A few items that caught my fancy

There's not been too much of personal interest this week, but I thought I'd comment on a few interesting things I read recently.

First, I got a email pointing out that Harvey Mudd got a D+ on the college sustainability report card. That by itself is not particularly surprising, though a bit disappointing after the hard work I and some of the other students were putting in to improve our campus. The fact of the matter is that HMC has a long way to go towards its goals of improving the college's sustainability.

But I was actually a little incensed when I saw that Pomona got a B. Having been at the claremont colleges and connected with the student organizations working on campus sustainability for the past few years, the practical difference between these two colleges is not big enough in my mind to merit such a disparity in their 'grade'.

To give an example: for administration, Pomona is credited for a $15K fund established by the school's president for sustainability, but HMC has a recently established endowed environmental studies chair with a similar sized yearly grant not to mention several of President Klawe's vision initiative grants going toward campus "greening" efforts. Another example: Pomona earns a significant edge over HMC primarily for bike and mass transit programs for students, but given that virtually all of the students on the claremont colleges live on campus, student driving is fairly insignificant at both colleges. Pomona does have a better faculty and staff program, but is it really the difference between a D and a B?

This illustrates the thing that most worries me about the current state of Sustainability efforts. Too much weight is being given to interesting programs and your ability to promote them to those watching, too little to looking at what specific environmental overhead we require and what changes the programs actually effect. Don't get me wrong, awareness is an important first step to change and this sustainability report card is at least trying to help evaluate where we stand, but it seems we, humankind, anyone who cares that about how we treat the planet, have a long way to go on even measuring sustainability before we can make truly credible claims to have achieved it.

Now on a completely unrelated note, I ran across an interesting article arguing that renting was more financially prudent than owning your house. I'd never heard this argument before and I launched an investigation to validate his claims. I came upon this page which includes a pretty detailed spreadsheet for making a comparison. I took some of the other things I read to play around with it for a while and added my notes to the top. my version is published here.