Climate change and the political economy of archives

This was my portion of a panel at this summer’s annual conference of the Society of American Archivists. You can listen to it here.

Hi everybody. My name’s David Staniunas. I’m records archivist at the Presbyterian Historical Society and just like Helena did, I had a joke about the opening slide.

So, my original title was adaptive HVAC use, the case of my
shop, the new title is,

I came here to talk about climate change but I’m talking about the political economy of archives instead sorry about that. (LAUGHTER)

So for everybody who needs to jet out really quick, here’s a summary of
everything I discovered. All in my shop generates 321 metric tons of CO2 a year. HVAC system accounts for fifth of that, about 72 metric tons. Trying to fiddle with the controls to make sure we run at 50% capacity instead of 69% might get us down to 29 metric tons.And the same reduction in carbon could happen if none of us drove to work.

We’re going to talk a little about the physical plant of the building, my institution’s organized in 1852.

The 1967 building is 110 feet by 110 feet square.

The 1976 annex is underground, 63 by 187 feet, designed originally to house 24,000 cubic feet. It has always run a dedicated Liebert HVAC system. (We have compact shelving now and a total footprint of 36,525 cubic feet.)

In 2012, all in we used nearly a gigawatt-hour of electricity, we currently do about 75% of that.

Cooling capacity on the archives dedicated HVAC unit ranges from between 32kW and 44kW; that’s a measurement of the amount of energy as heat that can be moved out of the building by the system.

SCOP (sensible coefficient of performance) on almost all commercial HVAC is about 2. That’s a ratio of the amount of energy you can move out, by how much energy you used to move that heat.

Taking the middle of the range 38kW, dividing by 2 for SCOP, means we use 19kW of electricity per hour for the unit. Our systems run all day every day, so 19 x 24 x 365 is 166440kWh/yr, about 1/5th of our total 743000 for the entire building.

Using the EPA’s greenhouse emissions comparison tool, it looks like the archival storage accounts for 72 metric tons of CO2 per year for us, same as burning 167 barrels of oil, or like charging 8 million cellphones, says the EPA

I could not find ratings for how much input electricity we consume at different rates of use — that is, outside conditions vary, and underground storage retains its climate pretty well, so you’re never running at 100% of capacity. So I got input numbers for a 200-ton capacity unit, and just mapped those ratios to our 30-ton capacity unit. It looks like we mostly operate at a little less than 75% capacity year round, based on the kWh/yr we know about.

So if we tweaked our dials and for example, turned up the thermostat a little in summer, carefully shifting indoor conditions a little based on outdoor conditions, maybe we could get to that 50% usage figure. If we have 50% usage more or less year round, we shrink our kWh used to 40% of current. This would drop our megatons of carbon from 72 to 29, about. Which would be sweet.

If we can develop a system that permits greater fluctuations and uses less energy input, that would be great but again, archival storage is only 1/5th of our energy cost. Moving that around by 10% here or there represents a 2% move overall. And there are externalities to archives that bear a carbon cost as well, and I think some of those are worth dealing with too.

Cars — why?
(audience members laughing)

So again, just stating the statistics again. We generate 321 metric tons of CO2, the archival storage is a fifth of that. We have 10 daily car commuters in my shop. If you look at the EPA calculator commuting is 4.6 megatons [Not the first time I will mess this up. I meant metric tons. — eds.] per year. So, our commuters are burning 46 mega tons [See that? — eds.] which is more than the cost savings he with would realize by fiddling with the HVAC.

Why is that?

GOT NO CHOICE FAM. They got no choice. The rent is too damn high.

Median rent is $2000 here, but okay you can find some deals. Sixth and Snyder is a straight 2 miles from my shop, easy to walk, Septa’s 47 and 57 buses run there in foul weather.

The last six archives jobs in Philadelphia on Meredith Lowe’s site have salary floors from $58,000 (thank you Amtrak) to $37,000. Holy shit the Annenberg what are you doing. So on average we are as a profession starting people at $45,000. A third of that is taxes, so your take home is about 30, over 26 paychecks is about $1100. So even in a good scenario — you find that single floor to rent at $1100, you’re paying half your salary in rent.

It’s completely understandable that a number of my colleagues commute by car: some of the youngest of necessity live with their parents; Septa is great but all transit systems have problems, short staffing on the El is pretty acute; and the city is full of dangerous lunatics who will hit bicyclists with impunity.

Anyway, if all my back of the envelope calculations are more or less in the ballpark, my shop could economize on archival HVAC and spare the earth 43mt of emissions a year. With some new efficiencies in the REST OF THE BUILDING we would probably do better than that. If nobody here drove a car to work, our external carbon costs would drop by 46mt — and there was a period in my shop from March 17 to June 7 2020 when nobody drove to work at all — but there are reasons why that doesn’t happen and I get it.

I came to this panel, maybe you did too, with an underpinning desire. We all know the Earth is heating, we know that’s diminishing quality of life for billions of people right now in the third world, maybe we here in the first world have been evacuated from a wildfire, or lived under an air quality advisory, or gotten socked with a massive home insurance payment so it’s not like we’re immune. We also know we spend a third of our lives working for institutions, that have physical plants and consume energy and output greenhouse gases. This is a professional organization, and theoretically, as professionals — unlike laborers, or so goes the concept — we have the responsibility to manage the conditions of our work and make determinations about what that work will look like.

It would be annoying and reductive to take the necessity of responding to climate change in archives and boil it down to “archives workers need control of the work environment” — like One Big Union is going to keep us short of +1.5 degrees Celsius — but what I’m saying is the whole material conditions of archives contribute to climate change: every unavoidable car commute, every site visit, every UPS shipment, every plane ticket to a conference, and careful stewardship of those carbon costs should be part of professional practice.

And as a friend reminded me once, thinking very big picture, there are way worse things to spend a carbon budget on than cultural institutions. It might not be the best thing to slap a tin roof NBA arena in the middle of a parking lagoon air conditioning-wise, but we let the Sixers do that because hoop is a thing we value. A 2016 Brown University study found that the US Department of Defense is the largest single institutional user of petroleum in the world. If you want to look for carbon cost savings, forget shrinking the carbon budget of your local library or archives — let’s shoot the moon and shrink our imperial warmaking presence abroad. Peace and prosperity go hand in hand.

Thanks. (CASCADING APPLAUSE, WEEPING, FAINTING)