MSU student group looks to reduce school's coal usage

Students for a Sustainable Future, a student group at Missouri State University, tonight begins pleading its case to transition the school from coal to renewable energy with the Beyond Coal campaign kickoff at 6 p.m. at the Plaster Student Union.

Lindsey Berger, a Beyond Coal organizer with the Sierra Club and guest speaker at tonight's event, said she hopes to inform the MSU community about what she calls dangerous health risks associated with using coal as an energy source.

“Missouri State doesn’t have a coal plant on the campus, but it’s receiving a ton of electricity from the grid which is coming from a variety of power plants that are powered by coal in Springfield,” Berger said. “It’s been shown in so many different studies that the closer you live to a power plant the more likely you are to develop asthma, and if you live within five miles of a coal plant, you are 50 percent more likely to develop cancer later in life."

Guest speakers for the Beyond Coal campaign also include former Springfield City Councilman and environmentalist, Dan Chiles, and SSF President Kara Andres.

SSF media coordinator Lauren Bansbach hopes that MSU will soon be using renewable solutions such as wind, solar and geothermal energy. SSF has been in contact with the administration to orchestrate the plan.

“Our eventual goal is for the administration to create a plan to use 100 percent renewable energy as soon as possible,” Bansbach said. “We’ve kind of set a date of 2030, but as soon as we can get to the administration to create a plan that is feasible for them is what we hope for.”

Colleges moving beyond coal has become an accelerating trend in the U.S. According to the Sierra Club Web site, the following campuses have committed to moving off coal: Cornell University, Penn State University, Case Western Revere University, Ohio University, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Clemson University, Oberlin College, University of Louisville, Western Kentucky University, SUNY-Binghamton, Eastern Illinois University, Western Illinois University and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.[[In-content Ad]]