Who wouldn’t pay that price ... for the safety of the planet. That’s nothing. We could do that globally, we could do that across all our institutions. If our government would wake up, we could do that," Levin said.
He said he hopes to have a conference of the 10 leading global universities this summer to get similar commitments.
Can and should great universities be doing more to provide environmental leadership for the society? Is meeting minimum legal requirements an adequate policy?
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