Fast Company reporter Kristin Toussaint spotlights how MIT researchers have developed a new map detailing how the shift to clean energy could impact jobs around the country. The researchers found that workers could be most impacted in areas that drill for oil and gas, as well as “regions with a high concentration of manufacturing, agriculture, and construction—all industries that rely heavily on coal, oil, and gas.”
Prof. Emeritus Henry Jacoby writes for The Hill about the potential impact of the 2024 presidential election on climate change. “Laissez-faire, ‘do nothing’ climate policy is a recipe for present and future climate and societal harm,” Jacoby writes. “The climate system will not magically self-repair if we continue to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.”
Prof. Jessika Trancik speaks with Associated Press reporter Alexa St. John to discuss electric vehicle emissions and ownership costs. Trancik notes, “buyers should consider total cost of ownership, which for an EV is generally less than that of a gas-powered counterpart due to savings on maintenance and fuel.”
Robert Stoner, interim director of the MIT Energy Initiative, speaks with Boston Public Radio hosts Margery Eagan and Jim Braude to discuss the climate crisis and some solutions being developed at MIT. "You have to be [optimistic]," says Stoner. "I do feel there are technological pathways that we can go down and get there. Solar and wind and storage get us an awful long way. We have to make these things cheaper, and there are an awful lot of people at MIT and at other great universities, and many companies, hammering away at those problems."
David Zipper, a senior fellow at the MIT Mobility Initiative, speaks with Kai Ryssdal of Marketplace about how cars in the U.S. are getting heavier and larger, and the environmental and safety costs associated with larger vehicles. “For decades, people who buy enormous, very heavy cars have been creating societal costs that they aren’t paying for. That’s what’s called a market failure,” said Zipper. “So if you want the market for automobiles to succeed, we need to make sure that when people are shopping for their next car, they are considering the societal costs of their purchase.”
Cement production is a climate catastrophe, writes MIT Technology Review’s Casey Crownhart, pumping billions of metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Sublime Systems, a startup founded by MIT Prof. Yet-Ming Chiang and former postdoc Leah Ellis, uses electricity to trigger the chemical reactions that form the building material. Over the past few years, it’s gone from making palm-sized batches to producing 100 tons a year. The next stage is a commercial facility producing tens of thousands of tons of material a year.
MIT researchers are working to uncover new ways to avoid contrails and minimize their impact on global warming, reports Nicolas Rivero for The Washington Post. “Whether [the contrail impact is] exactly 20 percent or 30 percent or 50 percent, I don’t think anybody knows that answer, really,” says research scientist Florian Allroggen “But it also doesn’t really matter. It’s a big contributor and we need to worry about it.”
David Zipper, a senior fellow at the MIT Mobility Initiative, writes for Slate about the “continually expanding size of the typical American automobile” and the deadly consequences of car bloat. “In 1977, SUVs and trucks together represented 23 percent of American new car sales; today they comprise more than 80 percent,” writes Zipper. “Meanwhile, the models themselves keep getting larger. These four-wheeled behemoths started as niche vehicles, meant to allow certain groups of people to accomplish specific tasks. Today they have become a fixture of everyday American life. They are also linked to myriad societal ills, from crash deaths to climate change to social inequality. Bigger cars make each of those problems harder to solve.”
Michael Mehling, deputy director of the Center for Energy and Environment Policy Research, speaks with E&E News reporter Benjamin Storrow about the impact of global climate deals on climate change. “The history of the Paris Agreement suggests that global climate deals do make a dent in emissions,” Mehling says. “But the impact can be subtle and felt over time.”
MIT students have created a “countdown clock” to help conceptualize how close the globe is to reaching a concerning level of warming, reports Paula Moura for WBUR. “There’s only 60 Bruins games, six Patriots games and 30 Red Sox games scheduled — or about six months — until scientists estimate the globe reaches a point of no return for extreme weather and species loss,” writes Moura. “Everyone is really alarmed because even college students at a very technical university have trouble conceptualizing how soon this is,” says second-year student Norah Miller. “Even though a lot of us are not Boston natives, these kinds of statistics in terms of sports really hit home.”
Writing for The Hill Prof. Emeritus Henry Jacoby highlights the importance of addressing climate change in discussions of government policy. “If the global emission reduction efforts falter, the ensuing damages to the most vulnerable will be especially dire,” says Jacoby. “The world is already plagued with failed nation-states unable to sustain their population while maintaining political stability. As the number of these nation-state failures increases, there will be hundreds of millions of environmental refugees and stateless people, taxing the available resources of the entire planet.”
Boston Globe reporter Vivi Smilgius spotlights the MIT Climate Clock, a massive clock being projected onto MIT’s Green Building that uses Celtics, Patriots and other local sports teams as a means to count down to the projected date and time that the planet is expected to have warmed by 1.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels. “Someone might get that there are six Pats games until this event. That makes a lot more sense to people,” said second-year student Norah Miller. “It’s a sense of personal urgency.”
Writing for The Hill, Prof. Emeritus Henry Jacoby, former co-director of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, and his colleagues make the case for a concerted scientific effort to better understand the risks posed by exceeding climate tipping points. “These risks are becoming more serious with every tenth of a degree of global warming,” they write. “Investment in a better understanding of tipping point risks might be the best investment humanity could now make in the effort to preserve a livable planet.”
Prof. Yet-Ming Chiang has been named to the TIME 100 Climate list, which highlights the world’s most influential climate leaders in business. “When it comes to cleantech, if it won’t scale, it doesn’t matter,” Chiang says. “This is a team sport—companies large and small, and governments state and federal, need to work together to get these new technologies out there where they can have impact.”
Prof. Jacopo Buongiorno speaks with Danny Lewis, host of The Wall Street Journal’s “Future of Everything” podcast, about the future of nuclear power plants. “As countries, regions, businesses contemplate their future plans for reducing carbon emissions, nuclear is one technology that they have got to consider,” says Buongiorno. “It's an incredibly dense energy source, so you don't need a big supply chain that continuously feeds the power plant with fuel, the same way that you would with coal, for example. Also, the machine itself, the reactor is very, very compact.”