Ritchie notes in her Vox piece that she has adapted her “framework for bringing about societal change” from right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel’s entrepreneurial bible, Zero to One. As Thiel does, she taxonomizes people along axes of changeability (“changeable” or “not changeable”) and optimism (“optimistic” or “pessimistic”). The ideal people, according to this framework, are optimists […]
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This season, as of February 19, the total number of chill hours is 746, compared to a historical average of over 1,100. Both peaches and blueberries, which are produced in abundance in the American South, depend on a certain number of what’s known as “chill hours” in winter to trigger fruit production in the spring […]
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Four things on the agenda for Biden’s first trip to Canada as president | The Hill Skip to content AP Photo/Andrew Harnik President Joe Biden arrives or a news conference at the 10th North American Leaders’ Summit at the National Palace in Mexico City, Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2023. President Biden is making his first trip […]
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Real estate investors are increasingly putting sustainability at the center of their decision-making processes, given the close association between climate risk and real estate assets, both of which are location-based. This growing emphasis comes at a time when the real estate industry is one of the biggest contributors to global warming; its embodied and operational […]
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Haruko Wainwright, the Norman C. Rasmussen Career Development Professor in Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) and assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering at MIT, grew up in rural Japan, where many nuclear facilities are located. She remembers worrying about the facilities as a child. Wainwright was only 6 at the time of the Chernobyl […]
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Three MIT-led teams are among 16 nationwide to receive funding awards to address sustainable materials for global challenges through the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator program. Launched in 2019, the program targets solutions to especially compelling societal or scientific challenges at an accelerated pace, by incorporating a multidisciplinary research approach. “Solutions for today’s national-scale societal […]
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In my home, Norway, a similar attitude of delay pervades the government’s continued enthusiasm for discovering and exploiting new oil and gas fields. The mostly state-owned company Equinor plans to continue expanding until 2026, and it’s pretty safe to assume that somewhere in late 2024, that date will be pushed back. Just another few years, […]
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Biden administration announces nearly $200 million for wildfire resilience | The Hill Skip to content FILE – Residents fight the Marshall Fire in Louisville, Colo., Thursday, Dec. 30, 2021. A wildfire that destroyed nearly 1,100 homes and businesses in suburban Denver last winter caused more than $2 billion in total financial losses — by far […]
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“MIT is a place where dreams come true,” says César Terrer, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Here at MIT, Terrer says he’s given the resources needed to explore ideas he finds most exciting, and at the top of his list is climate science. In particular, he is interested in […]
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The Tribune notes that such hesitation in the face of an AR-15 had led police in other shootings—including at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando—to respond less quickly. Republicans, both in Texas and nationally, have opposed banning or further regulating weapons like the AR-15—even now as police […]
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The Tribune notes that such hesitation in the face of an AR-15 had led police in other shootings—including at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando—to respond less quickly. Republicans, both in Texas and nationally, have opposed banning or further regulating weapons like the AR-15—even now as police […]
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The problem with that win-win story is that it isn’t true. “Growing the energy pie,” i.e. increasing fossil fuels and increasing clean energy as well, means growing the emissions pie, too. Fossil fuel production will need to be reduced long before it becomes unprofitable. Domestic fossil fuel production has a tenuous relationship, at best, to […]
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For this reader, one of the most meaningful passages in Saving Time came from an aside about the race to produce human-like artificial intelligence. Odell has always thrived at conceptualizing abstract technologies, and the recent public interest in DALL-E, ChatGPT, and related services has only served to amplify our confusion, fear, and excitement about these […]
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National and global plans to combat climate change include increasing the electrification of vehicles and the percentage of electricity generated from renewable sources. But some projections show that these trends might require costly new power plants to meet peak loads in the evening when cars are plugged in after the workday. What’s more, overproduction of […]
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Tucker Carlson has been on a tear lately trying, not very convincingly, to whitewash the Jan 6. riot as a peaceful gathering of “sightseers.” But on Tuesday, it appears the guy hated by some of his own colleagues had become the victim of fake news: As caught by The Daily Beast, the Twitter bio of […]
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“Not only a complete betrayal of his commitments to confront the climate crisis but is also an open violation of Indigenous rights.” The group Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic condemned the Biden administration’s approval of the project, calling it “a great disappointment” that “comes after years of grassroots, Iñupiaq-led opposition,” and represents “the continued prioritization of […]
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“Biden approved Willow knowing full well that it’ll cause massive and irreversible destruction, which is appalling,” said Kristen Monsell, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “People and wildlife will suffer, and extracting and burning more fossil fuel will warm the climate even faster. Biden has no excuse for letting this project go […]
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Almost every large corporation is committed to achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050 but lacks a roadmap to get there, says John Sterman, professor of management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, co-director of the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative, and leader of its Climate Pathways Project. Sterman and colleagues offer a suite of well-honed […]
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When MIT’s Office of Sustainability (MITOS) first launched in 2013, it was charged with integrating sustainability across all levels of campus by engaging the collective brainpower of students, staff, faculty, alumni, and partners. At the eighth annual Sustainability Connect, MITOS’s signature event, held nearly a decade later, the room was filled with MIT community members […]
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“There’s lots of great stuff across the board.” Allyson Baker Book—chief sustainability officer at Baker Hughes, an oilfield services (“energy technology”) company—was enthusiastic about the opportunities presented by the IRA. It’s already provoked “a little bit” more investor interest in carbon management technologies, hydrogen, and geothermal, which uses similar equipment and expertise to oil and […]
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This season, as of February 19, the total number of chill hours is 746, compared to a historical average of over 1,100. Both peaches and blueberries, which are produced in abundance in the American South, depend on a certain number of what’s known as “chill hours” in winter to trigger fruit production in the spring […]
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Forests also help to allay and mitigate the effects of climate change. Trees produce oxygen and suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Cities—despite their overall climate benefits due to housing density and less car use—can act as heat islands, trapping heat and altering weather patterns. But urban forests can alleviate those problems, as studies […]
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Forests also help to allay and mitigate the effects of climate change. Trees produce oxygen and suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Cities—despite their overall climate benefits due to housing density and less car use—can act as heat islands, trapping heat and altering weather patterns. But urban forests can alleviate those problems, as studies […]
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Assil Halimi has loved science since he was a child, but it was a singular experience at a college internship that stoked his interest in nuclear engineering. As part of work on a conceptual design for an aircraft electric propulsion system, Halimi had to read a chart that compared the energy density of various fuel […]
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Whether fossil fuel executives agree with the anti-ESG movement or not—or are merely reluctant to be associated with its seedier elements—plenty are quietly supporting it through their paid memberships in trade associations and campaign contributions to politicians backing the push. In 2021, for instance, Sheffield donated $5,800 to West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who provided a decisive […]
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A wildfire can pump smoke up into the stratosphere, where the particles drift for over a year. A new MIT study has found that while suspended there, these particles can trigger chemical reactions that erode the protective ozone layer shielding the Earth from the sun’s damaging ultraviolet radiation. The study, which appears today in Nature, […]
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Researchers from the Disruptive and Sustainable Technologies for Agricultural Precision (DiSTAP) interdisciplinary research group of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, and their collaborators from Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory have developed the first-ever nanosensor that can detect and distinguish gibberellins (GAs), a class of hormones in plants that […]
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The MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) leads energy education at MIT, developing and implementing a robust educational toolkit for MIT graduate and undergraduate students, online learners around the world, and high school students who want to contribute to the energy transition. As MITEI’s director of education, Antje Danielson manages a team devoted to training the next […]
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“When I think climate change,” Biden is fond of saying, “I think jobs.” This is a savvy political maneuver: to make climate action palatable to the public, the president took a cue from the Green New Deal in framing decarbonization as a patriotic duty that would supercharge the clean energy economy and generate millions of […]
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MIT senior Aviva Intveld has won the prestigious Gates Cambridge Scholarship, which offers students an opportunity to pursue graduate study in the field of their choice at Cambridge University in the U.K. Intveld will join the other 23 U.S. citizens selected for the 2023 class of scholars. Intveld, from Los Angeles, is majoring in earth, […]
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Rationing might come in handy for another, happier aspect of decarbonization. As economist J.W. Mason explains, rationing in the U.S. during World War II was less a response to the war using up essential commodities than to the way war mobilization created a booming job market, boosting demand for those commodities. “Civilian consumption might have been […]
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