Environmentalism at Georgetown always comes with a caveat. The Intercultural Center is solar-powered, but only partially, and there is no plan to replace the solar panels when they stop producing power. The Georgetown University Student Association is trying to make this year’s Midnight Madness carbon-neutral, but it seems unlikely that a once-a-year event causes much global warming. And then, there’s the Switch It Off Challenge—a great idea that no one seems to know about.
Switch It Off, run by the University Facilities and Housing, is Georgetown’s poorly-publicized attempt to educate students on saving energy. The competition, which started on September 1, challenges students to reduce their energy consumption. The dorm or apartment complex that reduces its energy use by the most compared to its use last year will win a nebulous, unnamed prize.
Every so often, some students get an e-mail with challenge updates. The e-mails allow students to see their progress, but there’s no explanation of why students should be motivated to use less energy.
Ditto for the television monitors in dorms showing energy consumption, which are currently just a fancy and expensive way to display bar graphs.
Students living in dorms with the TV screens walk by them multiple times a day—so why are they not used to promote the Switch It Off Challenge better?
University Facilities and Student Housing did not respond to requests for comment on the competition.
The e-mails mention no end date. Everyone should want to save energy, prize or not, but why would a little-known, prizeless “competition” have any effect on students’ usual habits towards energy? Some irregularly-sent e-mails aren’t going to change the energy wasting habits of students who aren’t already aware or who don’t care that they’re using too much energy.
The challenge’s ineffectiveness is clear in statistics from the program. While Village A has reduced its energy consumption by 13 percent, LXR has increased energy consumption by 18 percent since the competition started.
Georgetown’s efforts at sustainability should be applauded, but the best attempts to change students’ energy consumption attitudes are useless if no one knows about them.
