Ecological economist and Director of the University at Albany Office of Sustainability, Dr. Mary Ellen Mallia shares steps everyone can take to advance sustainability. She also introduces listeners to "Operation Weatherize Albany," a sustainability initiative created in partnership with the City of Albany, NY that prepares homeowners' and renters' homes for the winter season. Through Operation Weatherize Albany, the University provides volunteer teams of students, faculty and staff to provide free basic weatherization services to homes and apartments, such as installing weather stripping, plastic window covers, door sweeps and energy efficient lightbulbs. Volunteers receive training in advance of the home visits, and student groups are accompanied by a staff or faculty mentor.
Dr. Mary Ellen Mallia's bio: https://www.albany.edu/gogreen/1.director.shtml
UAlbany Green Scene and UAlbany Office of Sustainability: https://www.albany.edu/gogreen
Albany Clean Energy Conservation Corps: https://www.albany.edu/gogreen/our_regional_environment.shtml
17 UN Global Goals: https://www.globalgoals.org
For information on Operation Weatherize Albany, or to inquire how you can volunteer or participate as a homeowner or renter, email gogreen@albany.edu.
Transcript of The Engagement Ring, Episode 7, A Conversation on Sustainability with Dr. Mary Ellen Mallia
[Lively, upbeat theme music plays as program host Mary Hunt introduces the program and plays excerpts from Dr. Mary Ellen Mallia’s interview.]
MARY HUNT: Welcome to the engagement ring, your connection to an ever widening network of higher education professionals, scholars, and community partners, working to make the world a better place. I'm Mary Hunt. Today on the podcast...
MARY ELLEN MALLIA: I think Mother Nature’s been doing a pretty good job of getting our attention. Right? And redirecting it and focusing us back on the issues, because we're just seeing, you know, more and more of these climate change inspired events.
MARY HUNT: I’ll talk with Dr. Mary Ellen Malia, an ecological economist and director of the University at Albany's Office of Environmental Sustainability.
MARY ELLEN MALLIA: Everybody has agency over how much energy they can use or the sustainable choices they can make, and anytime they make a more sustainable choice, there's a positive outcome.
MARY HUNT: And now a conversation with Dr. Mary Ellen Mallia on the big -- and small -- steps we need to take towards sustainability.
[Program interview begins]
MARY HUNT: Welcome to the podcast, Mary Ellen.
MARY ELLEN MALLIA: Thank you Mary. Thank you for having me.
MARY HUNT: Oh, it's a pleasure. All this time I've worked with you, I haven't known really much about your previous work experience before UAlbany or your educational journey. I've always known how capable and competent and how wonderful you were, and the word on campus is that if you want to get something done, you go to Mary Ellen, and she'll do it. But you have an interesting background. You started with, uh, a bachelor's degree in economics, and then you went to work in the private sector, I believe in the financial world. Then you went on to get your degree in ecological economics. Can you just tell us a little bit about that journey? How did you get from that bachelor's student with a degree in economics to be the leader in sustainability at the University at Albany?
MARY ELLEN MALLIA: Sure. I began in the business world as you mentioned, and I really was not satisfied with what I was doing. It wasn't really fulfilling me personally, and I always thought about being a teacher. So I quit a full time job at General Electric in Financial Management. No offense to General Electric. It just wasn’t the field I wanted to be in and actually came to UAlbany for my master's in Education. I always thought about being a teacher when I was young and said, well, I'm going to try, I'm going to try it. So, I actually did teach, um, locally at Guilderland High School for 10 years in social studies, some mostly economics, some public policy, a little American history, and, and I did love teaching. I really liked the systems thinking that economics brought. And I had always had an affinity for animals. I grew up about an hour from here in Cobleskill, which is agricultural country. So I think I always had that affinity for nature. And, um, locally RPI was offering a PhD in ecological economics, which was new in the United States. There were many programs in Europe. And it combined the idea of environmental resources and conservation, economics and systems thinking, but also sort of the sociological and ecological elements of people, how people actually behave. So there was some behavioral economics in it as well. So I began my PhD work there while teaching at Siena College on a visiting status and when I was finishing that degree, this position was posted, and I was thinking I was going to go into a professorship teaching economics and environmental economics and was offered this job. In 2008, I started. I actually had to google environmental sustainability, which sounds crazy in today's world that we were not.. you know, our awareness level was so much lower than it is today. And I obviously was offered the job and started the position. A lot of positions around sustainability were being formed at many colleges and universities. At that time it was sort of the, the Post-Al Gore-Inconvenient-Truth documentary wave. And I must say it's been great. It's never a dull moment. And I use a lot of the skill sets I learned in my degrees, not only teaching with communication and planning but in ecological economics, we look at systems thinking. We look at long range planning, and we also figure out how do you value things that may not have a dollar sign attached to them. So, how do we value our health? How do we value our well-being? And obviously as we've discovered, climate change impacts those pretty greatly.
MARY HUNT: I read that you, beside just changing your mind about your field and saying I want to try something different, that there was an event that moved you to change your path. Can you talk a little bit about that?
MARY ELLEN MALLIA: Yeah. So when I was freshly out of college, the Exxon Valdez incident happened. So, for some of our younger listeners who may not know what that is, it was a large oil tanker that basically ran a shore a little bit or the hull was cut due to inattentive driving. Let's just put it that way. And lots of oil spilled in this pristine bay in Alaska, beautiful ecological place, really caused a lot of damage to the wildlife there, obviously, and to the livelihood of the people relying on fishing, and even some tourism. So that really inspired me to not be a bystander in terms of speaking up for the environment. And, I mean, one of my first actions was I joined a no, volunteered for a local, no-kill animal shelter, and eventually went on to serve on their board for many years before moving out of Albany. But I really have felt ever since then, I've always included an element of being an advocate for the environment since then.
MARY HUNT: Can you define sustainability? I think a lot of us hear the word and we may not really understand what it means. We have our own impression of what it means.
MARY ELLEN MALLIA: Well, it's tough because there is the common definition, which is, you know, meeting the needs of the present without compromising the needs of future generations. But it's so broad and it can be very subjective, and it can be very co-opted by people for different purposes., I think it's ultimately sustainability is how can you maintain something in the long run, very long run perspective, very seven generations perspective. Most recently, I find it's helpful to talk about the U.N. sustainable development goals. These are 17 goals that were established in 2015 for sustainable development by 2030, and they speak to people when I show them the goals. So there's social ones around hunger and poverty and well-being and gender equity, inclusivity. And then there's environmental ones, obviously with life on land and life below the water and climate action. And then there's economic ones about decent work and economic growth and industry and innovation. So I think when we show those goals… or I would even encourage people listening to this podcast, just global goals.org, Check them out. There’s a lot of passion behind the goals. People see their work, they see their research, they see what they want to do in those goals. And so I don't think sustainability is best defined by one sentence. I think it's more of a concept, using the global goals to help identify what are all the elements of sustainability is really, um, I think crystallizes it.
MARY HUNT: How do you incorporate the goals into your work as the director of sustainability and the projects that you do, or the way you mentor your students, in any courses you might teach? How do they come into play?
MARY ELLEN MALLIA: Well, yeah, you have to be very conscious about how we connect the local to the global, right? So these are global goals. They have these targets and metrics. But how do we bring it to what we're doing right here at UAlbany? So very often when we do a program, we talk about which of the goals this program might best address. A lot of our researchers are doing a lot of research around good health and well-being or climate action. You know, we use the little icons. Each goal has its own little icon and people may notice around campus some of the signs we've worked on, creating them with our partners in facilities and communication and marketing. We'll put the little global goal icon there just to spread the word and spread the awareness. We recently did an orientation program for freshmen where for two hours they embarked on a service learning project or a training, and it were, Service learning activity was partnered with the goal that was most prominently connected with, and we called it 17 rooms of service. So that's another way we, you know, kind of bring in, um, the global goals to what we're doing locally. And my office is in charge of a lot of assessment. So I look at a lot of data in my office and one thing we've done is look at our course descriptions and we've looked at our researchers and the projects that we're doing, and we've assigned global goals to those courses and to those research projects. So at the end, we can create a chart that lets us know how often our research addresses, say, Global Goal 12, which is responsible consumption and production. So, you know, it's sometimes painstaking work and very detailed, but the results are really kind of cool when you see the range of things we're doing, we're teaching, we're researching and we're doing with our engagement programs.
MARY HUNT: What's the UAlbany Green Scene?
MARY ELLEN MALLIA: Well, I'm glad you asked that question because people seem the moniker “Green Scene,” the logo green scene, and they naturally assume it's my office. And I think, like sustainability, one person can't do it themselves. And the Green Scene is not one office. It's what we use for the collection of the different groups on campus that work towards sustainability. So there's many student groups involved with that. There are people like me on campus that work towards sustainability. We have a group called “Sustainability Coordinators.” Sustainability ambassadors are both faculty and staff groups. I have an energy officer that works very hard on reducing our energy and converting our carbon-based fuel resources, sources of energy, I should say, to non-carbon based sources of energy. But on the student side, we also have a few programs out of my office where we give students specialized training in sustainable practices. There’s a group called Eco Reps. There's a group on (inaudible) waste. If you look on “My Involvement,” you will find student groups like UAlbany Students for Sustainability, UNA-USA, which is focused on the global goal goals. Albany Outreach for Animals, UAlbany Outdoors. I mean, that's just a smattering. And then there's a lot of other groups that do sustainability-related programming that we work with. Their primary focus may not be sustainability, but they do a lot of work in it. And finally, we have Res Life (Residential ife). A lot of the RAs do programs around sustainability, and we try to provide resources and presentations for them.
MARY HUNT: It seems like students are really an integral part of your office. You give them great responsibility and they help you really run these programs.
MARY ELLEN MALLIA: Oh yeah. Yes, definitely . I know people are like, “ Can I intern it in your office”? It's like, well, we work, you know, because it's important work. There's a lot to do and we try to give our students… they have the passion, so we also try to give them the skillset they need to be change agents, because that requires planning and detail and diligence and persistence.
MARY HUNT: Mary Ellen, your work also transcends the university. I know you work with other SUNY schools, you work with other educational institutions, private institutions. Can you talk a little bit about how you partner with other institutions to further these sustainability goals and efforts and, how you consult with each other… as you say, no one person is going to get this done on his or own.
MARY ELLEN MALLIA: Right. I mean, we try to create networks within our campus. That's what the Green Scene basically is creating networks, uniting groups, and sort of a collective impact framework. And then that happens at every level. So in higher ed, there's so many groups. So we have a group, around the SUNY system. People who do what I do. We have a group for the state. So it includes the SUNY and private colleges. There's also national level groups we belong to that provide a lot of resources and support and sometimes inspiration. We're part of a university climate change coalition, and we're talking really high level ‘R1’ institutions -- Ohio State, the University of California system. Hearing what they're looking at and what they're researching and what they're trying operationally is wonderful for us to try to learn from and adopt here. So there's that. But also locally, there's a lot of groups, obviously working on different elements of sustainability. We work pretty closely with the City of Albany; it has a sustainability advisory committee. But we also work a lot with Radix (Ecological Sustainability Cener), and we work with the Capital District Clean Communities, and we work with Tech Valley High across the street from us on some projects. So, you know, I don't mean to mean to omit any of our partners. We have so many wonderful partners. I’d be here all day telling you Mary all the ones we work with, but those are some of the ones we've worked with most recently.
MARY HUNT: And you do create, host and lead a number of projects on campus and in the community. One of those projects I want to talk to you about that has been very well received and that you're gearing up to do again this fall is the Operation Weatherize Albany program. What is Operation Weatherized Albany, what’s a little bit about its history and, and who are the partners that you work with on it?
MARY ELLEN MALLIA: Yes. Operation Weatherize is a showcase project, um, a partnership between UAlbany and the city of Albany Sustainability Advisory Council. And we took our inspiration from a similar program called the Winter Blitz at Williams College. And the essence of the program is you train students in weatherization and energy conservation techniques. So you give them some life skills that they can use. But then you have a day of service in the community where you go out and weatherize homes that are in need of that service. So what we did last year is we provided a training for three Saturdays in a row and we partnered with Hudson Valley Community College, and we ended up having some UAlbany students, some HVCC students, a couple Albany High students, and some community members get trained in these conservation techniques. And we call that group the Albany Clean Energy Conservation Core. So they learned a little bit about renewable energy, what are some of the options in terms of what you can do, because it's not just for homeowners anymore; renters can get in on getting their energy that they use in their home, their electricity, renewably, unsourced, and even sourced within the state. So, you don't need to buy it up front, like in the old days of renewable energy where you'd have to buy the panels and you'd have to have money up front. Those days are gone. You can now buy into community solar project. So your electricity is being sourced from a renewable energy, project, and very often it is located in New York State. The name Operation Weatherize actually was a takeoff on Solarize Albany, which is a very well-known and popular service in Albany that helps people get their electricity from renewable resources, and if you're ever interested in getting renewables or getting your electricity sourced from renewables, they're a great resource to go to. So we took the name from them -- a little homage to them, and we have the Clean Energy Conservation Core. So, we had about 35 volunteers go through the training last year. We did three days of service. We did four homes each day and ended up with a total of 12 homes that received services such as putting plastic on windows, spray, foaming cracks, caulking weather stripping, putting foam insulation over pipes. We also will do some, not so much weatherized, but still energy conservation, such as changing out light bulbs, putting sort of insulation gaskets in your light switches. And you know, it was well received. The homeowners were very gracious for letting students into their home and their learning.
We do make the caveat that these are not professional services. These are not energy audits. Although we do leave the homeowner with some information if they're interested in getting an energy audit, and ways they could get that even for free in many cases. And I've been using the term homeowner, but this program can be for renters too because they're the ones paying the electric bills. So we're hoping that you people will see that. I know we surveyed homeowners who had the service done last year close to the end of the program. So they didn't quite have enough time to get their electric bills, but several of them reported that their home already felt, you know, cozier, warmer. You know, we do the service in November, so it's before the real cold hits. And we also want to do it while students are still here in town because they leave in mid-December.
MARY HUNT: Do you anticipate doing the same number of homes or has the program grown? What's your capacity this year?
MARY ELLEN MALLIA: We'd like to try and double the number of homes this year. I mean last year was our first year, so now we do have some students trained, so that's helpful. We have a base level of volunteers. We're hoping we'll have more people volunteer this year. We're hoping to move some of the trainings on our own campus, so that will allow us to have more training. We also have a need for people to serve as what we call mentors. So these are perhaps faculty, staff, or even community members who lead the student teams into the home. So they would be the liaison with the homeowner and would help organize the students because we have to think about transportation. A lot of our students don't have vehicles. So they would figure out the transportation and we all usually meet at UAlbany on service day and then they all take their supplies, and they go off to their homes. We’re also looking for some people who would be willing, these might be more people who are more savvy to energy conservation and these kinds of techniques to pre-screen our homes. One thing we found last year is we didn't always know exactly what we needed to go into a home. Homeowners were self-reporting as best they could what they needed done. But sometimes we got into a home and found that there was much more needed than reported. Or sometimes we got to a home where we had way too many people. They were stumbling over themselves in a home. So we're trying to right size that by doing some pre-screening. So we have the call out for homes if people are interested. I know the neighborhood associations have been very helpful in getting the word out, along with the sustainability advisory committee, subcommittees of the advisory council, I should say. And we'll set a deadline for October 7th. That will give us enough time to pre-screen and get the supplies we need to do the service in November.
MARY HUNT: Are there any eligibility requirements or is it open to anyone who's interested in terms of the homeowner or the renter?
MARY ELLEN MALLIA: Last year we stayed within the city of Albany and Delmar area. Part of it is just that the students doing the service don't have transportation. But we don't even really have that as a requirement, uh, that you're in Albany. We have no income requirements. I know other campuses have a similar program. There's maybe a handful of campuses that do this. I know, for example, Furman University does one and to be eligible that you need to be under a certain income level. We don't have that requirement. We're kind of all open, you know, to whoever wants us to come in. Some people may not be able to afford weatherization, so we certainly want to provide that service, but some people may have physical disabilities that prevent them from doing it, so we want to make sure we're there for them as well.
MARY HUNT: Is the program free to the homeowner or renter who invites you in and do they have to provide any materials themselves or do you bring everything?
MARY ELLEN MALLIA: It is free, and we bring pretty much everything except step ladders.
MARY HUNT: How about the, the students or the individuals that go in to do the actual weatherization? I know you said there are mentors. I take it they accompany them into the home so that homeowners or renters feel there's someone acting as a supervisor or kind of the senior person there, so anyone who may be a little uneasy about letting someone into their home that they don't know has the assurance or maybe a little more comfort knowing there is a mentor or someone overseeing the project. Is that correct? Are they accompanied?
MARY ELLEN MALLIA: Yes, definitely. This year we actually are adding a new element. I'm partnering with the School of Social Welfare and we're going to be offering this program as a placement for their social work students.
MARY HUNT: Great idea.
MARY ELLEN MALLIA: So they will actually be helping us with some intake questions with the homeowners, connecting them with services. So there are services available, especially if you're under a certain income threshold for energy assistance. So they will be connecting them with that, but also helping to prepare our students you know, because it is also students going into homes that may look very different from homes they're used to being in. So they're going to help us with that. I think that's going to be a great addition. I think actually even a unique addition to our version of Operation Weatherize compared to the other campuses that do this. So I want to give a shout out to the School of Social Welfare and Lisa Delamater for being a partner in that.
MARY HUNT: Do you estimate the savings to the homeowner of this weatherization, or can you estimate it in some way? Is that part of the assessment process?
MARY ELLEN MALLIA: We didn't estimate the cost, but we estimated the carbon reduction. So, I do also want to give a shout out a volunteer. His name is Peter Hoffman. He works at National Grid. He worked on this program, and he was one of the mentors and he helped us with the calculation. So when the students go in, when the teams go in, they log in what they did. So, how many windows did they put plastic on? How much linear feet of, you know, of caulking did they do? And that's part of their training. So we gave him that information and he put it into his calculation tool and did spit out some estimated energy savings. I think he did do some cost savings. Although Mary, I have to admit, I don't know off the top of my head what they were, but I do know that the carbon emissions was four tons. We estimated four tons of carbon was avoided from being emitted because of this energy conservation. Usually the average emissions from our campus are about four tons per person, so every little bit helps.
MARY HUNT: Well, that really makes an important point. The benefit of citizens weatherizing their homes goes far beyond them being, as you say, cozier or warmer or more comfortable, doesn't it? There are a lot of benefits that maybe we don't think about when we do take these steps on our own as individuals.
MARY ELLEN MALLIA: Yeah, definitely. In some ways, carbon emissions is an abstract number for people. So I think it's important that we remember carbon emissions equates into some negative health outcomes. For example, higher incidence of asthma, higher incidence of C.O.P.D. I think some of our own researchers are finding some links between effect on heart health. So think about anytime the air is not as clean as it could be. You know, you can have negative health impacts. In some ways you're saving people from different ailments that they could contract through higher levels of carbon in the atmosphere. It also helps with some of the extreme events we see. One thing Albany is vulnerable to is an immense amount of water at once and it overwhelms our ability to drain the water, right? So you have flooding. We have also seen an increase in average annual temperature of a degree Fahrenheit in Albany over the last two decades alone. So we're seeing more concern about heat, even impacts even in our dorms. You know, we don't have our dorms air conditioned, and it hasn't been an issue because usually sometimes when the students come back, it's uncomfortable for a week or two, and at the end of the school year, it's maybe uncomfortable for a week or two because it's getting warmer. But now, you know, we call them shoulder seasons; the shoulder seasons are much longer. Now it's, it's staying hot for longer. So we really have to look at some adaptive measures in terms of providing more cooling for people, not only just in our dorms, but in Albany in general.
MARY HUNT: For those that won't get the benefit of one of your student’s or community member’s visiting their house to help them weatherize for this season, are there any quick tips on how to get your house ready and energy efficient for the fall and winter seasons?
MARY ELLEN MALLIA: Yeah, try to button it up. I mean, this sounds really easy, but surprisingly, some people don't do it. Locking your windows helps, you know, make it a little snugger. Lock your windows. Lock your doors. That kind of helps create more of a snug barrier. The things you can do in terms of just energy conservation if you don't want to get into putting the insulation in or the foam, or the weather stripping, or the plastic. You can, you know, try to make the sun be your friend. So open the windows when it's really… or sorry! Open the curtains, not the windows. Open the curtains or put your shades up when it's sunny during the day and take advantage of the sun in the winter. You can also, obviously just turn things off when you're not using them. Unplug things when you can because there is a vampire power, they call it when you have things plugged in that are still drawing power even though they're not on. So, like computer monitors, you might see an orange glow, just push that button and it goes off. So you use less energy than if you have that orange glow. Some things we do keep on, like our coffee timers, you know, but if your coffee timer is on, or your clock is on your coffee, or your coffee machine has a timer, then it's using energy. So lots of things will use energy that, you know, up kind of like, oh sneaking up on you. But I think laundry also offers a good opportunity. You can wash in cold water when possible. You could do it, run the spin cycle an extra time, so you'll need less drying because the dryer will take a lot of energy. You can air dry sometimes. So those are just all sorts of little, tiny ways you can make subtle changes. They don't work all the time. Obviously, you can't air dry in the winter. It's a little harder. You know, I think a lot of us feel like conservation efforts are all or nothing propositions, and they really aren't, they shouldn't be. You may not be able to carpool every day or take the bus every day, but maybe you can do it once a week or once a month.
MARY HUNT: Will those kinds of incremental changes have an impact, or do we need bolder changes, whether in policies -- state and national policies -- as well as trying to get out of our own comfort zone about it?
MARY ELLEN MALLIA: Right. Yeah. The answer is, yes. You hit on a really interesting debate that was happening a few years ago in the sustainability world about, you know, there was a huge emphasis on individual changes, sort of pushing the, the onus on climate change as the fault of sort of consumer choices when in reality there are larger entities that have way more of an impact than you or I, you know, driving our car to work. However, that said, it's really a combination. So I think everybody has agency over how much energy they can use or the sustainable choices they can make, and anytime they make a more sustainable choice, there's a positive, the magnitude of which will vary depending on the person, but I think we need to do both. I'm a firm believer that I'm going to do everything that I can do. Okay? Uh, you can drive yourself crazy trying to do everything you need to do to be perfectly sustainable. So I think you do need to think about the actions you can take and the actions you can change, and the actions you can sustain. But I think it is true that we do need to push for more policies to make the change happen faster, because if we rely on behavioral change… here's where my economics will come in. We rely on the market to provide the signal. It's going to be tough because our markets, our free markets work when there's perfect information and we don't have perfect information. We don't have a way to really quantify sometimes the negative impacts we do, but it's not a direct, uh, signal to the people who are perhaps profiting off of things that are creating these harms in society. So that's a market distortion. So we can't rely on, I don't feel like we can completely rely on, the market to get us out of it, because if we expect companies to operate on a profit mode, they probably aren't going to sometimes undertake social sort of safety nets. We need protection from some of these harms that are happening. So I think we do need to advocate for, in my opinion, government policy to push changes.
MARY HUNT: Polls have shown, recent polls have shown that Americans are concerned about climate change, but other polls are showing that maybe the urgency in their minds is waning a bit because there's so many other issues coming at them that they're considering either equally important or more important, for example, inflation, prescription drug cost, healthcare cost, um, the fall of democracy, shall we say, Covid, crime, and lots of things. The list goes on, I'm sure, depending on your own individual circumstances. How do we keep climate change and sustainability issues front and center in the minds of citizens?
MARY ELLEN MALLIA: Yeah, that is a hard one because, you know, it's easy to get distracted by the crisis du jour. Right? But I think, Mother Nature's been doing a pretty good job of getting our attention, right, and redirecting it and focusing us back on the issues, because we're just seeing, you know, more and more of these, um, climate change inspired events affecting people. But I think you're right. I still see people aren't quite connecting it to a voting issue, and I'm wondering if part of that might be because they've seen no action on this. Well, I shouldn't say no action. Recently there was some action, right? But before the Inflation reduction Act, Congress had not passed anything with regards to climate change in two decades or more. I think the last significant one might have been the Clean Air Act of 1990. And you're seeing the Supreme Court say the EPA can't regulate it because Congress didn't give them the power to do it. But it very much is a voting issue, not only on a national level, but on a local level. You know, my town board decides whether you can have solar farms in our town. You know, your town zoning and planning boards are sometimes appointed. Sustainability is a voting issue. I just don't think people see it as one. And maybe because, you know, Mary, we work at a university, so we have a great advantage of being surrounded by young people. So you see the future, you know, I think it's something that's of high importance to the students. In fact, many of them have what you call climate anxiety about the future and what it holds, because they're going to be living in it. So I think I am optimistic that there'll be more changes coming and the most recent act is focusing on trying to support movement away from a fossil based source of energy, and that's really what we do need to do. It really comes down to creating carbon emissions, which is coming from fossil fuel, so coal, oil, natural gas sourced energy, or even products like plastic bottles. They're made from very often oil. There's a latency with carbon emissions, so it sticks around for a long time. And the impacts of carbon that was emitted in the seventies and eighties is probably what we're filtering through today. So even if we stop immediately tomorrow, it's not like on Thursday, there's no more carbon. It will take us a decade or, or more to bring the carbon level down. There's an amount in the atmosphere, parts per million. It's the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere, and scientists have told us that to stay with the ecological balance and to stay… there's always been cycles of the world getting cooler and warmer. You may hear people cite that as a reason why climate change isn't happening, but the fact is, when it was warmer, average global temperature, we didn't have the development we have today, you know. And it's true. The earth will adapt whether people will be living on the earth and living the way we live today is up in the air, depending on how hot it gets on the planet. And what parts of the planet will be able to sustain life and water is one of those concerns. We have a phrase in the sustainability world, you know “the war over oil,”. Well, the next war is going to be over water. Having access to fresh and drinkable water is something we're going to be blessed with I think in some of these northeast states. You could even see people perhaps moving back to the northeast out of all of these areas where manufacturing moved to the south and the west moving back because of the access to clean water. So the level right now is… the goal is three hundred fifty parts per million. There's actually an organization called Three Fifty dot org, which was founded by a very prominent writer, professor, and environmentalist Bill McKibben. So that's to sort of keep that natural balance. I think we're currently at four hundred fifteen parts per million, so we have some work to do to reduce our emissions and bring that level down. Because if the Earth will just continue to get warmer as that concentration level goes up, there are alternatives and solutions for all of these. So it's sort of like we have the technology and in fact, in many cases the renewables are, are less expensive than the fossil sources of energy. But the infrastructure needs to be built out and I think that's part of what the Inflation Reduction Act is trying to address, as well as the infrastructure we will need for the coming new grid and new types of transportation.
MARY HUNT: So Mary Ellen, I'm hearing you say big changes are needed, but also, we all have a part to play in the solution. And maybe one way to think of it is to apply a twist to an old phrase -- sustainability begins at home.
MARY ELLEN MALLIA: Yes. The embodiment of Operation Weatherize is meant to be a metaphor for what we can do going forward. Maybe not a metaphor, maybe it's an illustration of what we can do so we can educate ourselves about something that we all may need to know around conservation in this case and weatherization. The comments we got from students who went through this were heartwarming. You know, one of our intentions was to provide them a life skill set. And they were saying how they went back to their apartments, or they went back to their parents' homes, or one young girl said, “I went to my auntie’s, and I helped her button up her house. So she'll be warmer this winter.” And so I think it's educating ourselves and then learning to take action and then working as a community is what we need to do. We need to have more of a community mindset, how we're going to work together, and again, that collective impact framework.
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MARY ELLEN MALLIA: You may not think because you recycled that bottle Mary, that it made a difference, but it does – you and everybody else. And a lot of us are switching to reusables and we love that. You know, students are thinking a lot about food choices which have less of an impact. Again, it doesn't have to be all or nothing. You don't have to be a vegan, but you could be a vegan one day a month, you know, it all helps.
MARY HUNT: Mary Ellen, Malia, thanks for being my guest today.
MARY ELLEN MALLIA: Thank you for having me. I enjoyed this very much.
MARY HUNT: Dr. Mary Ellen Mallia is the director of the Office of Environmental Sustainability at the University at Albany. To learn more about the work of the office, its programs and initiatives and issues related to sustainability, follow the UAlbany Green Scene on Twitter at UAlbany Green SCN.
MARY HUNT: If you're interested in how to participate in Operation Weatherize Albany, email go green at Albany dot edu. The Engagement Ring is produced by the University at Albany's Office for Public Engagement. If you have questions or comments or want to share an idea for an upcoming podcast, email us at UAlbany OPE at Albany dot edu.
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