This summer we are featuring a series of blog posts from students in the ENV 2301 course "History of Environmental Thought". We are super happy to highlight the thoughts and ideas of these bright young individuals. The New York Times - The Magic Kingdom is Going Green Climate change is a hoax! Climate change is going to kill us all! Okay now that I have your attention with these opposing opinions of climate change, let’s get into the whole point of this blog.  Climate change is neither of these things. Climate change, however, is responsible for loss of habitat,  floods, food and water shortages, and other issues worldwide... BUT we are not doomed and there are ways to stop this from happening! But how exactly can we do this? Well here are my suggestions, and they begin here at the University of Ottawa. My suggestion comes from when I took a trip to Disney World two years ago.  While I was driving to see everyone’s favourite mouse at the Magic Kingdom, I noticed...

Photo credit: Jonathan Rausseo There are a bunch of little known facts that are true about our campus; one of them being that we use enough energy on campus every 5 days to send a Delorian back in time . And for all you poor fools who have never seen the Back to the Future Trilogy , let's just say that's enough power to run 10,529 homes all year long. Little known fact #2 - heat is cheap and electricity is expensive. This isn't that much of a secret if you have to pay your own hydro bills but the University spends 4 times more money on electricity than it does natural gas. The real problem is that electrical consumption keeps going up... I mean way up. In 2010 the University of Ottawa used 1,000,000 m3 less natural gas than it did in 1993 (all this while the campus has almost doubled in size). But electrical consumption during that same period has gone up over 20,000,000 kWh (about a 40% increase since 1993). Little known fact #3 - we installed solar panels on the Sports C...