Cooling Man

JEFF COLE '91 puts a chill on global warming.

From an environmental point of view, Burning Man—an eight-day festival officially described as an "experiment dedicated to radical self-expression and radical self-reliance" —is a big waste of energy. Forty thousand attendees consume gasoline and jet fuel at the end of summer to reach the temporary city built on a hot, blank canvas of the Nevada desert, where they literally burn all kinds of things, including an 80-foot-tall wooden sculpture of a man. Jeff Cole '91, an environmental consultant and 10-year veteran of the event, had an idea. Burning Man, meet Cooling Man.

A nonprofit launched in 2005 by Cole and a co-worker at San Francisco-based California Environmental Associates, Cooling Man uses carbon offsets—the idea of reducing pollution in one place to compensate for its creation in another—to minimize the impact of Burning Man. By Cole's calculations, the event emitted 27,000 tons of greenhouse gas in 2006, 90 percent of that from travel to and from the site. (The man himself gives off an estimated 112 tons.) The donations Cooling Man received in its first two years offset 246 tons of carbon by investing in a wind farm in South Dakota and an organization that gives solar lanterns to African farmers who would other-wise use kerosene ones. In 2007, with the festival themed "The Green Man," Cole was able to offset 850 tons. Cooling Man was also part of the effort that left solar panels with the city of Gerlach, Nevada, to help make it the first carbon-neutral city in America by 2010.

But Cole, who holds an M.B.A. and a master's in energy and resources, wants Cooling Man to raise awareness as well as money. "I'd be happier if everyone would take an action at home that would reduce a ton of greenhouse gas and then contribute that to the effort," he says. "Buying offsets works from an economic and carbon perspective, but to slow climate change everybody is going to have to take some action. With a big effort, global warming is a solvable problem."