Our Chill Out: Campus Solutions to Global Warming program has been nominated for an award from The Imagen Foundation for its positive portrayals of Latinos and Latino culture in entertainment.  NWF is thrilled to be nominated for this prestigious award! The Chill Out webcast was shown on over 400 college campuses this year and showcased the winning campuses of the Chill Out competition. 

The winning campuses have amazing projects and initiatives on campus to reduce global warming emissions.  The initiatives range from a strong transportation plan to a fuel cell power plant that powers part of the campus. 

The broadcast is narrated by an all-star cast of students, faculty and staff and a broad range of advocates and activists in today’s environmental movement, including: Academy Award-Winning producer Lawrence Bender; actor Courtney Gains ("Sibling Rivalry"); musician and composer Ethan Gold; comedian and host of Planet Green’s "Wa$ted" Annabelle Gurwitch; musician Nick Jago, Actor Efren Ramirez ("Napoleon Dynamite"); actor Alisa Reyes (Nick’s “All That”); Founder and CEO of Karmaloop.com Greg Selkoe; director, screenwriter and actress Angela Shelton; actor and stuntman Isaac Singleton Jr.; producer, first president of eBay and founder of Participant Media Jeff Skoll; Tony-Award-winning poet "Poetri" Smith; actor Douglas Spain (HBO’s "Walkabout"); actor Michael Welch ("Twilight"); actor Jose Yenque ("Traffic"); and actor Shawn-Caulin Young ("Dreams and Shadows"), and music by Austin band The Steps.

Chill Out is a low carbon footprint production, going well beyond the industry’s sustainable filmmaking guidelines, and has been recognized by the Environmental Media Association’s  Green Seal Program for using the film industry’s best environmental practices.

The awards will be presented at a black-tie dinner gala on Friday, August 21^st at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills. Check back Friday night to see if we won!

This week marks the first edition of AASHE's Global Edition of the Bulletin. Alongside ClimateEdu, the Bulletin is one of the best sources of news on the campus sustainability scene, but until now has only covered stories in the US and Canada. The new international version will be released twice a year, sent by email for free to subscribers of the existing Bulletin.

The first issue, released yesterday, covers such topics as green building awards in Dubai and Ho Chi Minh City, as well as student projects in Sydney and biodiesel parks in India.

See More:

Shanghai Calling: International Collaboration for Sustainability

Youth Activists Vocal at Climate Talks in Poznan, Poland

Curious about the finer points of the clean energy grid? Looking for new ideas on campus low-impact farming or biomass plants? Just need to relax by watching students throw paint on each other in the name of art?

YouTube's new higher education site might have you covered. Already, more than 20,000 videos have been uploaded from universities like Wesleyan, Harvard, Dartmouth, UNC-Chapel Hill, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Minnesota and Virginia Tech. Topics cover everything from quantum physics to curing kleptomania, in a variety of formats, such as full-length lectures, short interviews, or webcam anecdotes.

The site offers to extend the reach of the university beyond traditional students, which sounds like a good idea to us, especially when it comes to keeping up with the latest research on renewable energy and sustainability. In fact, even though the site was only launched a few weeks ago, 85 results come up for the term 'clean energy,' and 'sustainability' pulls almost 300.

While good green citizens are fond of using email to save trees, the widely-ignored fact is that those same emails take up all kinds of server space. Space which, as Warren Arbogast points out in the latest episode of Tech Therapy, isn't free, and requires a lot of electricity to run, maintain, and cool. And when we're talking about massive research and data projects, computing quickly sails to the front of the energy (and expense) line.

For example, the University of Michigan's computing is responsible for about 65 million pounds of carbon emissions annually, costing about $4.8 million in electricity bills, according to their own estimate in EDUCAUSE's white paper on the role of IT in sustainability.

So what's to be done?

Turning off computers at night is a good first step, but given that some estimates put emissions from computing at the same level as the aviation industry, much bigger steps are needed.

The key, says Arbogast, is to work systems-wide. All too often, the departments in charge of maintaining those computers never see the energy costs, making it a non-priority. When asked, he says, many IT staffers don't actually know how many servers exist at their school. So in order to conserve energy and save money, it's often necessary to get everyone in the same conversation: facilities managers, IT staff, department heads, and most importantly, whoever is in charge of the energy bill.

The University of Michigan, mentioned above, set a 10-percent reduction goal of computing energy consumption. According to the white paper, "the university is one of a handful of institutions that have joined Intel and Google in the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, which hopes to cut computer energy consumption in half by 2010. The nonprofit alliance estimates that reducing consumption this much could slash carbon emissions by 54 million tons a year." Assuming energy rates remain somewhat constant, a 10% cut in electricity usage could correlate to almost $500,000 saved just in electricity charges.

To get to that ambitious number, everything from consolidating servers to Energy Star monitors will be in play.

Making more efficient "supercomputers" is also crucial, if expensive, as we noted last fall. Several universities, including Purdue and UCSD, are testing data centers that conserve as much as 40% of electricity, and the University of Maine has one that can be powered by cyclists, if anyone is so inclined.