On Jan. 30, the University was awarded a gold rating under the Sustainability, Tracking, Assessment and Rating System in recognition of its campus-wide sustainability efforts. Out of 152 participating universities, Cornell was one of 25 to earn a gold rating from STARS.

The Student Sustainability Summit on Saturday drew 20 student leaders from various environmental groups on campus — including KyotoNOW!, Cornell University Sustainable Design and Take Back the Tap –– to brainstorm ideas for implementing more environmentally-friendly measures on campus.

Cornell University Sustainable Design, a group that is hoping to build the University’s first entirely student-designed building on campus, has completed its initial design of a Sustainability Research Facility. CUSD will construct a prototype of a single room this semester to test energy-efficient parts for the building, said CUSD team leader Jeremy Blum ’12.

A competition in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences saved approximately $230,000 by reducing an estimated 2 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions in six buildings, according to a Dec. 12 press release from the University.

Cornell’s campus switched from multi-stream to single-stream recycling this fall, a “fully advantageous” change that will reduce landfill waste and increase the cost-efficiency of waste handling, according to Spring Buck, operations manager for the Respect, Rethink, Reduce, Resuse and Recycle initiative.

To teach children about farming, the Cornell Cooperative Extension and Department of Horticulture recently launched an initiative to install “high tunnels” — unheated, arched plastic greenhouses — in selected school gardens in New York State, according to a University press release on Oct. 26.

The President’s Sustainable Campus Committee unveiled the Cornell Sustainability Plan on Oct. 21.

Tar sands mines in Alberta, Canada, contain a reserve of 175 billion barrels of retrievable oil, making it the third-largest crude oil reserve in the world after Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. TransCanada, a Canadian gas and oil company, has proposed the construction of a pipeline called the Keystone XL that will transport the heavy crude oil over 1,700 miles from Alberta to refineries along the Gulf Coast. The construction is a $7 billion completion of the company’s existing Keystone Pipeline that will allow for stalled oil in Cushing, Okla., to flow south to be sold. The current Keystone Pipeline carries half a million barrels of oil a day, but its planned expansion would increase oil production to over 900,000 barrels a day. The Consumer Energy Alliance along with twenty-five other organizations in support of the Keystone XL project report submitting more than 450,000 comments from Americans calling on the U.S Department of State to allow construction of the pipeline on American soil. While proponents of the pipeline cite many potential benefits, other Americans oppose the Keystone XL, saying that TransCanada’s extortion of Alberta’s dirty tar sands threatens human health and the future of the environment.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced on Monday that seven proposals to build an engineering and technology campus in New York City were submitted to the city by a total of 17 universities. There are “no immediate front-runners” in the competition, he said.