The centre for alternative technology in Wales is erecting a new environmentally friendly building. Following planes and scooping up their emissions, making buildings out of carbon, weighing rubbish and getting staff on their bikes: these are just a few of the ideas that universities are coming up with to combat climate change, according to a report out today. It all sounds wonderful, but it's hard to believe that this is the full picture.

And, of course, it is not. The report, Greening Spires, is a showcase, put together by the lobby group for higher education, Universities UK, and it paints an extremely rosy picture of an academia gone crazy for greenness. There is no doubt that in some areas our academics are leading the world. In Leeds, for example, the report highlights research into contrails, the aviation vapour trails from planes that cause rows about how to measure emissions from aircraft because no one can work out if they intensify the greenhouse-gas effect of flying, and if so, by how much. "Part of the problem is actually getting at them," explains Dr Piers Forster. "You could possibly go up in a balloon, but air traffic control wouldn't like it. One of the techniques being used at the moment is flying behind the plane in another plane and kind of scooping up the contrail." His research may offer crucial answers.

Paying for rubbish

At Southampton, students and staff have worked together to design a new eco-friendly professional services building. At Derby, they've been trying out a pay-per-weight rubbish system, and have shown after eight years that it really does work: Jo Anne Hasbury, the university's environmental manager, says they're emptying 50% fewer bins. At St Andrews, they're energetically pushing green travel for students and staff, to the extent of doing up old bikes and setting up a bike-loan scheme for staff, while also operating a lift-share programme, sorting out bus discounts for students and putting up bicycle sheds. At Greenwich, Professor Colin Hills is trying to make the leap from theory into reality with his Carbon8 system, a method for turning construction waste and carbon dioxide into small pellets that can be re-used as building aggregate.

But the problem is that while all this certainly takes us in the right direction, Universities UK's glowing report fails to mention the nagging anxiety in the sector that things are really not moving far enough, fast enough. One might like to believe that academics would be the first to embrace uncomfortable new scientific truths, but some universities appear to be finding it as hard to move out of their comfort zone as the rest of us: vice-chancellors are afflicted with the same short-termism that hobbles politicians.

The Climatic Research Unit at UEA has been monitoring global temperatures for over 30 years now and was one of the first places in the world to grapple with climate change. Its director, Professor Phil Jones, comments wryly that progress towards environmental awareness within his own university has been "slow, to say the least. It took me years, for example, to convince them not to turn the heating on one day in autumn, and just leave it on until spring. There have been plenty of climate-change sceptics, even here."

The past two years appear to have finally begun to galvanise academia: the Stern report on climate change and regular reports from the International Panel on Climate Change have focused minds, and the publication in 2005 of an action plan for sustainable development by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) asked universities to start integrating the environmental message into their courses and to look at their own consumption of energy and water, and their own transport habits.

Steve Egan, Hefce's deputy chief executive, says that their strategic review of sustainable development, to be published next week, will "identify the key opportunities and challenges in sustainable development. We welcome the lead that many higher education institutions have taken in integrating sustainability into their roles as educators, researchers and leaders in their communities and through their business operations. We also acknowledge that the sector has to rise to an increasingly challenging agenda and help others to do the same."

The areas that must be focused on are estate management (universities are huge and wasteful beasts), encouraging research into monitoring and solving environmental problems (this is moving along quite nicely), and education itself.

The Environmental Association for Universities and Colleges (EAUC) has been agitating for action for 12 years now, and is optimistic but also frustrated at the gentle pace of change. The executive director, Ian Patton, says: "The sector thinks it's doing quite well, but clearly it could do a lot better."

As an example he gives the Southampton professional services building, a really great initiative that brought together students, staff and green-building professionals so that a simple building project ended up becoming a brilliant educative tool. "You would imagine that this sort of thing would be happening all over the place, but actually it's seen as incredibly pioneering. We really struggle to find other universities integrating the education and the theory in the same way. There are some standard-bearers, places such as Warwick, St Andrews, Gloucester, where this stuff is in their DNA, it's who they are, but these places are the exception, not the rule. We need to get a move on: we're living on a planet that has limited resources, and we need to start dealing with that now."

Green degrees

Fortunately, he points out, students are starting to take action for themselves, with campaigns including student organisation People and Planet's Green League Table last summer, which gave universities degrees according to their environmental awareness. The results were surprising. Oxford and LSE both got 2.1s, while York and Glasgow scraped 2.2s: the top three were Leeds Metropolitan, Plymouth and Hertfordshire. "That really shook a few vice-chancellors," says Patton, smiling. "I imagine that resolutions were made not to come that far down again."

But the biggest problem is that, in the end, this is not just an issue for universities. This is going to be a problem for all of us. Paul Allen, development director at the Centre for Alternative Technology, is very anxious about the blindness of the academics. "Do they realise that we need to have a huge reskilling for Britain, that in the years ahead we are going to have to learn how to do things very differently? Are they planning courses that are going to re-educate our young people? No. They're teaching young people in buildings where the lights are on all the time, in buildings where the energy is badly managed, where no one has even thought about approaching green electricity providers."

EAUC's conference this year is focusing on skills for sustainability. If the architects, engineers, designers and scientists have not been armed with the necessary skills, we will not be able to achieve the necessary carbon descent.

So, as "Greening Spires" suggests, things are moving forward, yes. But is it fast enough? Climate change does not leave any margins for complacency.

If cars are becoming more fuel efficient, why is the price of running one still on the rise? Michael Pollitt investigates whether petrol-electric hybrids are the way forward...

Fraser Speirs with his Renault Espace, which he is selling to buy a hybrid.

As a school IT teacher and software developer living in Greenock, Scotland, Fraser Speirs is skilled in making spreadsheets with colourful charts. Prompted by the "unending pain of filling up my car" - a 1.9-litre diesel Renault Espace - he recently created one comparing the running costs of the Espace with a Toyota Prius, a "hybrid" petrol-electric car (which uses energy-saving features like regenerative braking - the battery is charged while braking.) Why? To see how much cheaper it might be.

The results surprised him: though the capital outlay is larger, a used Prius could be cheaper within months. "I've been tracking the development of the Prius since it was announced," says Speirs. "I looked at buying a Prius two cars ago, but it was just too expensive."

Hybrid advantage

So why now? Simple: the cost of fuel. Filling the Espace costs around £85 - compared to just £50 when he bought it in December 2006. At 20,000 miles annually, the Espace will use (at present prices) £3,740 worth of fuel. Assuming the Prius delivers 55 miles per gallon (mpg), that reduces to £1,835 - thanks to a 25mpg fuel economy advantage. "I was really surprised to see that; if I was able to acquire a used Prius, I'm looking at six months before I'm winning," says Speirs. "There comes a tipping point beyond which the economic pressure starts to make hybrids make so much more sense."

With the price of oil, and so fuel, only going up at present, it's worth asking: why hasn't fuel economy improved more? Compare the figures Speirs is juggling with those of a rather older car: the Ford Model T, introduced in October 1908. It generated 20 horsepower from its four-cylinder engine, had a top speed of 45mph - and a fuel consumption of 15.6-25 mpg (This is imperial - the US gallon is smaller than the UK one, so quoted figures in the US show it as 13-21mpg.)

An improvement of less than 100% over a century doesn't sound much like progress. Modern cars do have many more comforts than the Model T, but in the US, the average fuel economy for cars and trucks nearly doubled between 1975 and 1985, but has been declining since, mainly due to increased sales of heavyweight 4x4 vehicles.

In the UK, the average fuel efficiency of new cars improved from 29 mpg in 1978 to 37 mpg in 2002 - a 27.6% rise, but only 1.01% a year. Between 1998 and 2002, average fuel efficiency improved by only 6% - the same 1.01 a year rise. So why hasn't fuel consumption improved more quickly?

Prof Gary Hawley, director of the Powertrain and Vehicle Research Centre at the University of Bath, where he's involved in fuel-efficient diesel engineering, says: "That's easy. We've been adding weight to vehicles. More weight means more fuel."

Think of the past 20 years as a pair of scales, he suggests. On one side, put the extra weight of vehicles from enhanced crash protection, added comfort, and better noise reduction. On the other, increased fuel efficiency, mainly from improved engine control and diesel turbocharging.

"We are making strides in increasing fuel economy, but it's like everything else - you have to run faster and faster to keep ahead of the game," says Hawley. "As a rule of thumb, for every 10 units we gain in fuel economy, five units or 50% will be taken by increasing weight." So what about the Toyota Prius? "If somebody says to me 'I bought a Prius to go green', I'm saying, if you were going to go green, you would have bought a diesel. The Prius wins on fuel consumption by a nose - it's not clearcut."

His reasoning? The fuel consumption of the Toyota Prius 1.5 litre hybrid at 65.7mpg (combined) compared to a Ford Focus 1.6 diesel at 62.8mpg (combined). The Ford is around £3,000 cheaper - but hasn't, of course, got the same green appeal.

Cutting costs

Although Hawley thinks that hybrids are a success story for systems integration and weight saving, they're not the only answer. So what's the best technology for future fuel economy? "It's got to be everything together. There is no one single dominant technology. Technology alone will not cut it."

He has a novel suggestion to assist drivers. "Having a fuel-economy meter on the dash that reads, in real time, the amount of pounds and pence that your current driving style is costing you. If we adopt a more societal approach to our driving patterns and driving styles, everybody could probably save between 10% and 15% fuel."

Some cars, including the Prius, already show miles per gallon achieved - either average, or instantaneous. But if you knew that at 30mpg with petrol costing £1.50 a litre you were spending almost 23p a mile in fuel alone, would you think harder about the trips you take? Over the next 10 years, Hawley sees more legislative, technical, and social fuel-saving methods emerging. This may include the "stick approach" by the European Union on CO2 targets, along with smaller cars, more efficient engines, and weight reductions. There will also be more diesels, better hybrid batteries, and even the first diesel hybrids using a smaller engine.

On the rebound

But something else also affects fuel economy - rebound. A driver who replaces a car with a fuel-efficient model may then take advantage of cheaper running costs to drive further and more often.

Steve Sorrell of the University of Sussex wrote a report last year on the "rebound effect" for the UK Energy Research Centre. The phenomenon has undermined increases in fuel efficiency gained from lightweight materials, lean burn engines, and better aerodynamics. "Studies that have tried to measure the effects of driving further suggest that 10% to 30% of potential fuel savings are lost because we choose to drive further," says Sorrell.

Are there any prospects for even greater fuel efficiency? Ricardo is a leading independent technology provider and strategic consultant to the world's transportation industries. It reckons that future improvements for cars will come from lower vehicle weight/size (less than 5%), reduced aerodynamic drag (3-5%), energy recovery in hybrids (20% to 30%), higher mechanical efficiency (10% to 15%), higher combustion efficiency (2-3%), and optimised control (5-10%). For example, a more mechanically efficient gearbox or new engine control software might help optimise fuel usage.

Speirs isn't waiting around for such improvements to catch up with rising fuel prices. He's now buying a secondhand Prius although, thanks to a sellers' market, his original spreadsheet was somewhat optimistic. Even so, the payback from the fuel savings after he sells the Espace will come by the end of 2009. And having originally viewed hybrid technology as too expensive, what does he think of it now? "It seems like the future," he says.