Great news for fans of ridiculously good looking Republicans–former Massachusetts Governor and 2012 GOP presidential candidate front-runner Mitt Romney will be speaking at Columbia mid-September.

He shall walk among you! Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Romney will be speaking at the Millennium Campus Conference, a gathering of 1,000 or so student leaders and leading minds for a candid discussion on matters of sustainable international development. Chuck Roberts, CC’12 and executive director of the event, confirms that Romney will speak on “matters relating to global education and volunteerism.”

“We are expecting some more big names to confirm [their participation] in the near future,” said Roberts. Bwog is just glad to finally have someone other than Jeffrey Sachs headlining a sustainable-anything event on campus (not that we don’t love our Sachs, but variety is the spice of life).

The Conference will run September 17th-19th, and anyone looking to get in on the action should consider registering now.

The architecture firm behind the new geochemistry building at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory has won three design awards at the 2009 Sustainable Design Awards (building pictured at right). 

Xerox’s new CEO, the first African American women CEO of a Fortune 500 company, is also a Columbia graduate. Her degree? Master’s in engineering.

Three more Columbia faculty members have been named to the National Academy of Sciences.

Obama nominates a Mailman School professor to a Health and Human Services post.

Perhaps this will help him get an award: a Columbia pre-med student is featured in a Times article about web sites for cramming.

Bwog recently received in its inbox a glimmering copy of “Sustainable Columbia E-News,” apparently a seasonal update for community members of the university’s most recent steps towards increased environmental stewardship. 

With information about everything from Columbia’s greenhouse gas inventory to a listing of Columbia’s most recent sustainability score, “Sustainable Columbia E-news” details a wide range of intitiatives to reduce Columbia’s carbon foortprint and improve its long-term commitment to the environment

A formal launch email from Senior Executive Vice President, Robert Kasdin, officially announced the emergence of the new e-newsletter as an update on the “broad participation by students, faculty, and staff…in the shared goal of becoming even more sustainable and energy efficient in our operations and daily lives” and perhaps adds one more of many bureacratic messages to your already flooded email inbox.  But, its for a good cause, so you might as well read it.

Bwog hopes you have a chance to give it a gander soon.

SustainableBusiness.com reports that last week Columbia announced that it would begin to offer a Master’s Degree in Sustainable Development beginning in the fall of 2009. Twelve other schools will join Columbia in offering the two-year Global Master’s in Development Practice program (rolls right off the tongue)  within the next three years.  The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has pledged $15 million to start up the MDP program.

Surprise, surprise, Jeffery Sachs chimes in: “The new Master’s in Development Practice will train professionals with the multi-disciplinary knowledge, tools and management skills they will need for success.” Sachs also recently proposed a carbon tax as an alternative to cap-and-trade systems. Then saved the planet. 

In which Bwog Lecture Hop Editor Pierce Stanley ventures into the cavernous confines of Low Library to corroborate the commotion sparked by last night’s launch of Columbia’s newest journal of Sustainable Development, Consilience.

As the beat of African drums flittered through the four corners of Low Library last night, a diverse score of Columbia students, professors, affiliates, and members of the general public mingled heartily beneath the hallowed dome in anticipation of what would prove to be the next installment of the Jeffrey Sachs extravaganza.  One could even say that a general sense of consilience filled Low last night, as a diverse group of people came together to celebrate that very principle, the unifying of knowledge and information across many disciplines to create a coherent framework for the better understanding of the study of Sustainable Development.  With the mood as lighthearted as the drumbeats and a tangible sense of optimism pervading the lecture hall, the launch of the highly billed Journal of Sustainable Development, Consilience, did not disappoint.  Nor did the keynote address given by one lectern-suave and gratuitously adored poverty-swashbuckler come up short. Read more…

Homeboy Jeffrey Sachs’s love-fest, more commonly referred to as the Show Me: Poverty Action Tour, continued last night in Lerner Cinema, striking a far less harmonious chord than the previous night’s concert.  While Monday’s kick-off event offered a serenade by none other than the Grammy award winning singer-songwriter John Legend who sang “Show Me,” a piece written in response to his
qualms about witnessing poverty in Tanzanian villages, Tuesday’s event entitled New Directions: Critical Interpretations of Sustainable Development left the music behind in order to pack a more somber and academic punch.  

Indeed, the event served as a forum for an all-star cast of professors and activists to suggest alternatives and criticisms to Sachs’s approach to sustainable development.  While the previous night’s festivities were merely an homage to Sachs’s work in the field of economic development, Tuesday’s event offered an opportunity to rethink the current strategies of sustainable development and offer serious criticism of the anti-poverty movement (Sachs is arguably the most dominant voice in this field).

Read more…

Tonight Roone was witness to what at first appears like quite the odd couple: Columbia economist Jeff Sachs and Grammy winner John Legend.  And no, Jeff was not there for a duet.  These formidable giants of academia and entertainment were brought together by an ambitious goal: to eliminate global poverty.

While Sachs is no neophyte when it comes to tackling problems of global consequence (being a special adviser to the UN Secretary General and all) but Legend’s recent world tours prompted his investigation into what he could do to end poverty in many of the places he visited.  The result: the Show Me Campaign, aimed at permanently lifting the village of Mbola, Tanzania, from poverty with $1.5 million invested in seven key agricultural, educational and public health initiatives, in conjunction with Millennium Promise, an organization that helps villages all across Sub-Saharan Africa.  Photos follow the jump. Read more…

Wednesday, sustainability day was going to be “dedicated to encouraging and promoting Columbia’s recent environmental stewardship initiatives and pressuring them to do even more,” complete with such accoutrements as a mountain of trash, a PrezBo speech, and giant displays. Unfortunately, it rained. Sustainability day will be rescheduled!

Well, the rain didn’t stop Columbia’s sustainability report card from coming in. Despite its best efforts, Columbia failed to improve, staying at the “B” grade it received last year. It was, however, easily in the top third of the 200 schools graded by the sustainable endowments institute. Most of the other Ivies did better, with Dartmouth and Harvard coming in as “Overall Sustainability Leaders” and Yale racking up a “Campus Sustainability Leader”‘ recognition. Only Princeton, with a B-, did worse. To be fair, New York City seems like a tough place to be sustainable: after Columbia, the next best Big Apple school was NYU with a C+. Schools were graded in a variety of categories, including food, transportation, and investments. Food and Recycling was the easiest class, with 29% of the students making an A. Endowment Transparency, on the other hand, seemed to be a tough cookie, as only 4% of schools got the “A” grade.

Details were thin in PrezBo’s announcement regarding Columbia’s decision to curb its carbon habit, which should have dropped in your inbox sometime today. Ever curious, Bwog took its questions to sustainability czar and New Yorker of the Week Nilda Mesa, who made everything a little more concrete.

What data has Columbia gathered on its current carbon emissions? How does the University plan to monitor progress, and are there intermediate targets?

We are in the process of beginning the exhaustive data collection effort.  It involves many departments of the University, and will focus on the areas of energy, waste, transportation and refrigerants. Given the complexity of the University, and that this is new, to get accurate figures will take some time.  We will be in good shape though, with the measures we already began this year to put in systems to collect the data, such as metering the buildings separately at Morningside, Lamont and Baker Field. We will indeed have intermediate targets over the next 10 years.  It’s a very exciting time. 

Where will the reduction in emissions come from?

We will know better once we have an accurate inventory identifying the sources.  We expect our reductions will mirror the city’s patterns, and will come from such initiatives as installing light sensors and more energy-efficient lighting, installing double-paned glass, and purchasing energy-efficient appliances and boilers, some of which we have already begun to do.  Recycling will also be a component, and we are looking at the feasibility of purchasing renewable energy such as wind. It’s a big effort, and we’ll succeed if everyone does their part on even the little things like turning off lights and computers.

How much will this commitment cost the University to implement?

We will know better once the inventory is done and we have a good sense of where the opportunities are.  We expect we will save money in many instances over the long run because fuel costs are so high.

- LBD

Why Lee C turned the Harvard job down? Whopping salary still derided for paucity by admiring SEAS kids

Free downloadable music! Just for us! No, wait, scratch that, you can only stream it. And it doesn’t work on your iPod. Student reaction: as long as it “isn’t mainstream” or “have janky strings”

After Bwog commenters’ aesthetic assault fails, LCD screen permanent in Butler. Religion student worships at altar of technology, but plagued by doubt

M. Six Silberman, architect of civilizations, plots path to sustainable future: “heinous…labor-intensive…technocultural mess”

PLUS: Yet another reason why we’ll never be comparable to Penn…

Matthew Harrison C’05, who loved being President of CCSC so much that he decided to stick around after graduation, has been deluging Bwog’s inbox lately (okay, he sent us two emails) hyping up Environmental Sustainability Day (which is apparently tomorrow).

He geeked out a bit to let us know there is now an environmental section on the University Events Calendar, which we all check religiously at least four times every day after our emails, the NY Times, Gothamist, and of course, Bwog.

“It’ll be green for the next few days (to draw attention) and then turn green to match the rest of the site,” he writes.

He’s also tickled pink (er, green) by the header on Columbia’s Ask Us page, the “Go Green Columbia” logo on the header of CUIT’s website and the announcements on the SFS, Registrar, the ID Center, Housing, and Dining homepages. Yes, it’s also an event on our site right over there —–>

We know he loves this stuff. He knows we know he loves this stuff. He ends his email with: “I’m a dork.”

Thanks for keeping us up-to-date on the University’s (kind of overdue) campaign, Matt!